The film was billed as the first live-action film to feature just puppets and no humans. and Yoda, wherein you’re trying to create something that people will actually believe,” Henson said in a 1982 interview. Some puppets were radio-controlled, while the hulking Skeksis were controlled by six puppeteers each. Henson and his team took five years to make the movie, employing cutting-edge puppetry design and technology. While the Muppets are cartoonish and stylized, the world of Thra is incredibly lifelike. Those would become The Muppets Take Manhattan and The Great Muppet Caper. According to Henson’s daughter Lisa, he was told that he could only make The Dark Crystal if he also made two bankable Muppet films.
Watch our discussion with Brian and Toby Froud, and learn how they brought the Emperor to life for “The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance.While Henson threw himself into the project, producers and financiers were skeptical about its marketability. Nothing is symmetrical, everything is the shape and form that comes from nature and trees everything has a flow to it.” So it was very important that all our crafts people worked on this to create literally a living world. There’s all sorts of extraordinary life going on. There are creatures inside the costumes actually knitting it as it’s moving around. I always imagined that all the shapes and forms and fabrics have inherited their own life. “But in reality they come from this imaginative world of Thra, everything you’re looking at is not a piece of wool or lycra it’s not from our world, it is all a lie.
“It should feel in many ways familiar,” said Brian. “We had to choose very light fabrics, or as light as possible, and make them feel heavy, ad make them look as if they have weight and drape and shape and form and flow, at scale as they move around throughout the series.”Īfter that, the puppets and costumes needed to look aged, weathered and (most importantly) contain the depth and an organic quality that is intrinsic to “Dark Crystal.” “Everything has to be light, because they’re puppets, we’re not building costumes for humans.” Toby explained. Plus, each new addition to the fantasy world had to be as weightless as possible. There were about 8 hero puppets we for gelflings alone.” “And then we did other background that duplicated different elements for each clan. “I think we built at least between six and ten different gelfling for each clan, and that’s just for functioning puppets,” Toby explained. The creature-creating duo (official titles design and creature supervisors) were then tasked with resurrecting the world of Thra and populating it with over 100 creatures including gelflings (over seven clans), skeksis, mystics, landstriders and a whole lot more.
The quality and nature of that is stunning.” And that’s something that I literally grew up next to my whole life. “My parents have one of the old mystic coats hanging on the wall. “As a kid growing up in the family house, we certainly had a few props and pieces around from the ‘Dark Crystal,’ we had a crystal shard,” Toby Froud explained. First of all it was terror and then it was just a lot of hard work.”īut this time around Brian would have an extra set of hands besides his wife Wendy Midener (who also worked on creature design on the original) – their son, Toby. “And here we were doing ten episodes, which is several movies all in one, and done in an incredibly short time. “The original film ‘Dark Crystal’ was five years of my life,” Brian Froud told Variety.
#Dark crystal puppets series
So what did he feel when Netflix proposed a series prequel in less than half the time they had to create the original? In a word, terror! Putting together the elaborate puppet quest that became the 1982 cult classic “The Dark Crystal” took five years of collaboration with the brain trust of co-directors Jim Henson and Frank Oz. It channels a kind of practical magic that’s waiting for us all just on the other side of tree or hiding under a rock. The ethereal beauty that is essential to “The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance” doesn’t exist without the Froud family.īrian Froud’s now internationally known style weaves together nature and fantasy creating an extraordinary world that could very well exist right outside someone’s door.
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