Obviously, a show about animals requires so type of animal features in order for the audience to grasp the message. Our direction was to make masks the resembled the animals that the actor was playing, but make sure that each actor's face was still visible under it so that we could still read their expressions through their eyes and mouth movements. Each mask was completely hand made, using wire, paper Mache, latex, and paint to create each layer. This method kept the masks lightweight so that they weren't super heavy for the actors that would have to wear them the whole show. Originally, each mask was made with peel off skin, so that when the actor died and hung their mask up (we set our show in a slaughter house, so when the actor died, they would hand their mask and costume and it would hand above the stage for the rest of the show) it would look like a skull, but it was cut when our test audiences didn't understand it. This was achieved my making a separate paper Mache and latex layer that verlcroed to the base mask and the underlayer was painted like a skull. There were 26 masks made total, including the dog masks, which were made to have a detachable and moving jaw mouth piece so that the dogs could grow up from the baby dogs (like the book) to the guard dogs that Napoleon trained.