They went to great lengths to compose some of these shots. To puppeteer that, they basically built a merry-go-round with a platform about 4 or 5 feet off the ground so that they could have puppeteers control him to run around in a circle while somebody spun the whole thing around. They ended up building several pretty involved rigs–in one scene in the movie, Beaker gets shrunk down to about 5 inches tall, and we see him from above, running in a circle. For those head-to-toe scenes, the were shot on a blue-screen stage and composited into the shots later. It was quite an undertaking for the puppeteers to stay behind the puppet and get the right form of motion and everything. For those scenes, puppeteers were in the shots, because it sometimes took four puppeteers to make them walk and move their arms and their head. Ivins: For most of the project they were, but there were quite a few head-to-toe shots of the Muppets. PCW: Were the puppeteers always controlling the Muppets from underneath, or did it depend on the specific scene or Muppet? There are a couple of Muppets that appear in the arches shots that are blue…Īnd the puppeteers in blue suits, they’re not lit very well if they’re behind a character, so you have to do a lot of rotoscoping and luminance keying to fix those things. Gonzo has some blue feathers on his head, which was a nightmare, but other than that, blue isn’t in the Muppet palette very much. Characters with blue on them were less problematic to pull keys for, and there aren’t that many principal characters that had any blue on them at all. Did you need to use blue screens because Kermit the Frog is about the same color as a green screen?Ĭredit: Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures Ivins: Basically. It was amazing how long into the process we got before we found the last puppeteer head in the shot. So they might set up and think, “That’s good, no one sees my head,” but then another puppet moves during the shot, and boom, there’s their head. A big crowd of Muppets, and underneath that, a big crowd of puppeteers, all looking at a monitor to see how their Muppets are positioned. “Wait a minute, what’s that thing over here? That’s somebody’s head!” “Oh no, not another one.” Some of the shots, you’ve got like 15, 20 puppeteers crouching down, kneeling, lying on their backs, operating a big crowd of puppets … this giant crowd under the crowd. We didn’t leave any rods in on purpose–I’m sure there are rods that are visible, but you probably can’t tell if they’re rods or not.Ĭredit: Walt Disney Studios Motion PicturesI think two weeks before we were done, we were still finding puppeteers’ heads in shots. That’s one thing we did for the whole movie: Remove all the rods for the hands. But they didn’t want it to seem as if there was an extraordinary leap in technology, even though we definitely used that. All of it needed to feel tangible, even if it was obviously not “real.” It’s a puppet. There was sort of a conscious effort to remove the digital look from things. ![]() In a way, our job was to make it seem as if we were never present. We removed the puppeteers later, so it gave the puppeteers a lot more freedom in that they didn’t have to hide from the camera to do everything.Ĭredit: Walt Disney Studios Motion PicturesAnd the best thing about the movie is that it’s about the Muppets–it’s not about these spectacular effects. There were a lot of characters shot on a blue stage with blue props, and puppeteers dressed head-to-toe in blue standing behind the puppets. The biggest factor, in terms of what we were used for, was to give the puppeteers more freedom to do the puppeteering. At the beginning of the project, when we were talking about doing the effects for the movie, I was like, “Really? What are we going to do? Put legs on them? Are we doing CG Muppets? I don’t get it.” But that’s not what they wanted to do. Max Ivins: I didn’t feel a lot of added pressure. ![]() ![]() PCWorld: When working on the digital effects for The Muppets, did you feel a lot of pressure to make the effects conform to viewers’ expectations and to the legacy of the show and the previous films?
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