Here's Ruth Wilson as Mrs. Coulter
in "His Dark Materials,"
acting alongside puppeteer Brian Fisher
as her daemon, the golden monkey.
Fisher has the intricate and difficult job of walking,
talking, and even breathing in sync with Wilson.
For the series, production company Bad Wolf
utilized the talents of puppeteers
and visual effects artists to create over 2,000 shots
as well as 50 different creatures.
So why go to all this effort with puppets
only to eventually render the animal in CG?
And why was it that the VFX artists
needed to wrestle each other?
Even though the animals look incredibly real,
the only animal actor on set belongs to Lord Boreal
and is played by an actual snake.
This is Russell Dodgson, a visual effects
supervisor at Framestore, who first had to cast
the series, looking at different animals
that would play humans' external souls, the daemons.
Russell Dodgson: It was very clear that we wanted to go
for a naturalistic performance for the daemons,
because we didn't want them to have a kind of
caricature-ish or cartoonish quality to them.
Narrator: He worked with pre- and post-visualization
company Painting Practice
to look at animal reference images
and brought in animal experts to advise
on the creatures' gender and their correct
groom and coloration.
The VFX team then ran animation tests
in facial-rig software
with dogs sniffing and monkeys jumping
to try out the facial movement.
They realized they needed to perform dialogue
through the animals' bodies
instead of just using their mouths
and facial expressions to emote.
Dodgson: They would always start with the rhythm
of their body and then just add in the lip-sync
as almost like the final touch, rather than saying
we've gotta get all of the shape phonemes
perfect every single time they speak.
Narrator: Puppetry legend William Todd-Jones
then devised a series of proxy stand-ins, rigs,
and puppets for the actors to interact with.
And this is where Brian comes back in.
For close-ups, some of the puppets were sculpted heads.
Other slinky-body styles of puppet
for quadrupedal or bipedal animals.
When actors needed to demonstrate the weight of daemons,
the team made gray furry cushions called bucks.
These had weight and shape
to make it look like actors were holding daemons.
But why bother with this complex, laborious process?
Dodgson: Puppeteering, I'm giving the actors something
to play off of, was critical.
Because we're not just making kind of
creatures that chase after people;
we're making parts of people.
You know, we're representing their soul.
It's really amazing how you can have
a very simple puppet face,
and just the way that, like,
a puppeteer just does a little head cock,
and you suddenly just throw emotion onto it.
Narrator: Another advantage of using puppets
was the "puppet pass."
Take this scene with Brian.
This scene is blocked with the puppets so the crew
and actors know where the daemon would be.
They delivered dialogue or sound to the actors
via the puppets to rehearse the scene.
Brian makes noises like barks or clicks
or even breathes so Ruth, as Mrs. Coulter,
feels more in tune with her costar.
They shoot the scene once with the puppet,
and then with just an eyeline, or nothing at all.
The actor gets so used to having the puppets there
that they then perform to the empty space.
This allows the director to use the take with the puppet
if the performance is better,
as the VFX team could then easily edit out the puppet.
And this was often the case.
Now, that's all fine for something as small as a monkey,
but the team had to think bigger for something
as sizable as a polar bear.
Dodgson: For Iorek and the bears,
it was a whole different story.
Loads of rigs for them. A full-size head sculpt
was measured so that there was a stick attached to it
that when the performer, Joe Tandberg,
put it on his belly button, it became
the right height for Iorek's head.
It gave you the two eyes and the nose as a shape
and the full volume of the head, which was great
because Iorek's really imposing and you need someone
to feel like there's something in their space.
Narrator: And it wasn't just creating space
that made the puppets so important.
Puppets assisted the action when actors needed
to be thrown around the place or physically shifted.
There was the "basher bear" to ram into stuntpeople
and push actors to the ground,
like in this scene with Harry Melling.
There was also a riding rig for Dafne to sit on,
a backpack rig for her to get on top of someone's shoulders,
and a four-legged fiberglass standing puppet
to show a polar bear's height.
But the team also had to go further than using
this elaborate set of puppetry tools.
In order to capture the bears' movement, including fighting,
the VFX team used their own bodies and wrestled each other.
They filmed themselves grappling,
using mixed martial arts references,
as the way bears wrestle is quite similar to humans.
Painting Practice then built the entire bear palace
in the "unreal engine" game simulator,
and the team filmed the fight in that.
To live-track the set, they used a tool
called Vanishing Point vector,
which is a brand-new piece of tracking software.
It leverages augmented reality and real-time tracking
by placing a camera sensor on top of the main unit camera.
So the bears were real-time on the viewfinders
for the camera operators.
Dodgson: We could have made the entire bear palace in CG.
But because we had so much time in there with the actors,
we knew that we wanted that to be a space.
With any technology, there's always the chance
of something going wrong or you wanting to completely
adapt to a different thing or change the animation,
which you can't do live there, and then,
so we also then would just bring the puppets out,
which are kind of true, tested, analog way of doing it,
and we'd bring them out and work through it that way.
Narrator: Then began the painstaking process of CGI
detail for the bears and daemons.
It took 700 days just to make polar bear
Iorek Byrnison and his armor.
Amazingly, they didn't find bears the hardest
individual animal to make.
Birds, such as The Masters' daemon,
were some of the trickiest.
The point where the wings come together
and interlink is also tricky in 3D.
A computer finds it difficult to process them
coexisting in a similar space.
So the team had to use puppets
to land on actors' arms or take off
so they had a better visual reference for the CG.
Even though you see over 50 puppeteered
and CGI animals in the final product,
the amount of daemons in the final pass was limited.
The big character moments remain, but having
too many background animals was deemed distracting.
So, what you see is the bare essentials, formed, ironically,
through a painstaking, multi-department process.