The Art and Science of Carousel Making: A Conversation with the Master Makers

In a world where precision and perfection are paramount, the art of carousel making is a testament to human ingenuity and dedication. The carousel makers we spoke with have been working tirelessly to bring this beloved attraction to life, pushing the boundaries of what is possible with each new creation.

One of the most impressive aspects of their work is the efficiency they've developed in producing multiple versions of each character. "It's incredible," said one of our sources, "because you have so many dozens to make, yeah, that's a huge advantage over doing it one or two at a time." The team's use of molds and plaster rosettes has streamlined their process, allowing them to create multiple characters in a fraction of the time it would take otherwise.

But what makes these carousels truly special is the attention to detail and precision that goes into each and every character. "It doesn't sound like two or three years is enough time to make 15 some odd versions of every single character," said our source, "it's amazing what you guys are able to do." The team has developed a system for refining their process, allowing them to make efficiencies that were previously impossible.

One of the key tools in their arsenal is a technique they call "profile curve." By creating a profile curve, the team can quickly and easily layout the design for each character, making it much quicker than traditional methods. "We're working really closely with each other and coming up with new ideas and really pushing that," said our source. "It would continue to keep refining at the process so that you can make efficiencies."

As we toured the workshop, we were struck by the sheer scale of the operation. The team is busy creating multiple versions of each character, with some even taking on special requests from the animation team. "We'll take a look at it and he'll approve it," said our source, "then we'll go out to the animation team onto the floor and they'll start doing jumps, stretches, and moving around tests." The process is meticulous, with each character needing to match seam to seam to seam.

But what about the most intricate characters? Those that require a high level of precision and detail? That's where the team's expertise shines. We spotted a massive water buffalo puppet on a nearby table, its size and intricacy awe-inspiring. "He's obviously coming through camera," said our source, "pulling a cart." The team has developed special techniques for creating these larger-than-life characters, using materials like plasticine and silicon to bring them to life.

As we continued to chat with the team, one question kept popping up: how do you manage to keep each character looking its best? With limited time constraints, it's easy to let quality slip. But our sources assured us that they take maintenance very seriously. "You've only got a little bit of time," said one team member, "so you've got to get out reasonably quickly." The result is a level of precision and attention to detail that is truly stunning.

In addition to the intricate details of each character, we also spotted some truly unique and special pieces. A musk ox puppet caught our eye, its intricately designed fur and eyes a testament to the team's skill. "It's not just about making something look pretty," said our source, "it's about creating an organic character that feels real."

As we wrapped up our conversation with the carousel makers, one thing was clear: these are truly special people who have dedicated their lives to bringing joy and wonder to others. Their attention to detail, precision, and creativity are a testament to what can be achieved when human ingenuity is pushed to its limits.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhey guys it's Adam you might remember last year when Aardman Animations chief model maker Jimmy Jung came by my cave to show off a smattering of our demands incredible innovations in puppet making well now that we've traveled to the mothership Jimmy and his team are showing us well more than a smattering him and his incredible team of puppet masters I guess have built dozens of puppets and brand-new processes to address the technical challenges of our demands new film early man let's take a deep dive are you ready oh yeah let's go Jimmy when you came to my cave last year you brought some of your amazing handiwork and gave me a little taste of your guys wonderful engineering of these puppets but now I'm in your shop and I'm looking at a reasonable portion of the cast of early man and I'd love you to give me a deeper dive into how you take a character from concept all the way to being an animated puppet no of course very early on initially probably no story starts yeah and during that period Nick would be writing to a lot of writing and then also what he's doing is a fuse design sketches just over here we can kind of see some very early sort of a concept step in doing who's writing and his character developing all the time and at a certain point when he's happy he'll bring in doctor and we'll start sculpting so so she can see some of these really early scopes so the ones that engrave I've put about three to four years old and this is what we call a design sculpt is the great color a choice so that you know that it's one of the first ones not really I think it's just even sculptors can get his hands on oh or possibly what Nick wants to see mm-hmm so we go from this very early stage and then we'll do lots of different refinements there maybe five or six different sculpts that go on during that whole periods and are those refinements based on the requirements of the character industry but also how Nick gets to know the character exactly as he saw us that story's evolving he kind of known he was a bit cheeky or feasible of a ball or and so that the sculptor will adjust those accordingly to how Nick sees fit for him and so now making obviously comes almost an end result here of what Doug looks like now mm-hmm obviously a bit rough looking but he's still have a design sculpt and wants Nick's happy with that and that's been a pro we then go into production sculpt so it's sculpting it again right but sort of in like a sort of classic pose I see a pose yeah yeah so the idea behind that is that when it comes into model making then we can start separating all the different components off and start molding and casting and actually then start properly building the puppet as it were and that means building its armature but also engineering what is hard and soft and exactly registration exactly so now that sort of very beginning stage we'll get start to get involved obviously with Nick but also with some of the animation departments some of the some of the animation directors and they'll start sort of fleshing out looking at the story what that character needs to do you know if he's sort of any awkward positions you can sew that up so every film might bring with it a set of a unique engineering challenges except like there might be an action sequence that requires something you guys have never tried but yeah with in this film there so there's lots of jumping around and things like that so you've got a really bear that in mind when we start making those puppets so really early on in the design stage that's when it starts to get fleshed out so once we've done that we've got the design sculpt mm-hmm we then sort of start molding it so here artemon we work in a series of teens and we'll have obviously ahead of model-making but then it's then broken down in terms of having team leaders and then within those teams will have seniors and juniors and any new trainees that sort of come sort of come through this is aware so if there's quite a lot in each team yeah but also there's a hierarchical type system in there and normally the senior guys and the team leaders have a big wealth of experience right some of the guys have been here for over 20 years now you guys work it it sounds like you work it a little like a farm team like you bubble people up through the process so they get to learn you're getting more and more experience right and sort of over the period of admins history model-making and we were very departmentalized though you'd have a lot of people just painting and the people just foaming when everyone's becoming more generalist they're coming more and more experienced oh nice everyone's learning a bit of everything you know we still have our specific skills with an armature making and some guys would be a lot better at sculpting but those teams are then all set up well that sounds like you would make problem-solving a lot easier where people each understand what the other teams are doing and the constraints that they might be working on I would look at those different levels of experience those guys have been doing you know we're not everyone's done lost different projects in the in the past yeah yeah so we would try not to repeat the mistakes as before and try and build on what we've been doing so what are some of the unique design challenges that early man presented you guys with so some really early problems that we had first of all it's the first time we've done a lot of fir work uh how you've done we've done fir off seeing Shaun the Sheep who's that we've talked about before and but a lot of these guys the costumes are all not of fur now we died on our own fabric in house mm-hmm but some are actually required what sort of weave stencil died so this is what this one is you have a base color and then stencil die over the top to give that sort of unique pattern yeah and then some of the characters over here just pick up tree borer here but all of these different sets so all this fabric has died but these died separately and these are cut strips and it's all sewn to get all sewn together oh my gosh and I have a tiny bit here from a berry costume actually doesn't fall over and we look on the inside Oh each one is sewn in is a bit dirty because you're a refurb puppet wow that is so much work so we all have started to laser-cut but a lot of beginning we've sort of using a lot of hand cutting and you see everything still needs to be hand-stitched that's incredible now just slip over the puppet it has sort of a foam padding inside right rain going back to sort of the beginning once we've got that sculpt mm-hmm we start breaking it down now for new Fuu I wasn't heavily involved on we were quite a small team for nose here he's the villain he's the bad guy he's very funny that's Tom Hiddleston so when I received that sculpt I then sit down with my armature maker as it were and some of the other team members and we discuss openly how we're going to go about it so I'll see more minds on the job really helps so streamline and everyone has a slightly different idea right but how that goes and when you say armature maker just to be clear you mean the interior of this puppet has a rigid metal armature that allows it to be animated so this so this is one of the other characters here this is not what's inside meth but you can cut up a good good feel you can manic that up yeah ball and socket joints classic admin stuff yeah and also we have a few rotates on at the top in the ocean in the shoulders yeah yeah so tested viewers if you've seen the video of me visiting Jackson shop and handling the Willis O'Brien armature for King Kong the thing I found most amazing about handling it is it's basically the same technology Alyssa Brian kind of solved this problem in one shot for King Kong and we're still using modified version exactly what's up and all we're doing is really sort of refining it and we may use be using it more heavily in certain items and really quite technical in terms of the mouths of mechanics and things like that and when you set your meeting with the our metric team you're also taking I would guess about the weight of the puppet which means how much load bearing others jointly that there's some different problems wouldn't know if he's really top-heavy yeah so we try and make him as lightweight but he's still a bit top-heavy but normally you have an armature guy that's assigned to the team and that's when you start fleshing out talking problems so the chap I was talking to was a chapbook Kevin writes and we would sit down quite often and have a dialogue in terms of how we were going to build do certain yeah there's certain parts to him once the sort of Heath so he goes off and he starts building the armature I then start molding the sculpts oh so this is just a fiberglass mold right so this is just for foam latex okay and this will give us that you can see now ice it gives you a shell so we'll injecting foam latex into there's only one kind of an experience with foam it's almost like baking a cake yeah smells of eggs because the ammonia that's in the foam and it's dependent heavily on the temperature in the lights changing constantly oh yeah so it's all under climate control yeah and once that gets injected into there we have a certain guys to do the foaming that gets baked that comes out and that gets trimmed the difference obviously with from this character was some in the past like on pirates we would sort of hand paint these foams because we've sculpted clothing yeah but we know one of the ladies called Harriet them actually then made some patterns and actually dress yeah it's just the characters back off yeah yeah real cloth so yeah it has a under wide skirt in there hold his legs look at his tiny you know his hands have an armature inside them yes so I really hate Tanja that could totally anything anymore who's been to their life when when you're looking at ah so yeah they just sort of come out as low Oh what do cocaine s Lots in there look at dad I just pop him down a second I can just oh this is where this is this is the mole that they've come out of yeah and so we're injecting into here and we put a tiny tiny of armature little ball and socket joint in there and then and then all the air will then escape out of here so you close it up and inject into this hole and then all the silicon will come out these visors here Wow and this is I mean this is a mold that's been built to be repeatedly used dozens and dozens in there you have to bear in mind we're not just making one character we're making multiple characters you're gonna at the end of production how many news might you have yes so I think we've got about sir I've made the seventh one the other day and we're doing three versions of him and his referee case Wow which we can't reconstructing at the moment Wow so yeah lots of hands will go through there and it's a really I mean obviously because it has to do that it's clearly a super robust more that's easily yeah it's a polyurethane was on the malla medium power deputies you can withstand temperature and obviously we're clamping it yeah injecting into it it's a talked a little bit about the cloak on the back this cloak is all wired like and I got one here for being sort of refurbs and it has a metal plate in here so this is this classic thing where you have to talk to your touch the armature guy I'm trying to figure out this problem because this this is super thin yeah there's a little plate in here so that enables what we designed here and enabled us to sort of almost just move the cloak around a little bit without having to talk much of the wires there's no wires in here and they're just held under tension when they're in place into the collar like so that's such a lovely solution and it's so another thing if I can do it rights with all these heads if the Chunkin heads off there's a button just in here oh that's a new is that a new development yeah it kind of yeah quite new because noise so sliding kns and things like that mm-hmm just popping those in and that makes it even easier to pull out yeah sometimes the animators like to fill in the little hinge because they just like to slide in and out you were really did mention how little they want to move the puppet Wow but a lot of the characters now have all these fancy little neck making but pop that down there and I bring up the Queen I only found this out today because I've never I didn't work on the Queen I bring her down there you press on this middle section here no way on them and then her head should come up by that she's going like I said these are already done a cup here so you've got to remember to press the right one otherwise you're gonna snap the right yeah so that if you can see in there yeah alters the suss designed by eight and the guys downstairs that's that's you guys having too much fun yeah okay I have a question about Knuth here does the jewel on his medallion flashing in desirable or under several ways what he's being animated it doesn't know it's not sort of back lift or anything like that it's just literally the lighting that they moon what they use on it so I think it just some really nice effects but it's just a it's a gorgeous very little jewel here Wow and you're casting this so yes so that what's going on here I can quickly show you this this is the mold for the for his for the neck collar so there's a high sort of hard there's hard molds this is sort of what we call fast Castle this is polyurethane again in the back here oh but the neck ring is so it is soft yes so that piece gets bolted in right and then we'll I'll just sort of literally just inject again that won't give us the collar well you're doing cold morning yeah it should have just literally just yeah pushing it through Wow with silicon and then once that's done I've done some chains and I sort of will stick it on here yeah and then I'll stick on the medallion there it's bolted down into the middle of oh look at that great super modular and within there there's actually you feel this a lot there's a hard core yeah so that was designed like I said with Kevin really early on to make sure that collar fitted in exactly the right place I see so I can just mix we go in pop that off replace the collar Wow and then leg marks so the armature this is actually bolted to the bottom this is the second half here so these again are designed to go upside down right as you inject through the top mm-hmm and the risers come out by the foot pass ah this has obviously been painted this is just for display purposes so and this is what it looks like inside there is some type of armature like we are sitting with inside there and you've bolted it from the bottom so that the rub when you cast the rubber in it casts around it yes Wow what happens if you have to tighten up one of the joints after it happened morbid yeah so when the puppets finished you have to sort of very carefully to make tiny slits where the joint heads will the bolt heads are I should say so that's a little bit like I've just made this beautiful popular sometimes you can leave it but you've just every animator requires different tension so your job is it's not just to make these models they'll be coming in and out in dept all the time right Jimmy I need your attention this leg I need him to walk his arms a bit loose can you loose enough can you tighten it up so that's we're constantly doing around trying to obviously finish up our house as well another development that's done in house is the mouth plate system in previous films and whatnot yeah obviously passing gets very hot and so they can distort quite easily you know you the classic taking on and off their mouth shapes mm-hmm and now if I just pull this one off hopefully they never distort this mouth shape Ashley there we go destroying his mouth so look on the back there it's done with a certain curvature and we got a top tooth with the top teeth slider mm-hmm and then you can see there that will slide on and off the plates like so there's a little yes and then this has been engineered here so it's a positive mechanical you know just sort of click onto there so basically I'm just taking that stuff off and I'm gonna slide that one in on there and then the animator then sort of address that in for every different moves a change of the mouth so will then sort of pull that off or carry on mother I have a question about the you have color-matched plasticine that's plus silicon yeah yes that's an astounding I imagine that's non-trivial no it's very hard there's a few people to do it here and one that one of the chaps called J does it has a big part in that so for instance now this is obviously silicon mm-hmm no explaining about the heat right onto the floor and yeah this type of look it's really what Nick likes the sort of real funny that it's it looks like you've got your fingers yeah exactly so these are all silicone and they're silicone for a reason because if we were to make these all in plasticine it would take us an awful long time to get the film finished now there are shots where Anne animates will require a plasticine hand when he's holding stuff yes yeah so we can use the same molds oh just a bigger molds here so we can use the same molds and then it matches perfect yeah so that J will then sort of match the colors as you can see this is silicon this is plasticine you know we have a slightly different tone for the nose but it's it's a very complicated process and it takes a long time yeah her bet and I also noticed that a lot of these characters have actual hair yes now let's see if I can pull her hair off here there we go so you can see there's a like a polyurethane do skullcap with a little area in the magnet registration and then all the hair will be sort of dressed in glued well unlike Shawn where we just sort of use PVA mortar this is to feed the hair yeah cuz it works or to make the hair nice and stiff and we're using like another polyurethane so they can move just a little just a tiny bit over Nick likes an element of that moving around but we're trying to keep it to a minimum minimal Wow amount this is is this the first time you guys have had so much hair yeah yes it's pretty crazy really nice little story about this fella in terms of when they were trying to get the look yeah when so during this whole process that I've been talking about work back and forth with Nick all the time so we'll seen it maybe once or twice a week he's a very busy man he's also got other things to do yeah so we're trying to make judgment calls of what he likes we then will then show Nick hey mate what do you think about this hmm so when they first did this originally I think it was done in chamois leather yeah and it was anyway we really love the look yeah but the promise of chamois leather it doesn't move as well for animation so then they had to mole the sculpt texture its mold it foam it's and then paint it up so we look like chamois leather yeah yeah all those so that's what this is yes it's just a sore thumb cause until look because it looks exactly like yeah Wow but it also gives it a better scale yeah when you mold it like that and then during this whole mouth development phase here we're trying to speed up some of the processes nonlin is making a single mold for a mouth shape or a bat place I should say in the top teeth yeah we're trying to sort of figure a quicker way out and sort of streamline that process so that was sort of developed in-house really early on sort of on farmers on sort of Shaun the Sheep man and that's and pirates even and that sort of progressed further and further down the line and sort of been refined even more so we have what these we call it carousel molds oh oh oh and I've got a really cute one to show you over there so these are top teeth Phaneuf mm-hmm I was just showing you earlier these ah take that out so these are what we call gravity-fed so they look a little bit like centrifugal but they don't get fun you just pour the better engine yeah and then pull the resin in and it just and it makes you 12 pairs or something so these like will sit in oh look at that and each one is exactly registered and can be replaced by any other yes so we'll make a set of masters they'll get molded first of all and there's some really there's a really cute one here one of our guys for salmon made and these are actually for the men such birds top of his nose oh that's probably the smallest carousel ma yeah it's been made here but in this I mean this is so much more efficient than doing one or two at a time yeah because you have so many dozens to make yeah yeah that's incredible and I this is yeah I'm just days to get refined and refined and they become smaller and smaller a chap called Nigel here we've been working with closely we're doing these molds you came up with a new technique which was based on doing the plaster rosettes in the ceiling by making a profile curve and then you can just sort of make the layout that much quicker yeah yeah so everyone saw that you know everyone sort of you know we're working really closely with each other and coming up with new ideas and really pushing that so you guys okay it would continue to keep refining at the process so that you can make efficiencies yes something like this would normally like in the old days maybe five days to layout we were taking it down to like two and a half days two days right right right really push it through much much quicker yeah Wow you know when I see the scope of what you have done it doesn't sound like two or three years is enough time to make 15 some odd versions of every single character it's amazing what you guys are able to do yeah I mean once once the first main characters in made is finished what we call a prototype character Nick we'll take a look at it he'll approve it you'll go out to the animation team onto the floor and they'll start doing jumps stretches and moving around tests enemies just test animation just make sure everything's working okay because sometimes you can from a call to puppet and take it out and go it's not twisting right there's something that's not working here hopefully in conversations that you've had previous with the animation team yeah yeah find all those out but it still happens once that gets a prequel animation Department so when we start making multiples so that's when we start making seven or maybe sixteen of the same character and that will be scheduled out during the course of the film we won't make seven all at once right right right so we're gonna make two nerves and then what I would have go on to make something completely different another character and then come back to the neuf so it gets made out over sort of but the requirements on you guys are intense because news has to match seam to seam to seam to seam maybe uh three or four different sets of yeah and it's the a and I'll see these puppies age as well you know you could be out one Knuth could be out shooting for two months and you just have to keep on top of the maintenance to make sure he looks pristine and it's nice that's when you then sort of slide in number two so that they don't pop there's no some color exactly yeah Wow as we're talking about all these puppets I'd like to talk about the elephant in the room or as you guys might refer to it the water buffalo on the table this is by far the largest puppet on this table Wow I hope he's really light it's quite light his name Wow so during the whole process of making all these main characters we'll have what we call special characters that come up yeah things that were only in front of camera maybe for a couple of seconds or a few frames and this is the champ so he's obviously coming through camera pulling a carts yeah people on Academy remember precisely some of the lovely ladies here called Gina had made this with Nigel oh look at the underside it's so simple yeah so it's just put blue foam and a bed of plywood and they get stressed in these will all have to be sculpted and molded and dressed in with the fur and then actually the I think if I'm right so a little bit dental nobody that's actually plasticine knows they're oh so he's obviously come long as snorting as easy as it's going through shots why it is but it is I think his head moves as well this is all silicon with a little bit of leather work here as well so these are great to do because you've only got some times the time cuz there's a lot of time constraints then you've got over get out reasonably quickly what I would imagine with the super engineering time constraints of the hero characters one off like this is a real this this is all up a few weeks and these are sort of maybe 12 to 14 weeks depending on yeah and how complicated today are he's lovely as beautiful as me obviously big eyes as well that we will make in-house so great Jimmy I it's just astounding the level of precision and yet also an organic character you're able to keep in these in these characters it's incredible yeah this is not a water buffalo it's a musk ox I think there we go that was weird that's awesome well donehey guys it's Adam you might remember last year when Aardman Animations chief model maker Jimmy Jung came by my cave to show off a smattering of our demands incredible innovations in puppet making well now that we've traveled to the mothership Jimmy and his team are showing us well more than a smattering him and his incredible team of puppet masters I guess have built dozens of puppets and brand-new processes to address the technical challenges of our demands new film early man let's take a deep dive are you ready oh yeah let's go Jimmy when you came to my cave last year you brought some of your amazing handiwork and gave me a little taste of your guys wonderful engineering of these puppets but now I'm in your shop and I'm looking at a reasonable portion of the cast of early man and I'd love you to give me a deeper dive into how you take a character from concept all the way to being an animated puppet no of course very early on initially probably no story starts yeah and during that period Nick would be writing to a lot of writing and then also what he's doing is a fuse design sketches just over here we can kind of see some very early sort of a concept step in doing who's writing and his character developing all the time and at a certain point when he's happy he'll bring in doctor and we'll start sculpting so so she can see some of these really early scopes so the ones that engrave I've put about three to four years old and this is what we call a design sculpt is the great color a choice so that you know that it's one of the first ones not really I think it's just even sculptors can get his hands on oh or possibly what Nick wants to see mm-hmm so we go from this very early stage and then we'll do lots of different refinements there maybe five or six different sculpts that go on during that whole periods and are those refinements based on the requirements of the character industry but also how Nick gets to know the character exactly as he saw us that story's evolving he kind of known he was a bit cheeky or feasible of a ball or and so that the sculptor will adjust those accordingly to how Nick sees fit for him and so now making obviously comes almost an end result here of what Doug looks like now mm-hmm obviously a bit rough looking but he's still have a design sculpt and wants Nick's happy with that and that's been a pro we then go into production sculpt so it's sculpting it again right but sort of in like a sort of classic pose I see a pose yeah yeah so the idea behind that is that when it comes into model making then we can start separating all the different components off and start molding and casting and actually then start properly building the puppet as it were and that means building its armature but also engineering what is hard and soft and exactly registration exactly so now that sort of very beginning stage we'll get start to get involved obviously with Nick but also with some of the animation departments some of the some of the animation directors and they'll start sort of fleshing out looking at the story what that character needs to do you know if he's sort of any awkward positions you can sew that up so every film might bring with it a set of a unique engineering challenges except like there might be an action sequence that requires something you guys have never tried but yeah with in this film there so there's lots of jumping around and things like that so you've got a really bear that in mind when we start making those puppets so really early on in the design stage that's when it starts to get fleshed out so once we've done that we've got the design sculpt mm-hmm we then sort of start molding it so here artemon we work in a series of teens and we'll have obviously ahead of model-making but then it's then broken down in terms of having team leaders and then within those teams will have seniors and juniors and any new trainees that sort of come sort of come through this is aware so if there's quite a lot in each team yeah but also there's a hierarchical type system in there and normally the senior guys and the team leaders have a big wealth of experience right some of the guys have been here for over 20 years now you guys work it it sounds like you work it a little like a farm team like you bubble people up through the process so they get to learn you're getting more and more experience right and sort of over the period of admins history model-making and we were very departmentalized though you'd have a lot of people just painting and the people just foaming when everyone's becoming more generalist they're coming more and more experienced oh nice everyone's learning a bit of everything you know we still have our specific skills with an armature making and some guys would be a lot better at sculpting but those teams are then all set up well that sounds like you would make problem-solving a lot easier where people each understand what the other teams are doing and the constraints that they might be working on I would look at those different levels of experience those guys have been doing you know we're not everyone's done lost different projects in the in the past yeah yeah so we would try not to repeat the mistakes as before and try and build on what we've been doing so what are some of the unique design challenges that early man presented you guys with so some really early problems that we had first of all it's the first time we've done a lot of fir work uh how you've done we've done fir off seeing Shaun the Sheep who's that we've talked about before and but a lot of these guys the costumes are all not of fur now we died on our own fabric in house mm-hmm but some are actually required what sort of weave stencil died so this is what this one is you have a base color and then stencil die over the top to give that sort of unique pattern yeah and then some of the characters over here just pick up tree borer here but all of these different sets so all this fabric has died but these died separately and these are cut strips and it's all sewn to get all sewn together oh my gosh and I have a tiny bit here from a berry costume actually doesn't fall over and we look on the inside Oh each one is sewn in is a bit dirty because you're a refurb puppet wow that is so much work so we all have started to laser-cut but a lot of beginning we've sort of using a lot of hand cutting and you see everything still needs to be hand-stitched that's incredible now just slip over the puppet it has sort of a foam padding inside right rain going back to sort of the beginning once we've got that sculpt mm-hmm we start breaking it down now for new Fuu I wasn't heavily involved on we were quite a small team for nose here he's the villain he's the bad guy he's very funny that's Tom Hiddleston so when I received that sculpt I then sit down with my armature maker as it were and some of the other team members and we discuss openly how we're going to go about it so I'll see more minds on the job really helps so streamline and everyone has a slightly different idea right but how that goes and when you say armature maker just to be clear you mean the interior of this puppet has a rigid metal armature that allows it to be animated so this so this is one of the other characters here this is not what's inside meth but you can cut up a good good feel you can manic that up yeah ball and socket joints classic admin stuff yeah and also we have a few rotates on at the top in the ocean in the shoulders yeah yeah so tested viewers if you've seen the video of me visiting Jackson shop and handling the Willis O'Brien armature for King Kong the thing I found most amazing about handling it is it's basically the same technology Alyssa Brian kind of solved this problem in one shot for King Kong and we're still using modified version exactly what's up and all we're doing is really sort of refining it and we may use be using it more heavily in certain items and really quite technical in terms of the mouths of mechanics and things like that and when you set your meeting with the our metric team you're also taking I would guess about the weight of the puppet which means how much load bearing others jointly that there's some different problems wouldn't know if he's really top-heavy yeah so we try and make him as lightweight but he's still a bit top-heavy but normally you have an armature guy that's assigned to the team and that's when you start fleshing out talking problems so the chap I was talking to was a chapbook Kevin writes and we would sit down quite often and have a dialogue in terms of how we were going to build do certain yeah there's certain parts to him once the sort of Heath so he goes off and he starts building the armature I then start molding the sculpts oh so this is just a fiberglass mold right so this is just for foam latex okay and this will give us that you can see now ice it gives you a shell so we'll injecting foam latex into there's only one kind of an experience with foam it's almost like baking a cake yeah smells of eggs because the ammonia that's in the foam and it's dependent heavily on the temperature in the lights changing constantly oh yeah so it's all under climate control yeah and once that gets injected into there we have a certain guys to do the foaming that gets baked that comes out and that gets trimmed the difference obviously with from this character was some in the past like on pirates we would sort of hand paint these foams because we've sculpted clothing yeah but we know one of the ladies called Harriet them actually then made some patterns and actually dress yeah it's just the characters back off yeah yeah real cloth so yeah it has a under wide skirt in there hold his legs look at his tiny you know his hands have an armature inside them yes so I really hate Tanja that could totally anything anymore who's been to their life when when you're looking at ah so yeah they just sort of come out as low Oh what do cocaine s Lots in there look at dad I just pop him down a second I can just oh this is where this is this is the mole that they've come out of yeah and so we're injecting into here and we put a tiny tiny of armature little ball and socket joint in there and then and then all the air will then escape out of here so you close it up and inject into this hole and then all the silicon will come out these visors here Wow and this is I mean this is a mold that's been built to be repeatedly used dozens and dozens in there you have to bear in mind we're not just making one character we're making multiple characters you're gonna at the end of production how many news might you have yes so I think we've got about sir I've made the seventh one the other day and we're doing three versions of him and his referee case Wow which we can't reconstructing at the moment Wow so yeah lots of hands will go through there and it's a really I mean obviously because it has to do that it's clearly a super robust more that's easily yeah it's a polyurethane was on the malla medium power deputies you can withstand temperature and obviously we're clamping it yeah injecting into it it's a talked a little bit about the cloak on the back this cloak is all wired like and I got one here for being sort of refurbs and it has a metal plate in here so this is this classic thing where you have to talk to your touch the armature guy I'm trying to figure out this problem because this this is super thin yeah there's a little plate in here so that enables what we designed here and enabled us to sort of almost just move the cloak around a little bit without having to talk much of the wires there's no wires in here and they're just held under tension when they're in place into the collar like so that's such a lovely solution and it's so another thing if I can do it rights with all these heads if the Chunkin heads off there's a button just in here oh that's a new is that a new development yeah it kind of yeah quite new because noise so sliding kns and things like that mm-hmm just popping those in and that makes it even easier to pull out yeah sometimes the animators like to fill in the little hinge because they just like to slide in and out you were really did mention how little they want to move the puppet Wow but a lot of the characters now have all these fancy little neck making but pop that down there and I bring up the Queen I only found this out today because I've never I didn't work on the Queen I bring her down there you press on this middle section here no way on them and then her head should come up by that she's going like I said these are already done a cup here so you've got to remember to press the right one otherwise you're gonna snap the right yeah so that if you can see in there yeah alters the suss designed by eight and the guys downstairs that's that's you guys having too much fun yeah okay I have a question about Knuth here does the jewel on his medallion flashing in desirable or under several ways what he's being animated it doesn't know it's not sort of back lift or anything like that it's just literally the lighting that they moon what they use on it so I think it just some really nice effects but it's just a it's a gorgeous very little jewel here Wow and you're casting this so yes so that what's going on here I can quickly show you this this is the mold for the for his for the neck collar so there's a high sort of hard there's hard molds this is sort of what we call fast Castle this is polyurethane again in the back here oh but the neck ring is so it is soft yes so that piece gets bolted in right and then we'll I'll just sort of literally just inject again that won't give us the collar well you're doing cold morning yeah it should have just literally just yeah pushing it through Wow with silicon and then once that's done I've done some chains and I sort of will stick it on here yeah and then I'll stick on the medallion there it's bolted down into the middle of oh look at that great super modular and within there there's actually you feel this a lot there's a hard core yeah so that was designed like I said with Kevin really early on to make sure that collar fitted in exactly the right place I see so I can just mix we go in pop that off replace the collar Wow and then leg marks so the armature this is actually bolted to the bottom this is the second half here so these again are designed to go upside down right as you inject through the top mm-hmm and the risers come out by the foot pass ah this has obviously been painted this is just for display purposes so and this is what it looks like inside there is some type of armature like we are sitting with inside there and you've bolted it from the bottom so that the rub when you cast the rubber in it casts around it yes Wow what happens if you have to tighten up one of the joints after it happened morbid yeah so when the puppets finished you have to sort of very carefully to make tiny slits where the joint heads will the bolt heads are I should say so that's a little bit like I've just made this beautiful popular sometimes you can leave it but you've just every animator requires different tension so your job is it's not just to make these models they'll be coming in and out in dept all the time right Jimmy I need your attention this leg I need him to walk his arms a bit loose can you loose enough can you tighten it up so that's we're constantly doing around trying to obviously finish up our house as well another development that's done in house is the mouth plate system in previous films and whatnot yeah obviously passing gets very hot and so they can distort quite easily you know you the classic taking on and off their mouth shapes mm-hmm and now if I just pull this one off hopefully they never distort this mouth shape Ashley there we go destroying his mouth so look on the back there it's done with a certain curvature and we got a top tooth with the top teeth slider mm-hmm and then you can see there that will slide on and off the plates like so there's a little yes and then this has been engineered here so it's a positive mechanical you know just sort of click onto there so basically I'm just taking that stuff off and I'm gonna slide that one in on there and then the animator then sort of address that in for every different moves a change of the mouth so will then sort of pull that off or carry on mother I have a question about the you have color-matched plasticine that's plus silicon yeah yes that's an astounding I imagine that's non-trivial no it's very hard there's a few people to do it here and one that one of the chaps called J does it has a big part in that so for instance now this is obviously silicon mm-hmm no explaining about the heat right onto the floor and yeah this type of look it's really what Nick likes the sort of real funny that it's it looks like you've got your fingers yeah exactly so these are all silicone and they're silicone for a reason because if we were to make these all in plasticine it would take us an awful long time to get the film finished now there are shots where Anne animates will require a plasticine hand when he's holding stuff yes yeah so we can use the same molds oh just a bigger molds here so we can use the same molds and then it matches perfect yeah so that J will then sort of match the colors as you can see this is silicon this is plasticine you know we have a slightly different tone for the nose but it's it's a very complicated process and it takes a long time yeah her bet and I also noticed that a lot of these characters have actual hair yes now let's see if I can pull her hair off here there we go so you can see there's a like a polyurethane do skullcap with a little area in the magnet registration and then all the hair will be sort of dressed in glued well unlike Shawn where we just sort of use PVA mortar this is to feed the hair yeah cuz it works or to make the hair nice and stiff and we're using like another polyurethane so they can move just a little just a tiny bit over Nick likes an element of that moving around but we're trying to keep it to a minimum minimal Wow amount this is is this the first time you guys have had so much hair yeah yes it's pretty crazy really nice little story about this fella in terms of when they were trying to get the look yeah when so during this whole process that I've been talking about work back and forth with Nick all the time so we'll seen it maybe once or twice a week he's a very busy man he's also got other things to do yeah so we're trying to make judgment calls of what he likes we then will then show Nick hey mate what do you think about this hmm so when they first did this originally I think it was done in chamois leather yeah and it was anyway we really love the look yeah but the promise of chamois leather it doesn't move as well for animation so then they had to mole the sculpt texture its mold it foam it's and then paint it up so we look like chamois leather yeah yeah all those so that's what this is yes it's just a sore thumb cause until look because it looks exactly like yeah Wow but it also gives it a better scale yeah when you mold it like that and then during this whole mouth development phase here we're trying to speed up some of the processes nonlin is making a single mold for a mouth shape or a bat place I should say in the top teeth yeah we're trying to sort of figure a quicker way out and sort of streamline that process so that was sort of developed in-house really early on sort of on farmers on sort of Shaun the Sheep man and that's and pirates even and that sort of progressed further and further down the line and sort of been refined even more so we have what these we call it carousel molds oh oh oh and I've got a really cute one to show you over there so these are top teeth Phaneuf mm-hmm I was just showing you earlier these ah take that out so these are what we call gravity-fed so they look a little bit like centrifugal but they don't get fun you just pour the better engine yeah and then pull the resin in and it just and it makes you 12 pairs or something so these like will sit in oh look at that and each one is exactly registered and can be replaced by any other yes so we'll make a set of masters they'll get molded first of all and there's some really there's a really cute one here one of our guys for salmon made and these are actually for the men such birds top of his nose oh that's probably the smallest carousel ma yeah it's been made here but in this I mean this is so much more efficient than doing one or two at a time yeah because you have so many dozens to make yeah yeah that's incredible and I this is yeah I'm just days to get refined and refined and they become smaller and smaller a chap called Nigel here we've been working with closely we're doing these molds you came up with a new technique which was based on doing the plaster rosettes in the ceiling by making a profile curve and then you can just sort of make the layout that much quicker yeah yeah so everyone saw that you know everyone sort of you know we're working really closely with each other and coming up with new ideas and really pushing that so you guys okay it would continue to keep refining at the process so that you can make efficiencies yes something like this would normally like in the old days maybe five days to layout we were taking it down to like two and a half days two days right right right really push it through much much quicker yeah Wow you know when I see the scope of what you have done it doesn't sound like two or three years is enough time to make 15 some odd versions of every single character it's amazing what you guys are able to do yeah I mean once once the first main characters in made is finished what we call a prototype character Nick we'll take a look at it he'll approve it you'll go out to the animation team onto the floor and they'll start doing jumps stretches and moving around tests enemies just test animation just make sure everything's working okay because sometimes you can from a call to puppet and take it out and go it's not twisting right there's something that's not working here hopefully in conversations that you've had previous with the animation team yeah yeah find all those out but it still happens once that gets a prequel animation Department so when we start making multiples so that's when we start making seven or maybe sixteen of the same character and that will be scheduled out during the course of the film we won't make seven all at once right right right so we're gonna make two nerves and then what I would have go on to make something completely different another character and then come back to the neuf so it gets made out over sort of but the requirements on you guys are intense because news has to match seam to seam to seam to seam maybe uh three or four different sets of yeah and it's the a and I'll see these puppies age as well you know you could be out one Knuth could be out shooting for two months and you just have to keep on top of the maintenance to make sure he looks pristine and it's nice that's when you then sort of slide in number two so that they don't pop there's no some color exactly yeah Wow as we're talking about all these puppets I'd like to talk about the elephant in the room or as you guys might refer to it the water buffalo on the table this is by far the largest puppet on this table Wow I hope he's really light it's quite light his name Wow so during the whole process of making all these main characters we'll have what we call special characters that come up yeah things that were only in front of camera maybe for a couple of seconds or a few frames and this is the champ so he's obviously coming through camera pulling a carts yeah people on Academy remember precisely some of the lovely ladies here called Gina had made this with Nigel oh look at the underside it's so simple yeah so it's just put blue foam and a bed of plywood and they get stressed in these will all have to be sculpted and molded and dressed in with the fur and then actually the I think if I'm right so a little bit dental nobody that's actually plasticine knows they're oh so he's obviously come long as snorting as easy as it's going through shots why it is but it is I think his head moves as well this is all silicon with a little bit of leather work here as well so these are great to do because you've only got some times the time cuz there's a lot of time constraints then you've got over get out reasonably quickly what I would imagine with the super engineering time constraints of the hero characters one off like this is a real this this is all up a few weeks and these are sort of maybe 12 to 14 weeks depending on yeah and how complicated today are he's lovely as beautiful as me obviously big eyes as well that we will make in-house so great Jimmy I it's just astounding the level of precision and yet also an organic character you're able to keep in these in these characters it's incredible yeah this is not a water buffalo it's a musk ox I think there we go that was weird that's awesome well done\n"