hey guys I'm in a really magical place right now I'm in Wellington New Zealand
at the incredible wedding workshop who contributed amazing concept designs and
props and models and constructions for the eagerly anticipated ghost in the
shell' and we are privileged enough to actually be able to see them in person
and talk about them Richard Taylor is here to tell us and I'm great to have
you in our workshop again oh I just I love being here every time I come as an
adventurer and this is blowing my mind how how magnificent these are tell me
what that what that what what your original charge was to make here well
giving to work on ghost in the shell' as you can imagine a seminal movie in all
of our movie watching history but also an extraordinary opportunity to bring to
life physically rupert the director wanted to do as much as possible
physically so big thumbs up right there perfect and these would have easily been
tackled digitally but he wanted physical geishas for the scenes where the geishas
have been hecht they they transform into these bizarre deadly cyborg like
creatures and in this case we wanted to do them very much as as costume
characters that were worn by very elegant beautiful dancers and and
normally you were saying earlier off-camera that they were the original
idea was maybe to do these as prosthetics but you decided to do them
as mass yeah that's right there was a lot of ideas thrown around we did tests
where we just stood straight makeup on people the problem there is that their
own pore structure the imperfections in the human face doesn't let that
extraordinary elegance of the sort of the quintessential geisha come through
we tried prosthetics we ultimately campaign very hard to do them as
porcelain dolls literally so they would feel like they were made out of hard
materials and that's indeed ultimately how we ended up doing them and when
you're making masks for people how is how did you work out getting hard masks
on soft people that's not always a simple problem well the first thing we
did as Rupert chose one actor a young Japanese actress called rila very
famous actress and she already had an extraordinary face
we scanned her head cast her and then we made her digitally symmetrical then we
had to fit every other actors head inside reelers head very tricky you can
imagine because you're we have access primarily to European featured people
larger noses broader bridges to the nose etc etc but fiddling around we got their
heads to perfectly fit and we're able to make them comfy if in fact if we open up
this one you have to help me a little bit but if we hold it up and so simply
got the sort of thing that you have on a ski jacket that hides away inside here
and you loosen that and then slides apart and off it comes and that's the
inside of the mask it's very important when doing things like this that you can
dress the actors quickly because the frustration for the actors of being
stuck inside these things so if you're doing the mass you want to be able to
get it on and off really really fast these cables up here or to go to
batteries that drive squirrel fans that are inside the head
so they have a little day they've got going but eventually got quite a good
lot of ear sucking through their nostrils and over their faces a
nightmare for the poor sound guys of course because you've got these things
whizzing away and they're actually expelling through these very nicely
hidden slots here and they're incorporated the design of comfort all
the way into the aesthetics yes very trying to be very thoughtful at that
sort of thing the foam page you can see in there are specifically to hold
pressure points we try and pick up on these specific pressure points on the
face these are where the hard bony areas are if you pick up here the the mass
will slide and slip around on the flesh but if you pick up on the hard point I
call it the washing line of the human face this is a where the pigs are on the
washing line it will hang on to the face very very well this is the kind of
institutional knowledge that weather has from decades a lot of mucking around
with the sort of stuff the eyes interestingly are done very similar to
sunglasses so that when you have no light behind them you
see through them at all but should you look through them you've got pretty good
vision yeah a big problem is lack of peripheral vision a bit real big
challenge with puppets is that the moment you put a puppet head on and you
take the peripheral vision from where their human eye has to a pinpoint out
here it's blue and monsters only lose your balance of loss because we use our
peripheral for balance so here the paint job is really magnificent did you sculpt
these we milled them and then did a huge amount of model-making on them to get
them as perfect as they are also there were 3d printed 3d printed em milled
inserting we post put in the pins these are ready to stand a dressmakers pin
heads but we wanted to get the quality of domed surface that you couldn't have
got in a 3d print or a milk I myself spent hours on them as the number of
members of our staff trying to get them as perfect as we possibly could all the
hair is 3d printed initially we take molds and then take castings in the case
of one that's been blown up of course there's a huge amount of scratch build
model making into them it's really intricate and beautiful and kind of
super intense to see it up close to see such a beautiful thing so destroyed
these are these are the things that go into the back of the donors necks
these are got horrible pins that come out and skewer into the docking points
and these are tendrils that come out of the throat as you'll see here with this
full body even though they are future tech this is a world in our future we
don't want to always play to what is expected in the form of a hard tech
manufactured engineered world and as you can see here many many people watching
this will remember a movie such as Hugo which celebrates in the automata of the
17th and 18th century and that's what we're trying to find here as is a
technological mix between handcraft a beautiful skill based work you know
maybe the Asian eye maker and Blade Runner is a great example of that I you
know I only do eyes but yet true he has this extraordinary ability to weave his
craft to the objects he makes and we're trying
to find that and turn how much fun to work with such aesthetic richness as
from the model making casting molding design standpoint there's there's so
much to sink your teeth into to have a client that is willing to let you go to
these places that isn't just thinking at a single plane of ideas which are well
it's future take therefore it must be like a modern-day cell phone it's lovely
to have someone that's willing to take these sorts of creative ideas and run
with them which is very nice I've even seen some incredible details like in
molded designs in these clear clear resin hair very thick hair pieces I I
really in the case of these I I didn't want them just to be lucite blocks I
wanted that we saw form of ancient Japanese wood carving within them for
instance but when the light hits these they ping beautifully and so these are
all lucite components cast into it now and while these are static props you
actually contributed some animatronics and this is an example of some of your
animatronics yeah our animatronics department did a great deal of work on
this movie and in the case of verses you can see so dude
so the it she uh she opens and closes and and out of the mouthpiece here is
where the tendril feeds as tariffs if you come in closely you can see that's
completely clockwork it's all working gears that are actually spinning in
there is so gorgeous yes a this really captures that quality of the hand skill
automata clockmaker of the 17th century but then with you know how do you move
the facial muscles then it's got this very electronic motif in it as well well
so I know as having worked with animatronics that this requires the
coordination and collaboration of artists and engineers and craftspeople
working together there's a tremendous amount of coordination go yeah yeah
there is to bring something like this together and bring it together really
quickly because you know we you can almost
describe it as shooting from the hip there's no chance to aim and fire it's
almost like a gunslinger because and the only way that works as if you're
intuitively connected because you've done it so many times together before
and one thing has to flow into another into another now that doesn't mean that
it doesn't go wrong of course and when you're jerry-rigging something like this
as you you know you do in your own work there's no plan no one wrote a manual to
do it now you've never done exactly this before so you've got to jerry-rig it to
some degree and that just requires almost guerrilla model making yeah you
know there's there's some nice little ideas like these panels are held on by
magnets so that if the thing it's knocked they don't smash the mechanism
that the these will just detach and then we can simply clip them back on that
also makes working on them and model correct exactly so and they self home
and go exactly back into place and of course when they close they've got to
marry back up exactly together this may not look like a great deal of complexity
to your viewers seeing the immense complexity and things like an automotive
car but trying to get those petals to exactly match together
in perfect timing who know I look very tiny every card or is it masterpieces
yes it is absolutely a car door is a surprisingly complex thing to make and
to get the hinges to work and hang and not miss adjust during you know
operation and that's exactly the challenge here one of the things I love
about visiting here Richard is how much you guys embrace both the entire history
of film using some of the oldest techniques imaginable and yet marrying
those two some of the newest technologies always building your own 3d
printers and 3d routers using latest technologies for scanning and digital
interfaces and the results are just gobsmacking in person oh thank you
it's interesting you know the camera that's being filmed that's filming us
today it only exists because it's climbed on the shoulders
of cameras before at over hundred plus years and and here what we're trying to
do is iterate on top of the technology that we were using yesterday to do
something unique tomorrow no audience wants to see tomorrow what they saw
yesterday so a movie like this we would have struggled to make this movie in the
time we had to make it two years ago because neither was the technology
around nor was the chemistry within the technology around the skeleton that we
built which I hope to show you the materials weren't even in existence two
years ago so I couldn't have built it right but we can build it today because
technology is iterating and growing just like the camera might be and because you
guys are paying attention to their technology and incorporating it into
your into the model you have to have this unabashed enthusiasm for data
sheets basically you know choice of reading a novel or a data sheet it's
going to be a data sheet because that's where you learn the stuff that's
rediscovered the amazing things people are doing all over the world how big was
the team that where they had on ghost in the shell' oh I think at its height
probably about a hundred and twenty hundred and fifty people
we had a big onset presence our complementing the amazing makeup
department and a team just looking after practical effects but most of it was in
the build back here in the workshop right because when you build something
like this it's not you don't just build it and send it to the set you have to
support it you're absolutely a fixture change it you know an average we do six
to seven movies a year only one of those may be in New Zealand so that means
we've got to have crews on the road somewhere in the world looking after the
stuff and you can't just turn back to the workshop if it breaks you've got to
know it's not going to break and you've got to go well-equipped if it does go
wrong so it requires a very unique type of human to go out on set and look after
the stuff Richard thank you so much for showing these beautiful objects I hope
someday there will be a an exhibition of these where people can come see it in
person because it's really hope I'm here to tell you no matter what you're seeing
on this camera Joe is going to get some beautiful close-ups that you've probably
already seen during this interview in person it looks
places good thank you very much thank you very much cheers to you all we'll
put her back to sleep a