Creating a World for The Dark Crystal

by David W. Samuelson & Ann Tasker,
American Cinematographer, December 1982

THE DARK CRYSTAL is a fantasy adventure inspired by myths and fairy tales which represents an attempt to do on film something comparable perhaps to what J.R. Tolkein did in writing THE HOBBIT. It involves the creation of an entire world filled with bizarre creatures and magical landscapes, a world with its own history and civilization but without any human inhabitants. It is an archetypal story of a quest involving a conflict between forces of good and evil in a time of crisis, and its impact depends on the richness of texture and detail.

Such a film is an ambitious undertaking to put it mildly and most people would assume that it could be done only with very elaborate animation. The DARK CRYSTAL, however, is not an animated film. It was shot live action with creatures walking around and talking to each other on sets at EMI Elstree Studios, and the creatures are not simply actors wearing costumes. They are incredibly sophisticated puppets, some of which required 5 operators using radio control or a variety of mechanical, electrical and hydraulic control systems.

The person who conceived this project and probably the only person in the world audacious enough to pull it off was Jim Henson, the creator of The Muppets. At first sight the Gelflings. Skeksis, Mystics, Garthim, Landstriders, et al. of THE DARK CRYSTAL are a far cry from Kermit and Miss Piggy; but the techniques used in the design and operation of the puppets for THE DARK CRYSTAL are an extreme evolution of the techniques Henson developed with The Muppets. Yoda, who was performed by Henson's partner Frank Oz, represents a state in the development of these techniques, and it is no accident that Henson's co-producer on THE DARK CRYSTAL was Gary Kurtz, producer of THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK.

Henson began working on THE DARK CRYSTAL in 1977. He started with a sense of the kind of world he wanted to create and began visualizing creatures before he really had much of a storyIine. One day Jerry Houle, vice president of licensing for his company, showed him a book called The Land of Froud, which was an anthology of drawings by Brian Froud. Froud is an English illustrator best know in America for his work on the bestseller Faeries, and Henson saw that his work the style that he felt was needed for THE DARK CRYSTAL.

Froud recalls their collaboration:

"He was, I think, looking for something different to the style he had been working in and it is interesting to discover how different it was. Whereas the Muppets are very simple bold shapes, what I designed was very complex and complicated. It was, I think, an amazing leap into the unknown and an enormous act of confidence on Jim's part to imagine that it could work, because I didn't know.

"We started off with a small group of people in New York, just talking about what the world might be and what the creatures might be in this world. Jim had a fairly strong idea about what the Skeksis might be. They are the evil creatures, and he felt that they were reptilians dressed up in very extravagant and opulent clothes, living in a castle. They were fairly easy for me to design, but then I had to populate the rest of the world and that was sort of unknown to Jim. So sitting around in a small group of people we would talk about not necessarily what the creatures might look like but some of their personalities, where they might be placed in this world and what they might be doing. It was like a community effort or a discussion group. I would be sitting doodling away, just making the sketches, and people would say yes and no and what things were working. Then, eventually once the broad basis was worked out, it became specific and I did more finished drawings for all the creatures. I was responsible for the conception of an entire world, a world that had never been seen before. I had to design everything. Not only the general look of the world, from skies to the landscape, but down to the smallest detail which included things like knives and forks , pots and pans, the everyday minutiae details of the creatures that lived in this world.

"In theory, when you are given total freedom to design a new world, a world that has never been seen before, you think you can create it in a totally different way than our world is, that one could design skies that were different in colors and lands capes that look totally different from a landscape we have in our own world.

"In practice, it doesn't quite work that way. For instance we decided that this world, the world of the Dark Crystal, would have three suns. This was a very nice conceptional idea, but if we carried it through logically it became a problem because it would mean there would be three shadows. This was almost impossible to film because it would be very confusing.

"If skies were designed a certain color what would that mean to the colors on the landscape? I think the danger is that things would look too alien. you have to make the world accessible. It has to be what I would call familiar. I think what I did was to assimilate an English landscape into a fantasy world.

"It has a reference to other landscapes in other countries-I think there is a lot of the American landscape in this film-and yet, really I took it from where I live, which is in Devon. I tried to create a world that was timeless, and in doing so I think I placed it at once in the past and also in the future. There are a lot of historical references that cannot necessarily be pinned down so you never know quite where this world is or what its time period is supposed to be.

"I think generally I look backwards, back in time for my major references because personally I believe that fantasy is partly nostalgic. Even future looking fantasies, like STAR WARS, to me seemed to be dwelling on things that are myths, and it is just an old story transcribed into a future setting.

"I suppose in creating a world like we did, we had a role that was very similar to God, but we very rapidly found that God had all the best ideas already. It is really difficult to improve upon nature and we did spend a long time in fact looking at a lot of natural history films to look at movement and different designs of creatures.

"I did a lot of research for the film, because we had to create a whole world, a whole system that worked, I looked at a lot of different cultures across the world and took various aspects from there and assimilated them, hopefully, into some cohesive whole.

"I think in doing the research I found that every system, every different religion and every culture is based on the same essential truths and hopefully, if this film can put across anything, it is saying that we are all the same, we all live in the same world, we all feel the same things, all our different religions are saying the same thing and hopefully we can achieve out of the conflict we have at the moment some sort of harmony. I know that sounds very heavy, I do genuinely believe, looking back on retrospect of what we have done, that that is the way it went."

Froud worked with Henson and his group in New York for two years before the operation moved to London. Once their ideas had developed to the point where they had a storyline, David Odell began working on the screenplay. As the designs for the creatures were refined, a small group started working on the realization of Froud's drawings as puppets. The first step was to sculpt a model of a creature in clay, and then the sculpture was used as the basis for constructing a working prototype of the puppet. When the production moved to England in July of 1979 - (so that Henson could simultaneously supervise the production of first "The Muppet Show" and eventually THE GREAT MUPPET CAPER) the "animatronic fabrication group grew from seven to 60 people.

The creative supervisor of this group was Sherry Amott. My job was to get the ideas from Jim Henson, Frank Oz, and Brian Froud, discuss them with Brian, and then identify and find someone to do it," she says. "I had to depend very heavily on the input from the puppet-makers we brought over from New York as to how they thought things should be fabricated. I would have to understand the whole process before I could pinpoint what we were looking for. I looked in places where you wouldn't expect puppet- makers to be. I looked at jewelry makers and watch repairers to be mechanical designers; dollmakers and pottery and ceramic majors in art school became our best mold makers. I was looking for people with a whimsical inventiveness combined with an interest in, say, pottery and electronics, or working with fabric and carving wood. It was the combination of the various skills and interest that strengthened the group enormously and made it flexible. Also, it avoided having extraneous people doing only one thing."

When a clay sculpture of a creature was completed, a mold was taken from it and used to produce a flexible latex version of the creature. Wendy Midener-Froud, one of the sculptors on THE DARK CRYSTAL, describes how the idea of using latex foam for the puppets' skin developed in the course of making a prototype for Jen and Kiri, the Gelflings who are the central characters:

"The first 'head' I had was a hard latex under-structure with a chamois leather skin over," Wendy says. "It looked interesting and was a nice texture but it didn't move enough. In the beginning we didn't know whether the creatures were going to be able to do anything, but I think it was Jim who heard of using latex foam and Dick Smith came in and worked with us for several weeks." (Dick Smith is one of the top make-up specialists in this field and was involved in such films as ALTERED STATES and LITTLE BIG MAN. Stuart Freeborn, who created creatures for STAR WARS and THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK, also gave help and advice in this area.) "Then I went off to work on Yoda for THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK and that was the first time anyone had used a total latex skin for a puppet, so he was an experiment for us in this film."

Tom McLaughlin, head of the of the foam lab for THE DARK CRYSTAL, estimates that four tons of latex were used by the lab for fabricating the puppets, and each character in the film required slightly different characteristics in the foam. A great deal of experimentation was done. "We. came with some things I didn't think possible," explains McLaughlin. "Like getting a highly plastic foam without the addition of oil. Oil is a plasticizer and has been used in the past to make things more flexible, softer, but oil in any piece of casting you are going to turn into a puppet will wreak havoc when trying to get things to adhere to it. This is something I came up with while working on The Muppets." McLaughlin's work begins when the sculpt is completed. The heads, hands and feet, etc. are sculpted in oil-based clay and then sent to the molding department where a two-piece mold is made. This is returned to the sculptor who makes a core. "We stick clay in the mold which will be the thickness of the foam skin," Lyle Conway, one of the sculptors, explains. "We test that to make sure it is thin or thick enough to allow the mechanisms involved to move, then it goes back to the mold-makers and they cast a plaster core. The mold is separated and the clay peeled out, the foam is poured in and the core pushed in ... the foam takes the place of the clay. This all takes two or three weeks depending on the complexity of the mold."

The foam lab work involves a battery of kitchen equipment as the foam is whipped up in household mixers. "We do have a large industrial mixer for large body parts," McLaughlin says. "This can mix up about four gallons at a go." When the foam is in the mold it is then placed in an oven and baked. "We whip the amount of air we feel the piece will need into the mix," McLaughlin continues. "Once it is nice and smooth the molder pushes it, shoves it or shoots it into the various mold parts and we bake it for anything up to three hours, very much like a cake. We have seven ovens and during our busy time we would use them all, they were going 18 hours a day."

The creatures had to be lifelike, flexible, movable, and lightweight. They had to be easy to get in and out of, in case of fire, and also be able to accommodate a small video underneath which the performer could watch. "Before THE DARK CRYSTAL there had been a lot of big creatures built on backpacks," says Amott. "But this was heavy, and It was difficult to lift your arm to work the puppet. So we decided to build the costume on a harness, which allows the weight to be carried on the hips.

"On Jim's suggestion, I tracked down a Steadicam harness, which was developed to support a Skeksis. The harness had a quick release for a camera. The prototype was taken into the production stage, and the mechanical designers turned out about twenty. This was an original idea of Jim's that turned into something we couldn't do without. It will become the basis for future puppets, I am sure."

The most difficult item on Sherry Amott's vast shopping list for the film was eyes. "Rubber was our biggest item," Sherry says, "but it took us longest to find eyes for the characters. They just don't exist. The eyes for stuffed animals that taxidermists use are half-round and come in standard types: lizard, dog, and so on. Then there are makers of artificial eyes for humans, which are generally cup-shaped to conform to the eye muscle. What we needed was almost a sphere in order to have eye movement, and these had to be custom-designed. The size of the pupil was particularly important, as far as focusing the eye line of the puppet, since it is the connection between the eyes and the camera that makes the characters come alive.

"We went to the people who make eyes for Madame Tussaud's. They produced glass-brown eyes, very fragile and difficult to put mechanisms in. Because the process prevents you from controlling the pigment, you can't achieve special colors. Brian wanted red irises, and they couldn't do that. We also went to an artificial-eye maker: She started off quite well, but she had a lot of patients and felt she should really give her time to them, so we ended up with a company that makes artificial eyes. They had to be of a certain plastic that was hard and could be polished; milky-looking eyes don't reflect or look alive."

The adaptation of Froud's drawings into workable puppets was a process of evolution and compromise over several years. Knowing when and how to compromise, what limitations to accept in the movement or expressiveness of each puppet, was perhaps the most difficult aspect of the process. As Kurtz puts it:

"It's very easy to get into the King Kong syndrome, which is the need to he able to do everything and then you have it so complicated that it's difficult to do anything. We were always trying to balance a simple enough operating mechanism that four or five people could operate all the functions and yet complicated enough to give us the range of emotions that we needed to convey. After some testing on prototypes we rejected some ideas and accepted others but came up with, I think a good balance. Then a team of people was assigned to each creature with a primary performer, we call them, whose job it was to create the personality of the character, just as an actor would create a role, and then work with his team of people, whether it was two extra people or four it didn't matter, to then create the movement properly for that character in rehearsal.

If they had any eccentricities or unique qualities that would be used throughout the picture then that had to be developed to such an extent that when they got into rehearsal for a scene they would all remember how the creature moved or how it turned its head or how it blinked or if it had a funny walk or any of the idiosyncrasies that a normal personality would have. They spent a lot of time on that aspect of the picture before we even got to the shooting stage."

The performers who brought to life the main characters and creatures in THE DARK CRYSTAL were drawn from the Muppeteers, but the Mystics and many of the other characters were created by a specially formed group of mime artists, actors, dancers, acrobats, clowns. Jean-Pierre Amiel, a mime artist well known in Europe, established this group of ten performers which complement Henson's nucleus of puppeteers.

Gary Kurtz recalls how the creatures came alive on the set: "The magic of the film for us, for me especially, was after all the rehearsal time and all those years of development to see the characters come alive on the screen and to have the film crew relate to them as characters although they knew they were being performed by all these other people. On the set in between takes they would talk to them as characters especially with some of the friendlier characters who were really pleasant to work with . They came alive because of the diligent rehearsal of the performers who had worked on it so long that they were all anxious to see it turn out as well as possible.

"There were nine Mystics and nine Skeksis and we had to have enough people to operate the all at once because in several scenes you see them all on the screen at the same time. In the case of the Mystics, they are large enough to have people inside, sometimes two people, depending on what it had to to in addition to outside manipulation of various aspects of the character.

"So because of that we had very small video monitors so the people inside who were manipulating things could see what was going on or at least see what the camera was seeing, and that was a great help.

"The position that these people had to maintain, especially in the Mystics, was so difficult that we had about a four week training period of gymnastics just to get them up to a position they could do that sort of stretch and stand without getting cramps. It was very difficult for them but it worked out quite well.

The sets for the film were designed by Harry Lange from sketches by Brian Froud. They were, of course, built to the scale of the puppets and had to be designed to facilitate the operation of the puppets. The object was to photograph the puppets just as though they were live performers. The principal performers for each character actually spoke the dialogue during filming, although the production track was only used as a cue track for looping later on. The sets were built up off the floor so that there would be room for the performers and their gear underneath. "In the larger scene, says Kurtz, "where we had ten, twenty or twenty-five characters on the screen at the same time, you can figure there were at least a hundred performers that we had to hide somewhere. It was not always easy and sometimes it was a bit like Grand Central Station."

The key to being able to shoot THE DARK CRYSTAL effectively was a storyboard. Kurtz comments:

"We knew from the very beginning that the creatures were going to be limited in what they could do. So every sequence had to be carefully storyboarded and had to have six or eight months of work with several artists that went through them sequence by sequence and laid them out as the script indicated.

"We would study them and try to decide how we could meet those restrictions of the creatures. The story-board artists were not concerned with the limitations of the creatures, they just drew them out and we worked on the sequence as if human actors were doing everything. Then, after we could put them up on the wall and see them all, we could decipher certain things that could not be done and would have to be shot in a different way to hide things. Then we would re-draw those storyboards so that we ended up with a sequence of what could be done shot for shot.

"Those were drawn before some of the creatures were finished so that we could incorporate some of the ideas about certain things that had to be functional on one particular creature that might not on another; but even that wasn't always enough.

"We did some rehearsing on video to test whether the ideas worked or not because in a lot of cases facial expressions and eyes were the most critical thing to bring life to the character."

In one sense every scene in THE DARK CRYSTAL is a special effect because of what was required to make the creatures appear alive, but in addition to the puppet work there were special mechanical effects supervised by Brian Smithies and special photographic effects supervised by Roy Field. Kurtz obviously brought to the picture a strong background in special effects and he describes the approach to the effects on THE DARK CRYSTAL:

"We started with special effects very early on. We knew we would have to have some miniatures, some matte paintings, a lot of optical composite work and some blue screen work. We did a lot of storyboards for the art department of the technical shots. We decided to build the Dark Crystal Castle in two miniature sizes, one about 10th scale and one about 25th scale so that we could build a fairly large landscape over Stage 7 with mountains and terrain and put the castle in the middle. Because we had 'power surges' as we call them coming along through cracks in the ground, we had to photograph multiple passes on the miniature and where we decided to photograph the landscape in lightning flashes we had to photograph slow time to get a proper exposure. Som etimes there were four or five passes through the camera before that aspect of the miniature was finished and to that we would add the sky which was mostly done with a cloud tank. We spent several weeks doing cloud tank skies, various kinds of stormy skies and clear skies all slightly weird in coloration and cloud formation just to make the world a little more unique.

"We had several matte paintings which were executed by Industrial Light and Magic in San Francisco and for that we provided, in most cases, foreground elements. We were going to shoot some of them on VistaVision but decided that for this purpose, as they were long distance travelling shots and most of the elements would be matte painted in, we could get away with using Panavision foregrounds. We did and they worked out quite well, although I normally prefer to use VistaVision for the elements. In this case it was easier for I.L.M. to composite the material because they were doing other work at the same time with their VistaVision printers.

"In addition to the matte paintings we did several key miniatures which were matched in with live action foregrounds and with cloud tank skies. We also did some composite work, which was very unique in that we did some superimposure of creatures that were matched into position with some special holdout mattes that gave us a slightly ethereal feeling.

"We have a sequence at the end where these creatures have to be very translucent and glowing, and they were done by shooting the original elements against black velvet and then matting them into a miniature of the crystal castle rooms. The crystal shard hanging in the centre was a separate matte element so we ended up with sometimes seven, eight, nine, ten, elements with all these creatures in this room, each one photographed separately and put together in the right perspective, which was a real chore. We were able to use video quite effectively all through the picture, especially with the special effects, but because it won't line up exactly right its not the same thing as putting a punched frame in the aperture. It did allow us to see a rough mix of the vague positions of the elements in the frame. We could play back the first element that had been shot several weeks before and mark on the video monitor with grease pencil the approximate position of it and then put in the new element live on the floor and look at the two video taped together and see if their position in the frame was close enough. It was good enough for lining up purposes for our shooting because as long as the images did not overlap and they could appear to be talking to each other we felt we were fine. We built a special video set-up for this picture which was completely portable and had two U-matic recorders, a switching network and a special effects generator incorporated so that we could insert a picture from one camera into the image of another. If the Panavision camera was shooting a fairly wide picture and one of the performers wanted to see an eye movement, we could have a band of Panavision in the top and bottom of the picture and insert a close-up of one of the creatures in the center. We could put up to three or four cameras if we wanted to and record that as a master. Some times we had 25 monitors on the stage at one time.

"In addition to the miniature of the exterior of the castle built in a landscape, which were fairly straightforward, we had the interior of the crystal chamber in which for the climax of the film, the stonework was to fall away to reveal the crystall ine structure underneath. The way in which it is done is the full size set, which had to match, was photographed quite carefully and then smaller pieces were made, and various small bits, then attached to the purspex crystal room that had been built up previously and lit from behind.

"The only way we could get the stonework to fall away effectively was to shoot at very high speed, so we brought in a 360 frames per second camera to shoot the falling away and set many many explosive charges all around the plaster stonework so that it would fall apart in small enough pieces for this scale to work. We had to try it several times with wires running all over the stage to get the sequence of explosions correct and make the stonework break away because it could not look like an explosion . It had to look like an earthquake collapsing the material and so the explosions and to be very very small just to jar the attachment points loose so then the material could break away and fall on its own.

"That was probably one of the more complicated of the interior miniatures. We had to use that same crystal chamber miniature for the interior set for the very end of the film because there was no full size set built of the crystal interior, that was all in miniature. The characters were all shot either against blue screen or black velvet and had to be properly placed in that miniature background by the perspective indicated on the storyboards so those shots were analyzed and lined up very carefully.

"The video was also a great help there because it gave us a better idea of what the proper perspective would be. We could run the background and look at the perspective on the foreground and see whether it matched up reasonably well.

"From an overview of the picture the biggest challenge was to shoot the film in such a way that none of these things were noticed. The actors moved where they had to move and said what they had to say and presented the drama in such a way that you would assume that they were just regular performers, and I think to a great extent that was achieved. We had certain limitations, certain scenes we had to cut around, things that didn't quite work, but for the most part I think all the scenes come across as fairly normal scenes and if human actors were being used they would have had been shot in pretty much the same way and that's really what we were after."