My Notes from the Chris Bowden talk.

I went to a talk at the electric cinema in Birmingham by Chris Bowden earlier on this year where he spoke about the Bristish puppet making company Mackinnon and Saunders and three of the feature films they have worked on: Mars Attacks, the Corpse Bride and Fantastic Mr Fox. (These are my photos which I took of the puppets and armatures that he bought with him.)

Mars Attacks

• 50/60 people worked on one martian. 
• Puppets had a foam latex skull and a sillicone mould suit.
• The helmets were designed specially to twist on and off without having to hold the puppet so that there would be no disturbance to it during shooting and of course this allowed the animator access to the martians head.
• The martians in the end were not shot in Stop Motion but Phil Dale carried out puppet tests of the martians and the range of there movement which are pretty interesting to watch.

Corpse Bride

• 230 puppets made for the corpse bride.
• 2 years work in pre-production. 
• Design process went from Tim Burtons inspirationals which were taken on by a guy called Carlos who developed these designs (often working on the back of cereal packets!) These were turned into sculpts which would then prompt more 2D design work. When they were happy with a deign there would be lots of animation tests on the armature and how it moved and the layers that built on top of this to create to look of the puppet.
• Mike Johnson, the animation director wanted rubber faces which moved rather than replaceable mouths. Peter Saunders then worked 9 months solid to work out the mechanics in the head.

 Armature

 

•  The armature makers within the company tend to be specialised mechanics and it is they who work soley in this area. This is unusual to a lot of companies who tend to have modellers who work in this area as well.
• There are screw driver holes in the back of the heads which twist to make the mout open and close.
• There are paddles to move the cheeks, eyes, mouth, etc up and down.
• Pulleys move the cheeks in circles for varied movement.
• Puppets have seperate eyelashes.
• On the puppet of the corpse bride the hand which is skeletal is actually part of the armature which has been left to show through and decorated to look appropriate.
• For one character there would be approximately 14 puppets each.

Costumes

• Material for the puppets costumes is usually hand printed as it is very hard to find material with print to scale of the size of a puppet.
• Costumes have their own armatures so they can be animated to look like they are clothes which move in accordance to how the body of the puppet moves.
• The veil caused them many problems. They tried many different methods, one of which was a veil created with wire, however in the end they realised they wouldn't get their desired effect without creating the veil as a CG animated object.

Animation tests are ongoing throughout feature films and the puppet companies will be the ones to test the puppets in animation as they couldn't send a completed puppet off to a production only for them to find that it didn't move correctly. This would waste time, money and materials.


Fantastic Mr Fox

Design process:

1. Character design
2.   painting
3. machet
4. established design
5. gets ammended (more drawings)
6. master sculpt
7. plastercine model gets turned into mould (can take long to mould than to sculpt)
8. Armature mechanics will then fit the skeleton into the mould (fatter characters have to have a square section missing to support their legs)
9. Heads are built (custom parts are built in house eg. eyebrow paddles)
10. Moulding (this needs treating for air bubbles etc)
11. Instruction manuals are then produced to explain the movement of the head.

Skin

If they are human characters with sillicone heads they use a technique of backpainting in layers to create a depth for veins etc. (see image)

 Costumes

Clothing has to be made before deciding whether to use it or not. This decision cannot be based on design alone. They used actual pattern cutting techniques to create the suits and dresses that make up the costumes.


Fur


There is a difficulty using fur as if you touch the puppet during animation it cause a rippling effect. Usually it is advised that you stay away from things you can't control with animation however Wes Borland actually liked this effect so this was not a problem.

To apply the fur onto the puppets, a piece of fur is painted with gel to keep the folicals in place, the skin is shaved off and then the fur is put onto latex. The gel is then removed. Fur is also cut with pattern cutting to sew perfectly onto the puppet.

Flocking is a process where strands of fur are attached electromagnetically with glue.


Animation tests

 Every stage of the puppet is tested.

• Costumes are refined through animation tests.
• Tail tests.
• How do they walk?
• Can they touch their heads etc?
• Head tests - expressions, these are pushed beyond what they would do in the film so the animator knows the limits.
• Grotesque proportions.
• From the animation tests it became clear that the shoulders of the fox puppets did not look right. Originally they had slopey shoulders like an animal but they decided they wanted more human stylised shoulders. Shoulder pads were then used to solve this.

Puppets were made in different scales. They also used miniature which were obvious that they were different to on screen puppets. These could not move.

Andy Gent was head of the puppet hospital on set where his job was to fix puppets during filming.



At the company there are only 8 perminant workers. The rest of the team are freelance and working on contract.