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MillimeterQuotemarks: Words on the Record
Oct 18, 2004 4:00 PM
Team America: World Police
"We figured out that every set could break every eight feet horizontally to allow a catwalk to come across the top where the puppeteers would be stationed. This affected the design approach, because in tall spaces—like the opening scene in Paris, for instance—we had to compact everything together. But this fit with our desire to present a satirical Americanized view of the world. So Paris therefore has everything packed into one convenient main square—the Louvre is right underneath the Eiffel Tower, and so on.
"The other thing we learned after our initial experience shooting the Paris sequence first was that foreground really matters. That’s where we put all the detail, for the most part, after we discovered how difficult it is to force long perspectives. If you have a long vista, like we tried with Paris, you need three different scales, and if it’s an action shot, with lots of things moving, you need some detail at all three scales. So we stayed away from long vistas after we shot Paris, and put most of the work into the first 20ft."
--Architect/designer David Rockwell, visual consultant on the film, on designing practical, third-scale sets.
“We needed full facial and lip articulation, so we had nine servos slammed into the heads of each hero puppet. They were controlled by [facial control computer software manufactured by Gilderfluke and Co., Burbank, Calif.]. It’s a great control tool, but it’s used primarily to pre-program displays at theme parks, restaurant attractions, things like that. That was not the goal here. We had to do a certain amount of programming in advance, and then have the system workable enough to have a live-performance aspect to it to change things on the fly as the story changes.
"We took their basic system and used it in ways they had not anticipated by developing a proprietary input system on how to program the faces. They had always used sliders, but we created a joystick system for it. The system was entirely wireless—WiFi with Blue-Tooth technology at a low frequency.”
--Edward Chiodo of Burbank’s Chiodo Brothers Inc., on the technical requirements for achieving facial articulation and control in the faces of Team America’s puppets.
Continue the discussion on Crosstalk the Millimeter Forum.