She's feisty, fierce and all about fashion. Mother, London and Rokkit's introduce Eleanor.

Naomi Campbell's cell phone-flinging ways have nothing on Eleanor, the fashion-forward marionette at the heart of Diet Coke's sponsorship idents for American comedy Ugly Betty, now in its third season on Channel 4 and E4 in the UK.

While Ugly Betty's titular character is loveable, if not bumbling, as she tries to make her way in the fashion world, Eleanor seems to have the industry's alley cat ethos down pact. One ident, "Sale Stampede", finds Eleanor unleashing an accessorized skunk at a clothing sale, causing her rival shoppers to flee. While others ("Dress", "Smoking Mark", "Scarf") show her handiness with a blow torch, which she uses to do everything from tailor clothes to burning holes in them to hustle reduced boutique prices.

Eleanor was conceived and designed by Mother, London with help from Rokkit, London directors Legs, who built the marionettes (alongside design studio Puppet Heap) and helmed the idents. But who is Eleanor really? It's a question that has preceded many an exposé on shrouded starlets and supermodels, so we decided to put it to Mother, London creative Peter Robertson, who filled us in on the story behind Eleanor.

From where did you draw inspiration for Eleanor's look and personality?
We knew we wanted her to be really feisty, but we needed something to offset her because you can get into the evil character really quickly. We wanted her to look cute and innocent so that when she pulled out her weapons it'd seem like she did it out of the blue. We looked at all sorts of cartoon references. Disney, Pixar and Manga comics all make characters' heads oversized and their eyes really big. That's kind of a quick shortcut to make characters look cute. Even [American artist] Margaret Keane painted little kids with really big eyes. We ended up with that kind of look, and it was a way to make Eleanor look really innocent.

We also wanted to make sure that she was fashion-forward and that's where the team at Legs was amazing. They worked with the fashion designer to make sure that Eleanor had everything that we'd all desperately want in clothing, just 150 times smaller. The voice is a big part of it as well. I don't know where it came from. Eleanor ended up with a Swedish, Japanese, Bjork-ish accent. I don't know where that happened. We were just writing and she kind of evolved. She came out of somewhere but we're not sure where!

Eleanor does some pretty extreme things in the name of fashion. How did the team decide upon what and which outlandish actions to give her?
It was weird because when we first wrote the scripts, we started off with bazookas and chain saws. What it came down to was trying to get different regulatory bodies to approve them. The skunk arose out of Channel 4's feedback to us, which was that you can't use tear gas because they thought that'd come across looking like terrorism so their suggestion was a skunk, which we accessorized - a pink skunk with pink vapors.

Weirdly enough, they said to us if you're going to use a blow torch than Eleanor has to wear a welding mask. It turned out that it was find of funnier that she wears all the safety equipment because suddenly her actions become more deliberate. The fact that she carries around a blow torch which is accessorized in snake skin but also has a Daft Punk-ish welding mask totally works.

Why did the team decide to make her a marionette?
Both [Mother creative] Susan [Hosking] and I wanted to do marionettes for quite some time. It's a little love we've had. I also think you could never do it with humans because it'd come across as incredibly violent. It was just exploring something that didn't feel like it'd been done a lot. Even the way we really pushed the puppeteers and the puppet manufacturers on how we wanted her to be. They'd never built a puppet with a head so big, which meant they had to find new ways of building the rig because the head size would have interfered with the strings of the body. It was a technical feat in itself but there's a charm in the marionettes that's just so clunky and clumsy.

What was the biggest challenge creatively?
Time is a massive thing. The amount of time it took to design the puppets because we built them from scratch and they were hand modeled. Then the technical aspect of trying to get that many strings in the puppet's head so that it could move its eyes left and right and eyelids and eyebrows up and down. That was pretty hard. Then we had four days to shoot 15 films, but the marionettes didn't mind working long hours so that was kind of good!

See the entire set of Eleanor idents here.