Supermarionation

Gerry Anderson's first experience with puppet filming was in 1956, when Pentagon Films – a group of five filmmakers including Anderson and his friend Arthur Provis – was contracted to make a series of Noddy-themed TV advertisements for Kellogg's breakfast cereal. Around this time, Pentagon also produced a 15-minute puppet film called Here Comes Kandy. These early efforts were noticed by children's author Roberta Leigh, who had written a collection of scripts titled The Adventures of Twizzle and was looking for a film company to turn them into a puppet TV series. By this time, Anderson and Provis had left Pentagon to form their own company, Anderson Provis Films (AP Films or APF). They accepted the commission, disappointed not to be working with live actors but realising that they needed Leigh's investment to stay in business. Before starting production, Anderson and Provis hired three staff: continuity supervisor Sylvia Thamm (former secretary at Pentagon and Anderson's future wife), art director Reg Hill and camera operator John Read. All three would later be made co-directors of the new company and play a significant role in the development of its productions.[21]

The puppets of Twizzle had papier-mâché heads with painted eyes and mouths and were each controlled using a single carpet thread. Speech was indicated by nodding the heads.[22] Somewhat embarrassed to be making a children's puppet series, Anderson and Provis decided to produce Twizzle in the style of a feature film, incorporating dynamic shooting and lighting in the hope that the results would bring them bigger-budget commissions with live actors.[23] To add to this more sophisticated look, the series often used three-dimensional sets instead of traditional flat backgrounds, while puppeteers Christine Glanville and her team operated the marionettes not from the studio floor but from a bridge above it.[24][25]

Following the completion of Twizzle, APF was unsuccessful in securing new clients, so accepted another puppet commission from Leigh: Torchy the Battery Boy.[26] This series used puppets with heads of "plastic wood" (a mixture of cork dust, glue and methylated spirit) and wooden bodies.[27][28] The heads incorporated moveable eyeballs and a hinged jaw that was opened and closed with a string.[28][29][30] In practice, jaw movement was difficult to control due to the bobbing of the puppets' heads.[31] By now all puppet sets were three-dimensional.[27] They had also become more detailed, being made mostly of cardboard with fibreglass props.[20][31][32]

After Torchy, APF severed ties with Leigh and produced its first independent series, Four Feather Falls, with funding from Granada.[33] The puppets' heads were now made as hollow fibreglass shells, the strings had been replaced with fine tungsten steel wires and the hinged jaw had given way to an electronic lip-sync mechanism designed by Hill and Read.[34][35][36] Lip-syncing was a key step in the development of Supermarionation, and as such Four Feather Falls is regarded by some sources as the first Supermarionation production.[37] The mechanism made it easier for the puppeteers to operate the marionettes in time with their dialogue as it was no longer necessary to learn the characters' lines.[31][32] According to Anderson, as exaggerated movements were no longer needed, the puppets were finally able to speak "without their heads lolling about a like a broken toy."[32] By now the puppeteers' movements were guided using a basic form of video assist: a TV camera mounted directly behind the film camera, which relayed footage to various monitors around the studio.[38][39]

The term "Supermarionation" was coined during the production of Supercar, APF's first series to be made for Lew Grade's distribution company ITC Entertainment. Its final 13 episodes were the first to be credited as being "filmed in Supermarionation".[1][16]

The puppets and puppet sets of Supermarionation were built in 1⁄3 scale, the former being roughly two feet (61 cm) tall.[7][40][41] Each marionette was suspended and controlled with several fine tungsten steel wires that were between 1⁄5000 and 1⁄3000 of an inch (0.0051–0.0085 mm) thick, replacing the carpet thread and twine strings that had been used prior to Four Feather Falls.[35][42][43] To make the wires non-reflective, they were at first painted black; this made them thicker and more noticeable, so manufacturers Ormiston Wire devised a method of chemically darkening them to maintain their thinness.[43][44][45] During filming, the wires often needed to be concealed further with "antiflare" (grease mist) spray or various colours of paint so that they would blend in with the sets and backgrounds.[34][46] Balancing the weight was crucial: puppets that were too light would be difficult to control; too heavy and their wires would not bear the load.[47] Inserts of real human hands, arms and legs were used to show complex actions that the puppets could not perform, such as operating machinery.[48] In a 1965 interview, Reg Hill estimated that the Supermarionation productions contained "three or four times" as much cutting as live-action features because the puppets' lack of facial expression made it impossible to sustain the viewer's interest "for more than a few seconds" per shot.[49]

The puppets' distinguishing features were their hollow fibreglass heads and the solenoids that powered their automatic mouth movements.[50] Character dialogue was recorded on two tapes.[31][34][51] One of these would be played during filming to guide the puppeteers and later provide the basis of the soundtrack; the other would be converted into a series of electrical signals.[31][34][51] Each marionette had two electrified wires that conducted the signals into its head; this contained a solenoid which, when operated by the signals, caused the puppet's lower lip to open and close with each syllable.[31][51][52] The heads of regular characters were entirely fibreglass; proto-heads were sculpted in clay or Plasticine and then encased in rubber (or silicone rubber) to create moulds, to which fibreglass resin was applied to create the finished shells. Guest characters were played by puppets called "revamps", whose faces were Plasticine sculpted on featureless fibreglass heads.[53] This allowed the revamps to be re-modelled from one episode to the next and play a wider range of characters.[54] Many regulars were modelled on contemporary Hollywood actors.[55] The puppets' eyes were moved by radio control.[56]

The placement of the lip-sync mechanism dictated the puppets' body proportions.[57] For all Supermarionation series up to Thunderbirds, the solenoid was located in the head. This meant that the head was oversized in relation to the rest of the body; the latter could not be scaled up to match as this would have made the puppets too bulky to operate effectively, besides requiring all of the set elements to be enlarged accordingly.[57][58] According to commentator David Garland, the disproportion was influenced partly by "aesthetic considerations ... the theory being that the head carried the puppet's personality".[59] It resulted in many puppets developing caricatured appearances, though Anderson stated that this was not intentional.[59][60]

Between Thunderbirds and Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons, the development of miniaturised electronic components prompted APF – now called Century 21 Productions – to create a new type of puppet. The option to downsize the components in the head was rejected in favour of moving the entire lip-sync mechanism to the chest, where it was connected to the mouth by a cable that ran through the neck.[58][61][62][63][64] This made it possible to shrink the heads and make the puppets of Captain Scarlet and later series in natural proportions.[62][63][64] Around this time, Century 21 also tried to make the puppets' faces more lifelike by crafting them in a new, flexible material, but the results proved unsatisfactory and the idea was abandoned.[61] As the reduced head size made it harder to sculpt faces in Plasticine, guest characters were now played by a group of permanent, all-fibreglass puppets that were made to the same standards of workmanship as the regular characters.[65] Likened to a "repertory company",[65] these puppets could be superficially altered from one appearance to the next – for example, by adding or removing facial hair.

In a 2002 interview, Anderson said that during the production of Captain Scarlet he was hoping to move into live-action television and that he endorsed the new puppets as a compromise for his inability to use live actors.[66] In 2006, he recalled that Century 21 had been "typecast" for its puppetry: "[S]o, knowing it was the only thing I could get finance for, I desperately wanted to make the thing look as close to live action as possible. And I think it was that that drove me on to bring in all the improvements and techniques."[60] Thom believes that the re-design reflected Anderson's desire for greater "realism and spectacle".[3]

Not all of Anderson's colleagues welcomed the change. Puppet sculptor and operator John Blundall pejoratively referred to the new puppets as "little humans" that lacked the personality of their precursors, also stating that the increased emphasis on realism hampered the puppeteers' creativeness.[59] Fellow sculptor Terry Curtis believed that the re-design took away the puppets' "charm".[40] According to director Desmond Saunders, APF was trying "anything to get [the puppets] to look like ordinary human beings. But they are not ordinary human beings! ... I often wonder it if would have been better to make them more like puppets, not less like puppets."[61] A drawback of the smaller heads was that they upset the weight distribution; this made the puppets harder to control, to a point where they would often have to be fixed to G-clamps to be kept steady.[59][67] In addition, problems achieving realistic depth of field made it considerably harder to film close-up shots.[67]

A major limitation of the marionettes was their inability to walk convincingly.[3][7][30][68] This was due to their low weight and the fact that the legs of each puppet were controlled by only two strings, which made complex articulation impossible.[69] According to Sylvia Anderson, the re-design exacerbated the puppets' core deficiencies: "The more realistic our puppets became, the more problems we had with them ... It was just possible to get away with the awkward moments in Thunderbirds because the proportions of the characters were still caricature. It was later when we had developed a more realistic approach ... that the still imperfect walk was [all] the more obvious."[70] To limit the need for leg movement, many scenes featuring walks were filmed from the waist up, with motion implied by a puppeteer holding the legs out of shot and bobbing the marionette up and down while pushing it forward.[71][72] Other scenes showed puppets standing, sitting or driving vehicles.[69] Tex Tucker, the hero of Four Feather Falls, avoids walking by riding a horse called Rocky, while the characters of Fireball XL5, Stingray and Thunderbirds achieve the same through use of personal hovercraft.[73][74][75] Supercar and Stingray's focus on their eponymous car and submarine, as well as Stingray's depiction of Commander Shore as a paraplegic confined to a futuristic "hoverchair", are examples of other devices used to overcome the puppets' lack of mobility.[3][7][46][76]

In a 1977 interview, Gerry Anderson said that the steps taken to make the puppets more lifelike were an attempt to "make the [puppet] medium respectable". On the preparations for Supercar, APF's first science-fiction production, he remembered "[thinking] that if we set the story in the future, there would be moving walkways and the puppets would be riding around in the car for much of the time, so it would be much easier to make them convincing." According to interviewer Kevin O'Neill, this use of future settings for greater realism "almost accidentally" ensured that all of APF's subsequent series would be science fiction.[68] In 2006, Anderson stated that the transition to this genre "wasn't a conscious move at all", but rather a natural progression given the basic deficiencies of the puppets.[77] Sylvia said that the reasons were budgetary, due to the fact that APF could not yet afford to work with live actors: "... we were picking subjects that we could easily do in miniature scale."[77]

David Garland calls character movement Anderson's "bête noire" and states that the puppets' limited mobility resulted in "vehicle-heavy science fiction" becoming his "preferred genre".[46] He considers the use of marionettes – the kind of puppet "perhaps most unsuited" to an action format – to be "one of the most striking paradoxes" of the Anderson productions.[78] Carolyn Percy of the Wales Arts Review comments that the inclusion of "futuristic vehicles" like Supercar allowed APF to devise "more exciting and imaginative scenarios" and "work around the limitations of the puppets ... to give their 'acting' the integrity to match the material."[50]

The final Supermarionation series, The Secret Service, used footage of live actors to such an extent that the result according to Stephen La Rivière was "half-way between live action and Supermarionation". Its protagonist, Stanley Unwin, was modelled on the comedian of the same name, who both voiced the puppet character and served as its human body double in long shots and other scenes where the puppet was impractical to use. According to Anderson, this was another way of avoiding the problem of lack of mobility: "I came up with the idea of getting Stanley Unwin to do all the walking shots, and driving shots in this Model Ford T [the character] had. If, for example, you had a sequence where Stanley Unwin would arrive at a building in his Model T, he would ... get out, walk down the path, and as soon as he opened the door, you'd cut to the reverse angle and that would be the puppet of Stanley Unwin ... I used Stanley Unwin, married to his own puppet, to enable him to do all the things that the puppet couldn't do."[79]

Special effects were created with miniature models and sets in a range of scales.[48] A wide variety of materials were used in their construction – for example, rock faces were made from painted blocks of polystyrene, while miniature vehicles incorporated recycled household objects and parts from toy model kits.[80][81] The lighting used for effects shooting was five times as strong as that normally used on a live-action production.[48] Effects were typically shot at high speed (72 to 120 frames per second) with the footage slowed down in post-production to give a sense of greater weight or steadiness, thus making the sequences look more realistic.[48][82][83] High-speed filming was essential for shots on water in order to make the small ripples inside the filming tank look like ocean waves.[82] As sets were built to scale, it was often hard to maintain a realistic sense of depth.[12][84]

Underwater sequences were filmed not in water, but on dry sets with a thin aquarium between the set and the camera to distort the lighting. Bubble jets and small fish were added to the aquarium to create forced perspective.[85] Beginning with Stingray, shots of aircraft in flight were filmed using a technique called the "rolling sky", which was devised by effects director Derek Meddings to allow filming of dynamic shots in confined space. It involved painting the sky background on a canvas, which was then wrapped around a pair of electrically driven rollers, and creating an impression of movement by running the canvas around the rollers in a continuous loop as opposed to moving the miniature aircraft itself.[86] Thunderbirds saw the introduction of the "rolling road", an adaptation of the technique whereby foreground, middleground and background elements of road sequences were created as separate rolls of looped canvas and spun at varying speeds.[87]

In the pursuit of realism, newly built models and sets were deliberately "dirtied down" with paint, oil, pencil lead and other substances to give them a used or weathered look.[88] Jetex propellant pellets were fitted to the undersides of miniature ground vehicles to emit jets of gas resembling dust trails.[89] Over time, the effects used for puppet gunfights became more elaborate: whereas gunshot effects in Four Feather Falls were created by simply painting marks on the film negative (which showed up as white flashes on the finished print), for later series the puppets' miniature prop guns were fitted with small charges that were fired using a car battery.[90]

The Andersons' puppet work also included The Investigator (1973), a pilot for an unmade Supermarionation series. This featured both marionettes and live actors but did not include the term "Supermarionation" in the credits.[110][111]

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