Pinocchio's Nose Part 2

Pinocchio opened weeks ago, so this post is very long coming. Right after opening the show I was incredibly stressed and I needed some space and time away from the experience before coming back to reflect on it.
Let me say first that the multiple noses I made didn't work. I spent many hours and lots of money and ended up not using any of it, and it was incredibly frustrating.
I am still convinced though that I was on the right track, so I will start by telling you what I did and the lessons I learned along the way, in case you ever are in a position to make your own nose.
After creating my posterboard prototype I set about looking for something stronger to make the final product out of. The best option I found was a telescoping light saber toy. As I sliced the toys, I learned several important lessons.

-A ton of the original light saber had to be forfeited to waste. You'll notice in the picture of the toy, there is a lot of overlap between pieces. Since my pieces were only an inch long, I couldn't afford to have that space.
-Because I had to work with the cuts that already existed between pieces it was pretty much impossible for the nose segments to be uniform.
-Every step had to be done in order, no short cuts. First, sand all the pieces so that the plastic takes paint, then paint the pieces, then sand them again so that the finish is smooth. Then cut each piece to length starting at the tip. I also melted the wider end of each piece and curved it inward so that each piece would catch the one before it as the nose collapsed.
The difference between fitting smoothly and not fitting was so tiny that even a thin layer of paint could throw things off and force you to redo everything.

This is how the plastic noses turned out when they were installed on the mask.

As with all of the noses I made, it looked pretty impressive when it was extended. The problem was that, with this script, the nose was only extended for two very brief moments during the show. Collapsed, the nose was far too big for the artistic director. He wanted it smaller, thinner and less distracting from the actor's face. 

After working though all the steps on several different plastic light saber noses I decided to go with another material. I went back to the original posterboard idea. This time I fully covered each piece of posterboard with masking tape, making it more durable and conveniently taking the whole thing closer to the right color. 

I wasn't able to make the closed nose much lower profile, but the thin material allowed me to make the extended nose much longer, and making it myself allowed me to make it much more uniform. The biggest problem with the posterboard was that, if it got a fold or wrinkle, the pieces would stop catching and you could pull the nose apart. If I were to do it again I might try something a little less inclined to bend, maybe paper mache. 

After making all of these noses the director and AD were still not happy. The large mask that concealed the tube across the cheek still took up too much of the actor's face. I mocked up some prototypes of smaller masks that would be hand operated instead of using the cable system, and even a totally different concept based on extension pieces that the actor would attach to the tip of his nose using magnets. None of these ideas worked. 

If I were to do it again I would probably try the cable system again, but instead of through the cheek I would design the mask to run the cable along the bridge of the actor's nose, across his forehead, over his head and down to the small of his back where it would be operated. The mask would likely have to have some sort of piece that extended across his cheeks, but it could be much smaller and low profile. 

I think my biggest mistake though this project was taking my policy of "saying Okay" too far. I don't want to be the props master who always says "no we can't," but in this situation there should have come a point where I insisted that we work with the current nose to trouble shoot. Instead I kept reinventing the mechanism in an attempt to fulfill every request I was given, and as a result, none of the dozen noses I made ever got to the trouble shooting phase. 

By the time we got to opening there was really no choice but to go with the nose from the last production. It had it's flaws, and it too distracted from the actor's face more than we would have liked, but it had been used extensively and the troubleshooting phase had been completed.