Chester Cheetah
Cheetos
This project involved making the iconic Chester Cheetah into a performance puppet for filming a viral campaign advertising Cheetos.
The Studio’s mission was to make a Chester Cheetah puppet that could be used in a social media campaign for the European arm of Cheetos. This advertising mainly targeted consumers in Poland and Turkey. We had to transform the pre-existing and well-known character design of Chester Cheetah and create a traditional 'hand and rod' style puppet character, with manually operated moving mouth.
We sculpted the puppet from foam and fabricated it in custom dyed natural fibres, carefully matching the tones and patterns to the original Cheetos character. Chester’s bottom jaw and nose were also sculpted, moulded and cast in latex for additional detail and realism. In addition, we crafted hand made teeth, so that when the mouth was operated it looked authentic. These bespoke elements made a tangible difference to the impact the puppet made on screen.
We also instructed our animatronics expert to create radio-controlled eyebrows that could independently raise for additional expression and emotion. The finished product was a puppet that was true to the original image of Chester, whilst also having great personality. Our puppet brought the official mascot for Frito-Lay’s Cheetos to life.
The finished film was screened on advertising spots through social media channels, such as Facebook.
