How Animators Created Oscar-Winning Stop Motion In Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio | Vanity Fair

you always hope of course that nobody is thinking about what's going on inside the code there's all of these ball and socket joints and wires articulating it all of this is to really trick the viewer into believing that the puppet has got a weighted real code and that it's moving just how you would expect it to my name is Georgina Haynes I'm the puppet fabrication supervisor on Guillermo del Toros Pinocchio what I'm going to talk to you about today is how do you make puppets for a stop-motion animated film in design and concept it came

from this amazing illustrator Grizz grimly and you know in our version of the story when when Geppetto is actually creating him he's actually you know been drinking a little too much and so half of him is is almost perfectly carved and the other half is just sort of left half carved when he first comes into being Guillermo really wanted it to be a kind of frankenstein-esque sort of creation story so when you first see Pinocchio walking he doesn't know how to walk he's a wooden boy that's never walked before so he evolves as a character

and he becomes more humanistic in his characteristics but he never becomes human and he never wants to become a boy there was different puppet making groups that came together the two main groups was Shadow machine in Portland and McKinnon and Saunders in England um and McKinnon and Saunders had been working with 3D printed metal this back plate of the puppet is all 3D printed in metal all of the wood grain the nails on the back that all comes out of the metal printer and then the internal sort of spine structure this is all for rigging

because Pinocchio is so active he's jumping he's flying he's doing all these crazy things he's dancing the rigging Department would use all of these Square sections and we'd have separate sort of extra plates that we could put on with a hole on the side and then from that we made Metal Armature parts for the arms and the legs and the feet which then had Boulder socket joints or 3D printed joints so all of his sort of shoulder and hip joints which were actually it part of his design we used again the 3D metal printing technique

to create this perfectly engineered kind of like ball and socket joint that didn't look like one of our standard ball and socket joints we use for puppets but looks like the design of Pinocchio most of the characters in our movie we most the human characters we use silicon and Tiny head mechanics to articulate their heads but with Pinocchio because he's a wooden boy and because he's got wood grain and we actually did an early test and the Silicon looked like rubber it didn't read as wood at all you got the detail of the wood grain

but it just the minute it moved it didn't read as wood so we decided to do him and he's like the only full replacement um puppet on the show one which belonged to a very special boy Carlo replacement animation is where you're literally moving the mouth shapes and the eyes frame by frame by taking masks off so each mask has a different shaped mouth than eyes so we 3D printed all of these masks so you model the face in the computer and you you then animate you you sort of meld that face into the shapes

you want and then you print it out I think that's what makes him really believable as a wooden boy next to all these human characters when we're doing replacement faces we generally cut the face in half so that we can get eyebrow expression and mouse expression in separate parts and then we'll we'll just erase the line with a computer afterwards but our our little Pinocchio has got wood grain Crossing where that line would go and he hasn't really got eyes you know the design of him is the eyes are a negative they're actually tiny little

holes we were just racking our brains how are we going to give him eye expression as well as mouth expression without having to print thousands and thousands of faces we noticed the original design on the face his eyes essentially are held within wooden knots so the knot that you would get when you when you cut into some some wood we entered Guillermo and said well if we can kind of join the outer shape of the knot we could actually have those as another replacement part so rather than separating it from top to bottom as a

face and and having a straight line why don't we use the wood grain the wood grain of the knots and we ended up having replacement plug-in eyes with the replacement masks of the face and then of course the nose has to animate as well because his nose grows and turns into branches and things so that was another separate part I am not lion lion each of Pinocchio's noses has a square hole that is actually printed into the nose and the head core of Pinocchio has a square peg a metal square peg that is projecting out

at the front of the face so essentially it allowed us to literally slide any nose shape over this Steel Square Peg and that's what allowed us to replace the noses for the nose growing into the twig the nose growing into the tree you know sequins because it was a steel Square Peg and it was attached firmly into the core of the the head of the puppet it actually allowed for quite a lot of weight to to go onto that face before we had to then rig it from you know sort of externally rig the puppet

and then if you need to take the face plate off and change it with another expression again you have to take the nose off and then you literally take the hole face plate the eyes are separate plugins so they come out and then you slide a new face and the nose helps locate where that face is going to be and then you get whichever eyes go with that sequence and you plug your eyes in yemo's version of Pinocchio is very Geppetto heavy gimmer wanted him to be the most expressive of the human characters traditionally most

puppets that I myself has worked on have worked on and McKinnon and Saunders especially have worked on are more sort of humanoid head mechanic puppets so head mechanics is where you have a silicon skin that sits over what looks a little bit like a skull but instead of having muscles moving the skin there's tiny little articulated ball and socket joints and gears so the strings sometimes that are cast into the corners of the mouths which are then sort of they go into the head into a little gear system which has cranks and Allen key accesses

through the ear we were really lucky with him that he has a beard and a mustache and he's older so when you're sculpting characters like that and you've got creases already embedded into the structure of the face that helps silicon skin sort of crease in the right place but underneath his underneath his his skin is this elaborate sort of like collection of lip paddles so he's got four lip paddles in that sit into his mustache cash so he has two outer lip puddles that can move his mustache you know and sort of smile and frown

and then he has two inner lip paddles that can get get the ooh expression of the top lip and then on the bottom jaw he's got again four lip paddles that sit in the bottom lip once you've got the skin sitting over the mechanics and you've got the articulation of the face working all of these characters have some kind of hair whether it be facial hair or whether it be you know sort of hair on their head or wigs or whatever so we decided it was going to be a hybrid between sculpted hair and then

fine strands of um like a mohair I don't have time or patience enough to explain that to you I think the most challenging part of all of the characters across the board was the eyes it's not just solely the eyes it's the way that the eyes interact with the eyebrows we wanted the eyeballs themselves to have dead to feel Almost Human we made most of our eyeballs with rapid prototype 3D printed core which we then put an iris pupil graphic on and then drop the whole thing into a mold and embedded it in clear resin

to get the lens quality so this is the scary sharp tool that the animators would go in with to animate and move the eyes so each movement of the puppy each frame that the animator is going to take they're moving the eye ball and the pupil and the iris literally sort of a couple of millimeters and you know an eighth of an inch at a time and then they're also having to go in and move the blinks so I'm moving the lower blink here and each movement take a frame of film then move the eye

blink down take a frame of film only day that our cacophonous Carnival will all our puppets of course have a wardrobe have costumes so with a character like count Volpe that has this long flowing coat with all the Fabrics we have to think about the scale of the weave and you know what is the fabric that's going to sort of cheat the human eye so that you believe with count Volpe he's wearing a Tweed coat you can see here if I move his coat without intention it Springs back and that's because it has wires which

are laced into it all the way around the outside they also link into the sort of the the body of the puppet so we call it grounding those wires so that the wires have something to move from and this is really how the animator frame by frame gets that feel of flow of fabrics as Ice Age you were charged with a terrible burden we wanted these puppets to be practical stop-motion puppets so we figured out the scale of how large can we make the creatures so that an animator can actually still move them frame by

frame the nice thing with Guillermo's designs for his creatures is that they're stylized there's a lot going on but they are quite stylized so we were able to sculpt all of the Wings on the front surfaces and then on the back surfaces we actually chose a a fur fabric we found which was almost scale-like that was inspired by the bark that we were using as well it was early days that some tests with cardboard sort of layering of cardboard were done for bark and shingles and things like that and they were very inspiring to how

we ended up doing the scales um and the the fur and the feathers on the creatures what was lovely about the dogfish is when we made her she was perfect for foam latex so foam latex is something that we often just use on the inside of a puppet and we don't use it for skin anymore because it has a wrinkly quality it turns out when you're making a dog fish for Pinocchio that wrinkly quality is perfect what we're able to do when we were building the creatures is embrace all of the sort of the the

techniques that we'd learned throughout our careers and use the best technique depending on which which creature we were working on it was about making these creatures as believable and as lightweight and as animatable as possible so we really did pull all of our knowledge together on those and they were fun they were they were super fun to make you will stay here with me a little longer each time you cross until the end of time [Music]