Charlie Productions : Puppeteer

Puppeteering is not an easy job, but I guess in this day and age of Wii-motes, the next generation of puppeteers will be able to draw on exceptional hand-to-eye co-ordination to bring the mastery of the art to a whole new level.

We had two on Panda - one for the mouth, one for the eyes, eyebrows and ears, all of which we felt would be incredibly useful for expressing the character (our thoughts on this matter mainly coming from the genius animation of Gromit by Nick Park, which show exactly how much expression you can get from a character with a monobrow and no mouth...). We did have to digitally enhance a lot of this in post, which in part comes down to how tricky the job is.

Rather than having a single person in charge of defining this character, we had Benny's voice, being played back by Martin on playback, with Peter inside the suit and Ben and Tina operating the animatronics - no wonder that timing wasn't always going to be perfect, especially considering the blistering pace we were having to work at thanks to our tight schedule and even tighter budget.

Charlie Productions believe passionately in doing things and always trying to stop in time for tea.

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