Artisans Bring ‘Life’ to Creatures That Look, Sound Real

The 1998 Warner Bros. film “Jack Frost” was in pre-production, and the main character was built--but when director Sam Raimi suddenly left the project, crew members at Jim Henson’s Creature Shop here realized their work faced a meltdown.

After months of studio indecision, in which the film appeared to be in limbo, the artisans who crafted the snowman’s robot head carted it over to the Warner Bros. corporate offices. With a puppeteer working the controls, the Henson band set up Jack in a rehearsal room, where he was soon bantering with whoever wandered by.

Warner executives, drawn by the commotion, lingered to trade quips with the puppet, said David Barrington-Holt, the Creature Shop’s lanky creative supervisor.

“There were $30-million worth of people there . . . and we had them for 45 minutes,” Barrington-Holt said, and they all left the room chanting: “Frost! Frost!”

A new director, Troy Miller, was brought in a few months later and put the project back on track--a turn of events Barrington-Holt credits to that day in the corporate offices. “It blew me away that the head could be so expressive, elicit so much emotion,” Miller said. “It was pretty remarkable for Mr. Holt to pull that one off.”

The snowman’s head is still on the job, visitors to the Henson Creature Shop will discover. It’s a handy demonstration device--programmed with a chirpy speech recorded by actor Michael Keaton, praising arctic climates and providing a reminder that marketing savvy is as important as technical artistry in creating magic moments in movies.

After all, said Matt Britton, the shop’s general manager, plenty of competitors are starting up all the time, eager to grab business from the established creature-making visual-effects houses.

Tom Atkin, executive director of the Visual Effects Society, a 475-member North Hollywood-based trade group, estimates that annual sales of the 10 largest shops in Hollywood total several hundred million dollars and that the group’s cumulative worldwide sales exceed $2 billion.

The Creature Shop is a unit of Hollywood-based Jim Henson Co., founded by the late Muppet-creating producer Jim Henson and now controlled largely by his five children.

Henson’s Burbank shop is a 21,000-square-foot satellite of the original in London, where supervisor John Stephenson says demand is brisk in film and European TV work. It is tucked into the corner of an industrial park near Burbank Airport.

A core staff of 10 artisans--their ranks balloon to 50 or more for big-budget feature film projects--includes mechanical wizards, mold and fur specialists and designers at work on future projects, such as one called “Dinotopia,” a mega-budget made-for-TV movie.

Production costs for Henson Creature Shop work can vary widely and can easily run into the millions for larger projects. The shop takes its share of smaller projects, too, such as an animatronic cat--at well below $1 million--being built for a TV ad campaign for Furniture.com.

That kind of work requires marketing, too--persuading a client that a puppet will out-perform a computer-generated character like Jar-Jar Binks in “Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace.”

“We like to consider ourselves a company that sells characters and performances, not just puppets and costumes,” Britton said. “So, when somebody comes to us with a script, we do everything from there. We design the character, design the performance, nominate the puppeteers or the performer inside the suit, send a whole crew to maintain the stuff and run it, keep it looking good. It’s a package deal.”

The Furniture.com cat will appear in commercials, wryly commenting about the decorative taste of his owners.

“The thing about a realistic cat is that it can stay in the play--maintain its eye line--to stay in the frame, while the other action is taking place, which a real animal won’t do,” Barrington-Holt said. “And our cat will sleep on camera, but a real one won’t do that, either.”

Industry veterans say the Creature Shop has a strong reputation for creating remarkable realism in characters, such as Lucky, the mongrel mutt voiced by Norm Macdonald in the 1998 20th Century Fox feature film, “Dr. Dolittle.” Shots of the real and animatronic dog were so seamless that many visitors are startled to see the mechanical version perched on a workshop table, seemingly ready to sit up and bark for a dog biscuit.

“I’m not knocking other people’s work, but nobody knows what a monster looks like and everybody knows what a cat looks like,” said mold-and-foam shop supervisor Phil Jackson. He was intently involved in modeling a feline head recently in his spacious workroom, which is rich with the aroma of fiberglass. He labored under a row of stern life masks--actors Billy Zane, Boris Karloff, Dustin Hoffman and Humphrey Bogart in mute repose.

Jackson’s role is to create the pliable, lifelike skin that encases the cat’s delicate robotic mechanism. Later the skin will be covered with fur obtained from food animals and harvested-fur animals, such as yaks.

“The fur has to be exactly right, or people will be able to tell it’s not real,” Jackson said.

The cat will speak its lines through the use of digitally animated mouth movements, pointing up the marriage of mechanical and computer-generated techniques usually required to bring a character to life. Such was the case in the 1997 feature “Mouse Hunt,” in which DreamWorks SKG tapped Stan Winston Studios of Van Nuys, the visual-effects house that created Universal-Amblin’s “Jurassic Park” dinosaurs.

In “Mouse Hunt,” Winston created a digital rodent and puppets for some shots and used live mice for others, said Bart Brown, “Mouse Hunt” associate producer.

“We were dealing with a mouse that’s supposed to look real but it doesn’t act like a real one,” Brown said.

“So you have it winking and doing acrobatic moves, and the challenge for that house was to pull it off without making it look hokey or fake.”

The pre-production process on a big-budget studio project, Brown said, usually includes circulating a script among the top creature makers--Henson, Winston, and Rick Baker (“Men in Black,” “Mighty Joe Young” and “The Nutty Professor”).

Even so, only one candidate performed visual effects for Brown’s latest movie. “The Flintstones in Viva Rock Vegas,” to be released next spring by Warner Bros., will be a Henson project.

The Henson Burbank shop was established 6 1/2 years ago during the original “The Flintstones” feature. Brown said the Creature Shop’s services were retained again to ensure continuity of design.

“Henson was the ticket, because of the first one,” Brown said. “They pulled off the look of it. We never even bothered to talk to other animatronic houses.”

The film brought mold-maker Phil Jackson his big Hollywood break, after six years’ anonymous labor at the Creature Shop.

‘ “I got to perform the alarm bird. I go, ‘Waaah! Waaah!’ when they pull his tail,” Jackson said. “It was really a thrill. This is a job where I can have a creative outlet that’s mental and physical at the same time.”