I hadn’t heard of Titan The Robot until recently, but apparently he’s kind of a big deal.

I wonder who made him? I want one!

The Stan Winston School of Character Arts (SWS) is an online school devoted to special FX make-up and animatronics founded by veterans of the Stan Winston Studio (now known as Legacy Effects). Their subscription based service offers a wide range of downloadable video tutorials on almost every aspect of character effects imaginable, ranging from basic character sketching all the way to how to create fully realized movie monsters. Best of all, the videos have been created by some of the best artists and technicians in the business, many of whom were colleagues of Stan Winston himself.

To help promote their service, SWS has been regularly posting lots of rare and never-before-seen footage from Legacy Effect’s work, including this latest video of their crew rehearsing a leaping “attack” with animatronic and rod-controlled raptor puppets for The Lost World: Jurassic Park (I’ve previously posted behind-the-scenes video from the Jurassic Park trilogy here and here). You can find lots more great footage from the Legacy Effects archives in the Stan Winston School YouTube Channel.

If you’re interested in checking out full length tutorials from the SWS, now is a great time to start. This week only they are offering 30% off of all of their training videos. Just go to www.stanwinstonschool.com and use promo code 600K by Friday to get the special discount.

Jim Henson shows viewers around the Muppet Workshop in this 1989 segment for CBS This Morning.

In light of the recent flap over Michael Bay’s planned (CGI) “re-imagining” of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, it’s worth looking back to a simpler time – the early 1990s – when the turtles were teenage mutants and animatronic. This is a behind-the-scenes look at the animatronic control system for the green guys in their third cinematic outing, Teenage Mutant Ninjas Turtles III.

This system was built by All Effects Company and looks suspiciously (ahem) like it may have been “inspired” by a certain system designed by Jim Henson’s Creature Shop, but nevertheless it’s a cool to get such a detailed look at the state of the art in special effects before the dawn of the CG era.

Found via Tom.

From the Stan Winston School of Character Arts comes this nice behind-the-scenes look at the robots built by Legacy Effects for Real Steel.

Following up on last week’s footage of a T-Rex rehearsal, here’s another great behind-the-scenes look at the animatronic dinosaurs of Jurassic Park. This is test/rehearsal footage of a “running Raptor” for a scene that involves Téa Leoni being chased through the jungle in Juassic Park 3.

Via The Stan Winston School.

Some classic rehearsal footage from Jurassic Park…puppeteers from Stan Winston’s studio (now Legacy Effects) “warm up” with their life-sized Tyrannosaurus Rex animatronic puppet while working on Jurassic Park’s iconic “Main Road Attack” sequence.

I recently got a boxed set of all three Jurassic Park movies and watching them I was reminded of just how incredible the animatronics and puppetry in those films really is. Although the first Jurassic Park is generally regarded as a watershed effects movie because of its use of computer graphics, people often forget that there were only about 50 CG dinosaur shots in the entire movie. The rest of the film relied on Stan Winston and his talented team of artists and puppeteers to bring the film’s dinosaur stars to life.

It was and remains a remarkable feat of puppetry and engineering.

Via the Stan Winston School.

Star Wars is coming to Blu-ray on September 12th and as we’ve come to expect, it’s arriving with a few new tweaks from director George Lucas. The revisions have been met with the predictable outrage from many Star Wars fans and one of the most extensive is the replacement of the animatronic Yoda puppet in Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace with a new CGI version similar to what was seen in the rest of prequel trilogy.

Here you can compare the original puppet:

…with the new CGI version:

Personally, like Navneet Alang over at the Toronto Standard, I’m from the Billy Corgan school of art; if you’re going to make something for film/video, why not make it as good as possible? No disrespect to Nick Dudman (who led the redesign of Yoda for Episode I) or the rest of his team, but the Yoda puppet in The Phantom Menace looks, well, odd. By going back and replacing it, Lucas seems to be trying to correct a mistake and make the film more consistent with the rest of the prequel trilogy (something he’s done before).

So puppet or CGI Yoda? Which do you prefer?

Via /Film.

How To Train Your Dragon Live is a new $20 million arena show that opens next March in Melbourne and Sydney, Australia. It looks pretty incredible; all of the dragons in the show were created by the Creature Technology Company, which was previously responsible for the internationally touring arena show Walking With Dinosaurs (see previous post).

Here’s a behind-the-scenes look at how the animatronic dragons in the show are being created:

Videos via Kari and Cartoon Brew (lots more can be seen in CTC’s Vimeo profile).

This is clever ad for U.S. hamburger chain Carl’s Jr. about a robot who comes home to discover that he can’t eat their new chicken sandwich. Although you might assume an ad like this is done with CGI, it’s actually mostly puppetry. To achieve the effect Legacy Effects (see previous posts) built two versions of the robot; an animatronic puppet for close-ups and a full body suit version worn by a performer that was digitally augmented in post-production.

Here’s a look behind-the-scenes at the making of the commercial:

Special thanks to Dockery James for sending this in!