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cademy Award-winning filmmak- er Guillermo del Toro joined forces with Emmy Award-winning stop-mo- tion veteran Mark Gustafson to direct a stunning new reimagining of Pinocchio, set in Mussolini-era Italy. Based on Carlo Collodi's classic tale of a wooden doll that comes to life, the film is a breathtak- ing adventure that explores the depths of grief and the transcendent power of love. Created in a richly-detailed stop-motion style with a stellar ensemble voice cast, the production creates a seamless syner- gy between classic handcrafted anima- tion and cutting-edge visual effects. HANDCRAFTING CHARACTERS Production designer Guy Davis, a fre- quent del Toro creative collaborator, de- signed expressive character puppets that would meet the demands of a stop-mo- tion animation workflow. Director of character fabrication Georgina Hayns worked closely with Mackinnon & Saunders, an industry leader in stop-mo- tion puppet production, to transform Davis' designs into workable figures with robust attributes. "Throughout the process, Guillermo was heavily involved in the look of the puppets on all levels," Hayns recalls. Centro Internacional de Animación, a Guadalajara-based animation studio founded by del Toro, also functioned as a second unit puppet department. Each character began as a clay ma- quette, which evolved into a full working puppet sculpt with detailed features and costume elements. The fabrication team referenced painters from around the turn of the 20 th century, particularly the work of Norman Rockwell and Andrew Wyeth. Animation supervisor Brian Leif Hansen began developing the puppets' move- ments with a series of preliminary tests of Geppetto's hands on ball-and-socket rigs interacting with props. "I think it really opened Guillermo's mind about what this might be," he recalls. Puppet maker Richard Pickersgill led the development of Pinocchio's unique design. "His body is his armature," Hayns explains. The puppet's construction combines ball-and-socket joints first developed for King Kong [1933], modern 3D-printed metal joints and plates, and a painted plastic shell. "With him being just a skeleton, there are lots of things that you normally would hide underneath," Hansen notes. "I would say that what Richard did with Pinocchio was an engineering mas- terpiece," Hayns adds. The faces of the film's puppets were primarily constructed with complex sys- tems of interlocking paddles and gears beneath a layer of silicone skin, allowing animators to manipulate their features with meticulous precision. The Pinocchio puppet, however, utilized a "rapid prototyping" expression system rather than mechanical elements. A collection of swappable 3D-printed plastic facial plates allowed the character to appear as if carved from wood. ESTABLISHING AN AESTHETIC A sample fabric swatch for Spazzatura's red-and-white striped pants led to a breakthrough in the film's design pro- cess. After reviewing samples created with various painting, printing and stitching techniques, this particular piece struck a chord with Hayns and art direc- tor Robert DeSue. "The lines of the makeup of how the colors were put together in the stitch lines was perfectly imperfect," Hayns recalls. "That became the signature of what our movie was going to be…all from a little swatch of fabric." The film's story includes a wide range of sequences ranging from choreo- graphed musical numbers to intimate emotional moments, all requiring a tremendous amount of planning. During pre-production, del Toro and Gustafson met with the animation team to outline a set of guidelines that emphasized a meticulously-handcrafted aesthetic while rejecting an overreliance on comput- er-generated animation. "We all agreed that we shouldn't hide the stop-motion. We didn't want to hide the fact that they were puppets," notes Hansen. "In stop-motion nowadays, you can easily make it so fluid that it could be mistaken for any computer simulation." SEAMLESS VFX INTEGRATION With a distinctive visual style in place, it was essential for the film's visual effects to be seamlessly integrated into the over- arching handcrafted vision. VFX studio Mr. X, now a part of MPC, came aboard to deliver the digital components that would bring the entire vision together. It was important to decide what could be achieved practically and what would be best delegated to the visual effects team. "The mantra going into the stop-mo- tion shoot from Mark and Guillermo was, 'If we can build it, if there's a way to do this practically, we're going to figure it GUILLERMO DEL TORO'S PINOCCHIO BY KENDRA RUCZAK KRUCZAK@CGW.COM CREATING SEAMLESS SYNERGY BETWEEN TRADITIONAL STOP-MOTION ANIMATION AND CUTTING-EDGE VFX A ANIMATION www.postmagazine.com 14 POST NOV/DEC 2022 Director del Toro and the film's lead, during production.