Fox & Rabbit, Seoul
From Birmingham to Seoul. Expressive Animal Characters, Built to Disappear Into.
Commission: GyoungJae Lee, Seoul, South Korea | Fox & Rabbit | Bespoke Animal Mask Costumes with Expressive Latex Masks
The Brief
A client in Seoul, South Korea, came to Creature Encounters for a pair of bespoke animal character suits — a fox and a rabbit — with expressive masks and custom costuming built around them. The characters needed to read as genuinely animal: not pantomime, not cartoon, but creatures that an audience could believe in.
The brief was clean. The standard was high. The distance between client and workshop was approximately 9,000 kilometres.
The Craft
The masks are where these characters live or die, and the masks were built from scratch — sculpted in clay, cast in plaster, and reproduced in latex: the same process used in professional creature effects for film and television, applied here to characters built for live performance.
Once cast, fur was laid over the rubber forms and exquisitely graded — a process that requires both technical precision and a sculptor's eye, building colour variation and texture depth across the mask's surface until the blend between rubber and fur reads as a single, continuous, living material. The result is a mask that does not sit on top of a character — it becomes the character's face.
The critical challenge in any masked character is the transition between mask and performer: the point where the creature's face meets the actor's body. A poorly managed blend breaks the illusion immediately and irrecoverably. In the Fox and Rabbit suits, that blend was carefully, deliberately softened — the boundary between actor and mask blurred to the point where the audience registers a creature, not a costume.
The fox received a bespoke tail, built and weighted to move with the performer's body rather than against it. The costuming for both characters was developed in close collaboration with the client to serve their specific creative vision.
The Specifications
Bespoke costuming. Expressive sculpted latex masks. Fur graded over rubber forms. Tail for fox. Seamless actor-to-mask transition.
Build time: Five weeks.
A Note on International Commissions
The Fox and Rabbit commission is one of a number of international builds Creature Encounter has delivered — alongside characters shipped to Kuwait, Indonesia, Estonia, Singapore, Monaco, Russia and South Korea. Geography is not a constraint. Our characters are built to travel, packed to survive, and documented so that clients anywhere in the world can maintain them independently between uses.
We work comfortably with international clients across time zones, managing the design development process remotely and shipping finished characters to wherever they need to be. If you are outside the UK and looking for a puppet or creature character builder, we would be very glad to hear from you.
Thinking About Something Similar?
If you need bespoke animal or creature characters — masks, suits, or the combination of both — for theatre, live performance, television, film or events, we would love to talk.
We work across the full spectrum of animal and creature character fabrication, from hyper-realistic creature suits built to withstand close inspection to expressive theatrical masks designed to carry emotion across a large space. Every build starts with the same question: what does this character need to do, and what does the audience need to believe?
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Creature Encounters are designers, makers and performers of extraordinary puppet experiences, based in Birmingham's Jewellery Quarter. We have delivered bespoke puppet characters and creature costumes for clients across the UK and internationally, including Seoul, Kuwait, Indonesia, Estonia, Singapore, Monaco and Russia, for clients including Away Resorts, Mark Thompson Productions, Atomic London / Greater Anglia Trains, Vectis Ventures / Robin Hill Country Park, Vectis Ventures / Blackgang Chine, Animal Madness Ltd, Big Brum Theatre in Education, Lakeside Arts Nottingham, and the Remal International Festival in Kuwait.
