PUPPETS COOL

Simple but effective finger puppetry. The behind-the-scenes at the shoot must have been hilarious.

Great mechanism. I love it when people get away from having cranes or earth-movers as puppet mechanisms.

Of course, I disagree with the negativity of the headline, and applaud the makers for taking steps to jump over the Uncanny Valley! ...but the tech would be great to use to make a truly scary Halloween automaton.

La marioneta gigante, Amal, atravesará ocho países desde la frontera turco-siria hasta Manchester, en Reino Unido. El proyecto The Walk, de la compañía de teatro británica Good Chance, busca llamar la atención sobre los refugiados.

On this day in 2004 TEAM AMERICA: WORLD POLICE was released! When you see Arec Barrwin, you will see the true ugriness of human nature. -Kim Jong II... It all started with the 1960’s puppet show THUNDERBIRDS Matt Stone and Trey Parker were not fans of the show growing up, but when they rediscovered it as adults they quickly recognized its comedic potential. Shortly after that, they read about the sale of the script for the disaster movie The Day After Tomorrow. "And we were like, 'That's genius. That would be the best puppet movie ever made,'" Parker and Stone thought the script to the 1997 blockbuster Armageddon about the oil rig team that saves the world was hilariously bad and wanted to shoot a word-for-word version using puppets. They developed the concept for Team America: World Police after legal issues with the studios that owned Armageddon and Day After Tomorrow shut those ideas down. The film's central concept was easier to conceive than to execute. Paramount immediately greenlighted the idea of making a puppet movie, in the mistaken belief that it would be cheaper than a live action film. Team America was produced using a crew of about 200 people daily while shooting, it was a huge undertaking by all departments. The sheer scope and detail of this film is jaw dropping and easily overlooked because they sell it so well. hopefully next time you watch it you’ll appreciate it a little more after reading this long ass post. For some specific movements the each puppet would require up to four people at a time to manipulate a marionette. The Directors were forced to constantly rewrite the film during production due to the limited nature of the puppets. The 270 puppet characters were created by the Chiodo Brothers, who previously designed puppets for films such as Critters, Elf and Dinosaur. A billboard in the Times Square set reads "Chiodo: You Go Now." The costumers of the crew were responsible for making sure the over 1,000 costumes remained in cohesive order and were realistic. Creating the 270 different puppets used in the film wasn’t just an incredibly arduous process, but an expensive one, too. Just building the tiny Uzi used by Team America members cost $1,000, and the production quickly stacked up a $32 million price tag not as pricey as a Michael Bay film, but expensive for a puppet show. All of the male puppet heads consist of nine different servo motors that control the various facial expressions/actions, while the female heads consist of seven in the head and two in the back. All of the puppets in the movie used the same two bodies (one for the males and one for the females) with different heads- except for Kim Jong Il, to make him look that much smaller. In order to create the Team America world, Stone and Parker brought in architect David Rockwelldesigner of the Dolby (formerly Kodak) Theatre, several W Hotels, and the Nobu restaurantsas a visual consultant, as well as production designer Jim Dultz (Muppets Tonight). The movie was filmed in a Culver City, California warehouse. Over 100 sets were built for the film. After shooting the very first scene, Stone and Parker realized the jokes were not working, and that the humor instead came from the marionettes. "Puppets doing jokes is not funny," Stone found. "But when you see puppets doing melodrama, spitting up blood, that's funny." Filming was done by three units shooting different parts at the same time. Occasionally, the crews had up to five cameras set up to capture the scene. The film was mainly based on the 1982 cult classic action film Megaforce, of which Parker and Stone had been fans. Many ideas had been copied such as the flying motorcycle sequence. Marc Shaiman composed songs and a score for the movie, but the score was rejected by Paramount execs about three and a half weeks before the movie was released. Harry Gregson-Williams was hired to rewrite the score and compose it at the 11th hour. Shaiman's songs, however, still remain in the finished film. According to Parker and Stone, Oscar-winning composer Hans Zimmerwho has scored a number of action movies over the past several decades, including many of Jerry Bruckheimer's filmssaid he hoped Team America would put the stake through the heart of this genre. Bill Pope agreed to be the movie's director of photography because he was looking for "something completely different" from his previous three movies, The Matrix Reloaded (2003), The Matrix Revolutions (2003), and Spider-Man 2 (2004), all of which contained large portions filmed in front of blue/green screens. Pope was thrilled to work on the film. He said it was "like shooting a regular movie, except I'm 18ft tall." The fight between Chris and Samuel L. Jackson parodies The Matrix, which Pope also shot. As a subtle detail in the opening scene in Paris, the streets are paved with croissants. Household objects were used as props in order to, according to Trey Parker and Matt Stone, remind the audience the actual size of the puppets. A pair of nail clippers can be seen on a Team America's utility belt in their first scene; in Cairo, a citizen is carrying a basket of Goldfish snacks on his head; and a set of palm trees have leaves made out of dollar bills. The statue in Jong-Il Kim's palace is actually a human in heavy makeup. In the first scene in which he appears, you can see his eyes blinking. The leaves on the palm trees in Hollywood during the F.A.G. meeting are made out of dollar bills. The jungle foliage used for the Panama Canal terrorist attack were Cannabis plants. When the camera first shows us the palace in North Korea, several of the smaller buildings are actually Chinese food take-out boxes. In the style of the Thunderbirds (1965) show which the movie is a spoof of, close up shots of hands were not puppet hands but rather real hands dressed up to look like puppet hands. In the overhead shot of Gary lying in the giant puddle of vomit, it is actually Trey Parker wearing a pair of fake legs so his proportions more closely match those of the marionettes. The "vomit" was a mixture of soup and beer. George Clooney was a driving force in getting Matt Stone and Trey Parker's South Park (1997) to air. He also appeared in the show and the subsequent movie. As to their puppetry portrayal in Team America: World Police (2004), both he and Matt Damon are quoted as saying they would have been offended if they weren't in the film. Matt Damon wasn’t originally going to be mentally challenged. Trey and Matt hadn’t always planned on making Matt Damon a babbling dolt. They had initially planned to make the puppet version of him somewhat charming and intelligent, but when they saw how utterly stupid the puppet looked they decided to dumb him down. Unlike some of the other actors parodied in the film, Damon took the ribbing pretty well and told Reddit that he enjoyed the movie. I thought it was brilliant! I mean, I never understood it, and then I heard an interview with them and they said the puppet came in looking kind of mentally deficient and they didn’t have time to change it, so they just made me someone who could really only say his own name. All the comedy they’re doing is really next-level stuff. One celeb who wasn’t a fan of Team America: World Police was Sean Penn. Penn was totally pissed off about the movie. He actually wrote an angry letter to Parker and Stone about their suggestion that it’s ok not to vote. The letter was signed with a sincere fuck you, Sean Penn. When the Film Actors Guild decides to go to North Korea, the members all shout "Qapla!" which is Klingon for success. The very first footage screened for Paramount executives was of a poorly crafted puppet in front of a background of a badly drawn Eiffel Tower, prompting one executive in the audience to yell, "Oh God, they fucked us!" This was a prank pulled by the directors and the shot then pulls back to reveal a highly refined marionette manipulating the inferior one, then flies over beautifully detailed Parisian landscape full of believable yet cheesy marionettes. This actually ended up being the opening shot of the movie. Despite almost getting an NC-17 rating in the United States, the film was promoted as a "kids and family" movie in several European countries, and rated fit for all accordingly. Due to a puppet sex-scene, the movie was given a NC-17 Rating by the MPAA. The scene was edited nine times before they received the R rating they were shooting for. Trey Parker later admitted that the scene was originally added to distract the MPAA from the rest of the film's subject matter. On Matt Stone's urging, the scene was reinstated to the "unrated" DVD. The MPAA gave this film an R rating, accompanied with the specific explanation "For graphic crude and sexual humor, violent images and strong language - all involving puppets." Several references to Star Wars (1977) are made in the film, including a recreation of the Mos Eisely cantina scene when Gary walks into the Cairo bar, and the assault on the Death Star when Team America is engaged in an airborne dogfight with the North Koreans. In the song "America, Fuck Yeah", the word "fuck" is used 37 times. Rather than rely on computer-generated special effects added in post-production, the filmmakers vied to capture every stunt live on film. Parker likened each shot to a complicated math problem. The late September 2004 deadline for the film's completion took a toll on both filmmakers, as did various difficulties in working with puppets, with Stone, who described the film as "the worst time of [my] life," resorting to coffee to work 20-hour days, and sleeping pills to go to bed. The film was barely completed in time for its October 15 release date. At a press junket in Los Angeles on October 5, journalists were only shown a 20-minute reel of highlights because there was no finished print. Many of the film's producers had not seen the entire film with the sound mix until the premiere. Matt Stone vowed never to make another puppet film with partner Trey Parker, such was the stresses and strains of working with him. The two worked together 17 hours a day, seven days a week up until three days before the film actually opened. Parker said that if someone threatened to kill his family, he still wouldn’t make another puppet movie. Parker and Stone are currently writing the movie adaptation to their hit musical The Book of Mormon. (Wiki/IMDb) Some photos via modelwerks Would you like to know more? Join the crew https://www.facebook.com/groups/crewstories/?ref=share

Here’s a very short movie that I made, using a rod puppet that I built from an artist’s mannequin. Feel free to share this. https://click.email.vimeo.com/u/