My Talking Frog.

This is a talking frog prop I made by covering a faux frog skeleton with thermoplastic, then installing a bluetooth speaker inside it.

First of all, these are what I used: First is a plastic frog skeleton left over from Halloween, but any skeleton is useable here.

Second, the plastic itself: This comes from Amazon and comes with coloring beads. And this softens in boiling water to the consistency of modeling clay and solidifies back to solid plastic when it is cool.

Third, is the speaker itself. I just used a speaker with an enclosure to boost the sound. The Bluetooth receiver is from a Bluetooth-equipped fidget spinner I modified for this use.

A quick trial proved that thermoplastic didn't stick to this plastic, so I took the skeleton apart and pushed some of the plastic inside the skeleton, in order to have the plastic on the outside stick to it. The head didn't need any plastic so I set it aside.

The only thing I did do the head is use a mototool to drill holes in the eyes to mount LEDs in them, plus I bored a hole through the "Neck" itself to feed the wires from the LEDs through. This hole is visible in the first pic.

I used the colorant from the plastics to color the plastic green, then while it was hot applied it to the legs, then reassembled the legs onto the body. And after I reassembled the body halves together, I applied more of the plastic to secure the body together.

I mounted the sound tube inside the body cavity with hot glue. I then used hot glue to secure the LED "Eyes" inside the head, then ran the wires down the neck into the body cavity and connected them to the Bluetooth speaker board. A quick test proved everything was working. The Bluetooth board I then secured to the bottom of the body, making sure both the charging jack was easy to get to, as was the on-off switch.

Now comes the painting. To paint this I used a Wal Mart color-shifting acrylic green paint mixed with Mod Podge to protect the paint, then used a brush to apply the paint. I gave this roughly five coats of paint until it was all green.

The talking frog, which I call "Jeremiah", needed a stage so I made a swamp-inspired background, a lily pad to sit on, and the two crystals in the pic are just color changing lights with UV resin crystals secured to it. I use these as place markers so I can superimpose images onto the raw video itself. The eyes of Jeremiah are connected to the speaker so they flash in sync with the sound.

This is a video of my prototype. THIS one has the eyes constantly flashing, but I modified it later on to flash in sync to sound.

This used a plastic frog skeleton, but any plastic Halloween skeleton can be used.