I’m an independent filmmaker and puppeteer in Toronto, Canada who blogs about puppetry and film.
This three part installment of Steve Johnson's Rubber Rules series on YouTube (see previous post) offer a behind-the-scenes glimpse at the creation of one of the most iconic puppet characters of the 1980s -...
This is a brief interview with British puppeteer Toby Philpott discussing his work on Who Framed Roger Rabbit, a film that most people don't realize required a team of puppeteers to...
Me and My Monsters is a new live action series about a family who relocates from Australia to the UK only to discover there are monsters living in their basement....
This is a demo reel for Steve Johnson's EdgeFX, one of the leading practical FX companies in Hollywood....
Geico - famous for it's long-running ad campaign featuring a talking gecko - has been busy adding new animals to its menagerie, including woodchucks, an octopus and a pig (above)....
In this video installment of the Henson.com Podcast from earlier this year, the Creature Shop's Head of Puppet Fabrication, Julie Zobel, explains the process of restoring several Skeksis...
Cats and Dogs: The Revenge of Kitty Galore was mostly panned by critics and got buried at the weekend box office, but it features some of the most sophisticated animatronic puppetry ever seen on film and for that reason alone I think it's worth checking...
Over at the ASIFA-Hollywood Animation Archive, Stephen Worth has a short post about animating robots. Stephen mentions how the job description of an animator is rapidly changing and muses about the possibility of animators being hired to “animate” robots, which sounds suspiciously similar to what a puppeteer does. Although robots and automata aren’t generally considered...
Zerks’ Log chronicles the voyage of a doomed spaceship Venturi 553. Zerks’ Log is one of the most impressive puppetry web series I’ve seen. It’s an 18 episode series (the season is currently 11 episodes in) about Captain Zerks Ganymedewski and his ship the Venturi 553, which disappeared without a trace. The story is told...
Kanye West’s recent Glow In The Dark tour featured a giant animatronic creature built by Jim Henson’s Creature Shop. Remember that big animatronic puppet that Jim Henson’s Creature Shop was building for Kanye West last year? Well, Sean – who along with his brother Patrick was part of the team that built the monster –...
A series of skateboards provide the first look at the monsters of Where The Wild Things Are. The film adaptation of Where The Wild Things Are (see previous post) has been hotly anticipated for a long time. The film’s original teaser was released back in 2000 and the movie’s troubled production history has been widely...
Mark Hamill reminisces about working with Yoda in this clip from the documentary Legends of Film and Fantasy. Here is Luke Skywalker himself, Mark Hamill, talking about the difficulties of working with small green animatronic puppets that have exceptionally high midi-chlorian counts. It’s a five minute clip from an upcoming documentary called Legends of Film...