but it's still a bit stylized and simplified, I think so that we don't have something become sort of miniaturized and Dalhousie that's definitely something that you could probably speak to. Yeah, it's a good point. And it's something that we've tried to be very careful of over the course of many years as this takes place is to not drift into realism. It's, it tends to be all of our sort of default comfort comfort zones. That's just what we know. So, honoring the style and staying true to the style throughout the duration of the show, while also gathering artists from many different backgrounds who also have their own sort of default version of reality. We study the characters, we keep their pictures at our work desk so that we're always reminded of the choices that were made about simplification. stylization. And that helps us build the world sorry, there's just a blank here.
Next up, we have cricket, which was one of our more fantastical characters, but we tried bringing in some real cricket and anatomy the two profiles of how he would stand and walk and simplified like Pinocchio to his expressions be in his eyes and his mouth.
Yeah, Cricket was a really great character for us to be mindful of in terms of the simplified shapes and forms but then also juxtaposed with a really complex paint job. So when it came to creating the prop sets that Cricut was going to interact with we, we took advantage of that and we thought let's let's keep some of the forms. Simple, but we can lean into a beautiful surface. There. I think some of the choices that we made in terms of paint, and again, I think George will maybe speak to this, although we're not really talking about puppet but you know, because you see it and close up and you see it for long periods of time. You want it to be interesting enough that people don't get sick of looking at it. And see something new depending on the lighting or how it's reacting. So it is something that I think you want to put as much detail in there without going overboard and getting creepy. You know, I think there's a fine line there to keep it interesting.
And the opposite, I think of Geppetto would be Voltaire, who was a lot more of a caricature. And this is a started from a hui concept that we tried refining a little bit as it went pulling back a little bit of the extreme caricature, something to make a fox, but still, I think probably are for this caricature going in.
Yeah, it's definitely on the far side as well. And I think it's a great instance where we sort of helped design something that helped the film evolve. Originally, Fox forebay was a minor character and they were sort of helping Luer Pinocchio into the carnival. And at a certain point, we realized that this character was sort of more interesting and actually Jericho came into well was at the end of a meeting, actually, was like, I've been thinking, I think we need to make him the head of the Carnival as opposed to magic bucho. And so it definitely sort of gave us a different thing to focus on. But I think that also really was a great choice at the moment and shook things up and we really sort of embraced that in a new way. The other thing that then was interesting is because the character slightly evolved, he would have, he wouldn't just be in his coat. And so we ended up having to design the rest of the costume and look at what he looked like without the codon. And then there's also a practical consideration of the head mechanics, which again, George will speak about in a little bit, how the expressions are formed with the head. There's a limit to how small votes can be and so the face on the left hand image that we're looking at, is slightly smaller and we had to grow the head in order to accommodate the mechanics but then also ended up having to grow the body proportionally so that the head would look super large, like a bobble head on a smaller body. So this was one that, again, landed in design relatively quickly and easily. But then some of the practical considerations of all the artists touched it. were things that we really had to sort of fine tune. Yeah, and it was so valuable for us in the art department to have this character be part of the lineup it it helped us solve so many secondary choices for the settings that we needed. You know, there's so much here about texture and color that we echoed in the carnival that will pay is leading so choices about his name draped on his public stage or the palette of like his red, his orange. We tried to let those things inform the world that he was. Yeah, it definitely helped establish the color palette for the carnival in general.
We've had Spezza Tara who started off as a very, I think, you know, not two dimensional but he was a very sort of angry screaming monkey and he evolved to having a lot more of a character and emotion that we wanted to come through, you know, so the design was, you know, he's a he's a screen monkey who can also emote sadness and happiness and care. And a specific detail actually influenced a lot more of the film than than we had expected. And I know Rob You can explain more on that.
Yeah, we're gonna we're gonna hop to the slide in a minute, but before we go there, this will likely be a part of Georgina's presentation as well. But the thing I want to bring up I think reflects upon what Mark and Guillermo were talking about earlier about how things can be really oddly simpatico sometimes we all gravitate towards something. And so that was the case with some samples that we got back for suppositories costume, and Mackinnon and Saunders sent us a board with many different swatches of how they can handle the shorts for choices for textile, applied painters and stitched things like that. And we all unanimously gravitated towards one swatch like the minute we unpacked at Mark. I think Aaron was does it was like the very next day, Guillermo Georgina her were always like, that's it. And that actually gave us a lot of confidence. I haven't had a lot of really there's a lot of trust early on as a result of us realizing that we kind of are on the same page about things. So the point of the next slide is the conversation that happened after that. This is more of a document that we use internally as part of our style guide. But it was the very first page that we made, and these are our commandments as opposed to Yeah, aside from the one at the bottom, which is in quotes, it says perfectly imperfect, you know, we took that that cue from Guillermo and Mark about how we were going to construct the world, not unlike the performance notes that BMO gave for animation. But then we thought we need to talk about why maybe there's something here that can apply to more things. Why did we love those shorts so much? Why did we all gravitate towards them? And so we talked about that and thought this could inform other things. We can take the bullet points and say, well, we like blinds that aren't exactly parallel. We like blinds that taper ever so slightly. We can apply this to things like a stand of trees in a forest, for example. So letting, letting things that evolved and became popular get traction to inform other things. was something we tried to do as often as possible. Yeah, and that starts from something that is literally two inches square, in this case, something that we just all loved and you don't know how much influence that has had over the film. Really. It's pretty spectacular. Yeah, and when you're world building from scratch, there's just so many choices that you need to make. It's a temptation to get caught up on some of them can derail you and I think sometimes just taking taking things when they're presented to you and running with them to see how far you can use it as a strategy. And it also gives us pretty beautiful results
and here we have a look at like Geppetto his workshop and his workbench and kind of a bit of the progress of how that evolved to large illustration was from Rustin Hasselhoff, which was a little too whimsical for the like environment we wanted. And we wanted more utilitarian sense to it. So that eventually evolved throughout it.
And we kept some of the decoration here some of the things that really gave the space the essence of wood carving, as you can see in some of the other frames on this page. But we did dial back the overall decoration we knew this needed to play in a different decades. We were going to use this location to tell the passage of time so and so the decoration became less self conscious, maybe like we had little places where he would carve on his workbench, not necessarily as decoration, but as something that would just sort of fill in the world if you will.
The next one is the overview of the town and this is where we started off with a lot more realistic, I would say in proportion and scope for like the environments. But
I think early on it was definitely a little bit more grounded in World War One and how the town influenced it and so, you know, as as the story sort of found its way, we definitely started to give it a little bit of a second look, if you will. And so this is a piece of art then from Jesse Greg who work here with us in Portland, and sort of refining it to more of how we see it in the shot and sort of this becomes a blueprint board for how it's built. I think, on our end almost. Yeah. This next one, this this one kind of this came about kind of mid show and I think we even began this built during the work from home phase, pandemic. So a lot of artists started tinkering with these flat, compressed perspective. Buildings in their garages and basements kind of cereal boxes here. If I remember correctly handmade charm again maganda detail informed the village as well as the prompts.
And that's the thing is that like the environment needed to match the character and city and to have that that not, you know, so realistic that it was the characters felt out of place within the environment. And also we didn't want anything that was so fanciful or whimsical that the buildings were crooked, or like, you know, designed to like you know, in a fantasy way. It's more just a caricature to everything.
Yeah, and it feels like a place you know, the foundations may have settled a little so it's not walking in whimsical but you know, those on those on parallel lines that we saw on the pants, I think even informed the way we would set buildings next to one another.
And things got huge. I mean I would say the Carnival was our largest set that started out from this, this design overview and then it became a set within a set when we placed it in the ruins. But all the details were pretty much here from the early sketch by Ross Anhui.
Yeah, I think three things to sort of just note is on the far left in the corner, there's sort of a generator. On the far right, there's bull baits, living wagon and the signs in front of a manager photo. So again, sort of as the story evolves, and sort of as we start to decide what we really need to focus in we we definitely want to keep this sketch in mind and honor it. But we do take a second, more thorough look at things and again, it sort of serves as a thing that we can use as a touchstone. And so here's an additional version of those that we did here and then used as a blueprint, if you will, to build things. And the wonderful thing about these evolutions of the original artists, the story evolved a bit and so we needed to tell the story of a carnival that had fallen our times had been weather maybe didn't age well had been set up and packed away and moved hundreds of times. And so I think that might be one of the sort of closer sharper pencils we might have put on at once we have the wide concept art which is so valuable, and we go in and try to reinforce the story in the sense of props. For instance, the large carnival graphics, the characters that we featured, some of them are the ones that we designed early on, but then really couldn't afford to build and keep in our budget cuts. And so the snake lady, for instance, appears or has a second life, if you will, in our world, and there's a lot of soft goods in the carnival and so we were able to make sure that the fabrics and things we were choosing were copacetic with the choices that were made in costume department.
But this was just a small look at some of the designs and process that went into it but it was a amazing collaboration with hundreds of people and different departments and teams that really put love and care into making everything a reality and bringing it to life. And it was an incredible project to be part of
that goes out Exactly, yes. Many hands, many hands touch it on. Yeah. You wouldn't know that this wasn't a live action set just looking at this frame for sure. Thanks, everyone. Very much. Thanks, guys. I think we're gonna hear next from head of character fabrication Georgina Hines.
Hi everybody hi here as I was just introduced, my name is Georgina Haynes. And I was the head of character fabrication in Portland for Yeah, so this amazing project. As you can see on the screen there, it's not all down to one person we have an amazing crew of artists and crafts people involved in making the puppets on these movies. I love this image because it says a lot about the people I work with every day. This was Halloween pre pandemic where we were all allowed to take on masks or outside just to show how eccentric we all are. But you know it takes it's a collaborative process to make the puppets for these movies. We make hundreds of puppets to fill the world. And you know, I wanted to I wanted you to sort of see some of those people before we go into the process behind it. So now that my part in the movie started, before I hired the crew, I was lucky enough to be in the early conversations with the design team Rob and Curtin guy and was you know really trying to figure out what their what their sort of concepts for the film were going to be and what is the style of this movie? What is the performance from the pockets of this movie? And a very important part of this early days was the inclusion of another company in England, which Kevin had been talking with for a long time about this project Mackinnon and Saunders. So McKinnon Saunders, not only did I collaborate with them on this project, as CO heads of public publication, they are also my mentors and they trained me as a public maker. So it was actually them that got in touch with me about heading up the public department in Portland while they were heading up another department that was working alongside in Manchester, England, so not having the same technical issues to Kurt had. I'm gonna say yeah, I'm gonna, I'm gonna use my assistant here to move the slides. So one of the first meetings we had with Guillermo was, you know, some of the design work had already been done and we've got the original character lineup and we need a character lineup before we can start thinking about how we're going to make these puppets. With this character lineup, we just sat down and we just had a meeting with Guillermo talking about how do you want these puppets to emote? You know, there's different forms of facial animation techniques, generally the bodies of puppets in stop motion, kind of have a similar makeup. But with facial animation. There is replacement facial animation, there's mechanical facial animation, and there's claymation. So one of the things very early days that I've been drawn to McKinnon's over was that the art that they had taken to, you know, amazing levels throughout their career. We've had mechanics and he loved the organic quality of the head mechanics and, you know, seeing this character lineup in front of us both myself and Pete knee and McKenna Saunders, we all agree that the majority of these characters lend themselves to head mechanics. So head mechanics is you know it, I'm going to talk about it a little bit more in depth as we go through the slideshow, but basically, it's a little bit like a Swiss watch sitting underneath a silicone head skin, which allows the animator to manipulate frame by frame to get the facial performances. And I say a Swiss watch that is actually a multitude of tiny little ball and socket joints which articulate the skin. But yeah, so this is the character lineup. Once we got this, we're sort of everybody is on board. So all of curtain guys work and, you know, robbers. Well they've all had input onto these characters and Guillermo and Marcus signed off on them. We then it's all about how do we make these puppets can get to the next slide. Don't Can we have the next slide, please?
Oh, sorry. Yeah. So the first step before we go into into fabrication is there's another level and this touches on what both occurred and what we're talking about. We have these sketches but we're making these characters in a timeframe, you know that there's a time in history. We want to make sure that all of the costumes the textures that we put on these puppets, everything has an accuracy either historically or to scale. We want the you know, again, I mentioned it's we're making a live action movie, but on a miniature scale, we want the viewer to believe in these characters. So we do a lot of research. We do a lot into the historical accuracy of the of the details in the costume. So this is just one board for the circus so characters we look into details of real clothing that was maybe had some elements that connected it to the illustration of the character. So you can see as a tourist pants, these are the parts out there that were used in circus performing at that time period, which really did look like that. So we're trying to make sure that everything that we're making in the world is accurate to the time period scale. We'll go to the next slide. We're also you know, I think Rob touched on this a little bit and occurred getting how are we going to paint these characters you know, paint can really affect the scale of the puppets, if it's not to the right scale, on the skin tone, or on on the costumes. So we do a lot of research and we often looked at the great masters of fine art and for this for this show in particular we find ourselves being drawn to painters like Norman Rockwell and Andrew wires who have a kind of a realism was an abstract brushstroke. So they use a lot of stippling and they use a lot of sort of like quite abstract lines that when you step away from the canvas look like a photograph of a human but there but there's so much more depth there and knowing that we're going to be creating these characters on a tiny scale. We want to add that life into them and get to the next so I mentioned that it wasn't just Portland, I talked about the amazing team that we had, you've seen all the characters, but and I've talked about the fact that we worked alongside Mackinnon and Saunders in England. But there was another amazing element to this. We also joined forces with a team in Guadalajara, which was led by DMOS passion for his country, his animation sort of family over there. And we work closely with Telly did future which is studio that was set up just for this and a small team of puppet makers, filmmakers. The intention was they are going to make part of the movie so it was an exciting project. But usually you just usually just got the problems of making copies in just one studio. Now we've got them across all three countries. The amazing thing is it was all about collaboration and information. Next slide. So making the puppet we all know that we started with sorry, we're just passing over the clicker here. We start with the sign of character designs. On the left we've got one of our secondary characters which supports your sister which is a beautiful design. We all love this design. Center. We've all seen Pinocchio. And then on the right we've got the black rabbit. So these weak puppets on the left, we were making the butcher's destroy along with a lot of the other secondary characters, a couple of the hero characters and one of the creatures from the movie. In the middle you've got Pinocchio McKinnon's. Sort of first puppet was Pinocchio. But then they made most of the incredible puppets. The hero puppets like Geppetto and Volpe and Spezza Torah, and then the Guadalajara team they were able to send lay on this very talented puppet maker over to Mackinnon and Saunders and he started fabricating the black rabbits over in Manchester. My clicker still not working. Oh, yeah, there we go. So the the first step, one of the things you'll notice is that technology and Puppet makers don't usually go hand in hand even though we take technology and pop it to a higher level. So the first step for all of us is to realize those two dimensional images into three dimensional buckets. Sorry, dance not working. It's just like,
here we've got the butcher sister that was him in Portland because he couldn't myself there were sort of when we started these mechanics sculpts. There's lots of mechanics going on at the same time. And the cat for us is a working model. This is a discussion point. We want to get something into three dimension that we can review where the piano with Mark and make sure everybody's on board before we actually determine how we're going to make that puppet. In England, they were doing the moquette of Pinocchio, and you can see how close the final Pinocchio puppet came to looking exactly like dat moquette as I say it's a style guide. And on the right, you've got to Kashi who was one of their very highly skilled sculptors sculpting that MCATs as well at the same time, we've got Layon who had bought at this point arrived in Manchester. He is sculpting away on the MCATs for the black rabbits. And with the cats, you put the costumes and everything on them so that you can kind of see what that final character is going to be. And when you get to the public making part of it. It's about stripping all of that back. So the puppet build, each puppet build and not many people see this starts with it isn't the most important part of building a puppet. It's all about sharing information. And you know, we did zoom meetings we did Google Hangouts all over the world, making sure that we were all on the same page of how we were going to build a profit. And this on the right is one of the sketches. This is the Mandy afoco character and he was gonna be a hero character that was in a lot of the movie. So the proportions of that with a puppet can be quite extreme. So with with him. We did We did all of this working out, you know, you go down. It looks simple, but it's also there's a lot of sort of technical aspects that come into this sketch that we then all come together we make sure everybody who's going to be a part of the puppet build of that character sits down around a table or we all get on the same page before we then build the character. So as I say, we did that with all of the characters all over the three, three countries. Okay, my clicker is the first step of actually making that puppet is as I mentioned before stripping back everything. So you've got your moquette but you have to in the meeting that you have with your team, you have to figure out what is that how it what does it need to do? What is it going to wear? How are we going to costume it? How are we going to make the head for this? So we have to do a breakdown of all of those parts and strip everything off. And that's called the puppet sculpt. So here you're seeing one of our team in Portland doing the puppet sculpt at the same time. In England and Manchester. McKinnon saw this with doing this with Pinocchio. Now, Pinocchio, even though we had all decided we were going to do head mechanics for most of the puppets, because Pinocchio was a wooden boy, it we really quickly decided that silicone and sort of a stretching moving basic wouldn't really work for him. So we decided with this one character we would use like replacement faces. And we did use 3d printing for those faces. We also took Pinocchio to a new level in puppet making. Mackinnon and Saunders hadn't amazed hasn't had an amazing artists there Richard pickers girl who had worked a lot with different 3d printing techniques, and he decided he was going to give it a go to actually print in battle the whole Pinocchio's body and skeleton, which to date is the only property I know of that has been fully printed out of a 3d printer. So it's interesting we use sort of age or crafts or stop motion, but we're also with Pinocchio in particular, when it when it was going to be beneficial to the character and the performance. And we're going to use the technology that that's out there that we've had experienced with so this is Pinocchio reinstalled in the computer with the aid of the MCATs and then Leon was that McKinnon's as well. Liquor really isn't working. Okay. Layon was also sculpting the black rabbit. So you can see here, you have to separate separate the head, separate the ribcage and separate the legs so all the elements on the left that you're seeing are essentially going to be parts of the finished puppet. And on the right, that's him sculpting. So we've got all of these scopes. And it's not just one puppet that we're making of each character. We are making multiple topics. I'm having a real problem. This clicker. Yeah, it's gone, but it's very anyway. So because we know we're going to be making