Dodos, Blackgang Chine

Beloved Icons. Extinct Birds. Brought Back to Life in Six Weeks.

Commission: Vectis Ventures / Blackgang Chine | The Dodos | Animatronic Walk-Around Puppet Costumes

The Brief

Blackgang Chine — the oldest theme park in the United Kingdom, and one of the Isle of Wight's most beloved family destinations — has its own mythology. Across its themed zones, it has built a world of characters and creatures that generations of visitors have grown up with. The Dodos are among the most cherished of those characters: icons of the park, as much a part of Blackgang Chine's identity as the cliffs and the coastline.

Vectis Ventures entrusted Creature Encounters with the task of realising those beloved characters as interactive walk-around puppet costumes. The brief had an additional layer of complexity beyond the standard character build: because the Dodos roam between the park's multiple themed zones — Cowboy Town, the Pirate Galleon, the Fairy Fling — each costume needed to incorporate elements that would allow the characters to blend credibly into each distinct environment, moving between worlds without breaking either.

Three characters. Six weeks. A brief that required the Dodos to be simultaneously themselves and contextually adaptable.

The Engineering

The central engineering challenge was scale and counterbalance. The Dodo is a compact bird — smaller in stature than many walk-around characters — which meant the performer's upper body needed to be concealed within the bird's travelling pack rather than the main body of the costume. This created an immediate structural problem: a costume weighted heavily at the front, which would naturally pull the performer forward and compromise both the illusion and the performer's safety.

The solution was deliberate: the weight of the puppeteer's rig at the front of the costume required the performer to lean slightly back as a counterbalance — a constraint that, rather than breaking the illusion, actively reinforced it. A Dodo leaning slightly back, moving with the careful, considered gait that the counterbalance demands, moves exactly as a Dodo ought to move: with the unhurried, slightly pompous dignity of a bird that has never had a reason to hurry and sees no reason to start now.

A constraint became a characteristic. The engineering became the performance.

The Craft

Each Dodo features a multi-directional head, a moving mouth, an eyeblink mechanism and a walk-around construction built for the demands of a full working day across a busy theme park. The travelling packs that conceal the performers' upper torsos are not just structural solutions — they are character elements, carrying the visual story of birds who have been somewhere, who are in the middle of a journey, who have things with them.

The multi-zone costuming — the elements that allow the Dodos to move between Cowboy Town, the Pirate Galleon and the Fairy Fling without incongruity — required careful design work, building costume components that serve multiple aesthetic contexts without fully belonging to any single one. The Dodos are, in this sense, citizens of the whole park rather than residents of any single zone. Which is, when you think about it, exactly right for a bird that wandered.

The Specifications

Walk-around costumes. Multi-directional heads. Moving mouths. Eyeblink mechanisms. Travelling pack performer concealment. Multi-zone costume elements for cross-park roaming. Three characters.

Build time: Six weeks.

The Result

"A massive, MASSIVE thank you from us all here. The Dodos excelled expectation and will be a fabulous addition to our offering here at Blackgang Chine."

- Verity Godwin, Vectis Ventures

The capitalisation is Verity's own. We have left it exactly as she wrote it.

The Vectis Ventures Partnership

The Dodos are the third Creature Encounters commission for Vectis Ventures — following the POLAR bears at Robin Hill Country Park and Cedric the Dragon at Blackgang Chine, and preceding the prehistoric dinosaur characters for Blackgang Chine's Restricted Area 5. Each commission has built on the last: the trust deeper, the brief richer, the shared understanding of what these parks need from their characters more precise.

For a visitor attraction group with multiple sites, multiple character families and multiple audiences to serve, that depth of ongoing relationship is not a luxury — it is an operational necessity. A maker who knows your estate does not just build better characters. They ask better questions, anticipate problems before they emerge, and deliver work that fits into a living, breathing creative world rather than arriving from outside it.

That is what this partnership is. That is what we offer.

Thinking About Something Similar?

If you are a theme park, visitor attraction or heritage site looking to bring beloved existing characters to life as interactive walk-around puppet costumes — or to create new characters that will become icons in their own right — we would love to talk.

We understand the specific demands of multi-zone park environments: the need for characters that can travel between themed worlds, serve multiple audience contexts and withstand the rigours of a full season's daily use. We build with all of those demands in mind from the first design decision.

To arrange an informal, no-obligation Discovery Call with Jamie and Michael, please use the Enquire button below.

Creature Encounters are designers, makers and performers of extraordinary puppet experiences, based in Birmingham's Jewellery Quarter. We have delivered bespoke puppet characters and animatronic creatures for visitor attractions, theme parks, theatre and live events across the UK and internationally, for clients including Vectis Ventures / Blackgang Chine, Vectis Ventures / Robin Hill Country Park, Away Resorts, Mark Thompson Productions, Atomic London / Greater Anglia Trains, Animal Madness Ltd, Big Brum Theatre in Education, Lakeside Arts Nottingham, and the Remal International Festival in Kuwait.