Portland puppet maker Georgina Hayns, pictured working at the "Puppet Hospital," led a team of artists who made the roughly 200 puppets featured in a new, stop-motion animation version of "Pinocchio" by Oscar-winning director Guillermo del Toro.
Shadow Machine/Netflix
In a career spanning more than three decades, Georgina Hayns has been making puppets that have been brought to life through the art of stop-motion animation on TV shows and feature films like “Bob the Builder” and Tim Burton’s “Corpse Bride.” But instead of relying on computers to do the animating, the characters in stop-motion animation are made by hand from materials like clay, latex and silicone. They are then animated by being positioned on sets and moved in tiny increments, with each movement recorded frame by frame.
Today, Hayns is the director of character fabrication at ShadowMachine, a stop-motion animation studio in Portland. She recently led a team of artists who made 200 puppets for an animated, Academy Award-winning version of “Pinocchio” by director Guillermo del Toro. She joins us to talk about working on the film, the opportunity that led her to leave her native England for Portland and the enduring appeal of an avowedly analog style of filmmaking.
The following transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer:
Dave Miller: How did you get started in puppet making?
Georgina Hayns: It’s a long story. Many years ago, it kind of goes back to being at school and being really good at art, but struggling with some of the academia. I think back then, I don’t know whether I had a problem with concentration, or whether it was … anyway, I wasn’t great at academia.
Miller: So you say school, you mean grade school?
Hayns: Grade school, yeah. Which [was] back in England. So I was very lucky that my parents really encouraged the artistic side of my personality, and when it came to … so I sort of got through school and decided I wanted to go off to college, but I really didn’t know what I wanted to do. I loved painting, drawing, sewing, all kinds of arts and crafts. So trying to focus all of that into one particular area was really hard for me. So I went off to do an art foundation course, which was all kinds of art. You get to sort of taste a little bit of every kind of art discipline, and I really enjoyed jewelry and I still enjoyed sewing. So still I was quite confused as to what I wanted to sort of narrow in on . . .
Miller: Because you like all these different aspects of art and craft?
Hayns: Exactly, yeah.
Miller: It seems like both a benefit and a drawback in an academic setting where you’re going to, maybe they’re going to try to propel you to focus on one thing.
Hayns: Yeah, absolutely. I was always kind of rebelling against that. I was like, ‘no, no, I want to do it all’. So at the same time, my dad was really into antique collecting and antique dealing, and I got dragged along to antique fairs. And through that I was sort of like, I don’t want to get into antiques. But through that I sort of decided . . . I found old dolls, Victorian dolls. And I bought one of these when my dad bought me one of these dolls. It got some things wrong with it and it needed some costume work on it. So I kind of started to restore this doll and really enjoyed it. It was tapping into everything that I thought I enjoyed doing and I was good at. So this was at the time that I was doing this foundation course, and I went in to see my art lecturers and said ‘I know what I’m gonna do with my life, I’m gonna make dolls.’ And they were really disappointed because they were these hippie fine artists, sort of abstract artist,s and they were like ‘no no no but your drawing skills and your painting skills, you can do more than making dolls and . . .’
Miller: What would it have meant to make dolls?
Hayns: To make dolls. So for me at that point in where I was at, it was going to be making ceramic headed dolls. So designing dolls, sculpting them, making them, making their clothes, which is actually what I ended up doing. But my shortcut to get around my art lecturers was thinking, I had this idea, ‘well wait a minute, puppets or an artistic form of doll’. So I went in the next day and went “what if I made puppets?’ And they loved it. They just, you know … it worked, my plan worked. But then I suddenly realized I don’t know anything about puppets. So I dived into.
In those days I went to the video shop and I got anything that had puppets on the front, on the cover. And one of those was Jim Henson’s Dark Crystal. And when I watched that film, it changed my life. Because if you think about it, Dark Crystal, the puppets in that are very doll-like, and I’m just ‘oh wow, I want to make this. How do I make this?’ So in my head that’s when I really sort of started to get an idea of an avenue to go with my career and training and art college, whatever. And I started to look around to see if there were any courses in puppet making, which of course there aren’t very many courses in puppet making, you sort of get into puppet making either through arts courses or through media theater courses. So I ended up sort of accidentally falling into, well, finding a course in Manchester, which was a film and tv course. I went to look around it and one of the previous students had a room full of Jim Henson-style Dark Crystal puppets. Okay, I’m coming here! He said that he was the first and only person that had ever made puppets at this place.
Miller: But you saw them and they spoke to you?
Hayns: They did, they did, yeah, and it’s interesting because that form of puppet making is live action and animatronic in a much bigger scale than what I ended up doing.
Miller: Well, let’s get to what you ended up doing because it’s really important and in some ways it seems like it hasn’t changed that much in 100-plus years. For people who need to hear this, we need to be reminded, can you just describe the basics of stop-motion animation?
Hayns: Yes. So as we’ve just mentioned, it’s a cinematic art form. Age old cinematic art form. It’s been around since film was invented. It’s basically taking an inanimate object and moving it frame by frame. So there’s 24 frames that make one second of film. And if you take any inanimate object and move it 24 frames and take an image, 24 images, and then play them back at real time, that object will move. So in the early days, you know, they would just get maybe a stone and roll across the table and something as simple as that. But then you look at films like King Kong. King Kong was the original. 1930s King Kong was a stop-motion puppet. So that puppet was fabricated with an internal framework that could hold its body and weight in space 24 frames for a second of film.
Miller: So what has changed in terms of – a lot of change in terms of moviemaking – but what’s changed in terms of stop-motion animation since King Kong or even since, I don’t know, 25 years ago?
Hayns: It’s interesting, because certain things are really very similar to how they were all those years ago. But then with technology moving in leaps and bounds every day and computer technology, one of the things that we’ve all embraced is 3D printing. So 3D printing in stop-motion probably I would say Laika really pushed this and invented the use of using a 3D printer to help with the performance of replacement facial animation.
Miller: This needs to be explained. So what does that mean, replacement facial animation?
Hayns: Well, in stop-motion animation, there’s really three different ways that you can make facial expressions on a puppet.
Miller: That seems like one of the most challenging things because we pay so much attention. We know what a face should look like, even if it’s fanciful. We were very practiced as humans at reading faces.
Hayns: Absolutely.
Miller: So what are the three ways?
Hayns: Okay, so the three ways, if you’ve seen an Aardman film or tv show Wallace and Gromit etcetera, that is claymation. And actually that has roots in Portland because Will Vinton actually invented claymation as we know it. Aardman continues using that. That is taking a clay head and sculpting each expression. So you’re literally sculpting the mouth shapes in between each frame. There’s then replacement animation, which kind of is similar to claymation, but it’s taking a mask with a mouth shape for each vowel and each shape of the mouth and replacing that mask each time.
Miller: So you’re having multiple face masks and that would go on top of a puppet that has an empty face?
Hayns: Exactly, yes. You have to have some kind of keying system and usually it will be the mouths that you swap in and out.
Miller: But if you were going to just have a character, do a basic smile, how many masks might you need?
Hayns: Well, depending on how long that smile is going to take, you can have anything from 1 to 24 to 48 depending. So if that person is talking while they’re smiling, you’re going to need more faces. And I can jump into how technology has helped that. With computer 3D printing, it allows you to generate way more mouth shapes than how we had traditionally done it before. Where we sculpted the mouth shapes, we molded the mouth shapes, we cast the mouth shapes, and we painted the mouth shapes. So that’s one of the areas that technology has really helped us.
Miller: And then there would be a box that just has all these masks for sly smile number two?
Hayns: Exactly, yes. So when it comes to replacement facial technology, it has changed so dramatically in the last 20 years. It allows characters to emote to another level. All those little nuances. But sometimes it’s almost too perfect.
Miller: What do you mean by that?
Hayns: Well, I think for me and for many people, the joy of stop-motion animation is the imperfections that make it the tactile quality, the materials that go into . . . you know that you’re looking at a real thing in a real space. And sometimes when it’s got computer generated faces, even though they’re three dimensional . . .
Miller: And even though you’re taking a picture every single time it’s true stop-motion?
Hayns: It’s sometimes it’s a little something that’s a little too real with it.
Miller: It’s like some version of the Uncanny Valley when it comes to stop-motion animation. It’s fascinating the way you’re talking about that there should be something, or from your perspective, slightly imperfect about this. Because recently my kids, they keep asking to watch the Rudolph the Rednosed Reindeer animation from, I think the early sixties, and that is, the dolls are fuzzy and, and from moment to moment, it’s nowhere close to perfect, but in a way that it is so different from the very slick and maybe boring digital stuff that they often watch that, they haven’t said this to me, but I’m wondering if that’s why they like it, the weirdness of it and the fuzz of it and the just bits of dust flying around.
Hayns: Well, yeah, it’s like real life. Nothing’s perfect. If it was perfect, if our lives were perfect, it would be slightly boring, dull and boring. We would all look the same and we would all move the same. So I think that it’s getting that happy medium.
Miller: How do you do that? Because I mean, people at the highest level – and you’re working for legendary, Oscar-winning directors – I can imagine they might want things to be perfect. How do you figure out when and how to show your work, in a sense?
Hayns: Well, I mean it’s not just me that’s figuring that out. And I think with someone like Guillermo, he had a very clear vision and this actually brings in the other form of facial animation that we’ve not discussed yet, which is mechanical animation. So, mechanical animation again has been around for a long time. And that is it’s essentially like the body of a stop-motion puppet. It has an internal skeleton that we call an armature in a skull, set into a skull, and it’s lots of tiny little ball and socket joints and gears that manipulate the face and the animate. It has a silicon skin over the top of it. So like a human or an animal skin. And the animator is in control of the performance of that puppet. So they are moving that silicon skin from the outside frame by frame to get the expression.
Miller: And when you say the animator, that’s a very specific role in these works. You’re a puppet maker and you’re in charge of a big team of puppet makers.
Hayns: An incredible team!
Miller: How many people for just your team for Pinocchio?
Hayns: So for the puppet department, it’s sort of a range between 40-50 artists, engineers and craftspeople. And I do like to sort of make sure that the world knows. I’m just one person who’s trying to help orchestrate and make these puppets, but it’s the team that really does the making.
Miller: And then what does an animator do in this context?
Haynes: Yes. So then the animator is like the actor in a film, the animal takes the puppet and literally moves that puppet frame by frame and brings it to life. And that’s one of the most magical moments for us as a team of puppet makers, is when we hand that puppet – a finished puppet – over to the animator, and they put personality into it. Suddenly you’ll see this character you’ve been working on for sometimes up to a year suddenly walk across a set with life and expression, and it’s very special. So they’re amazing human beings, because where does somebody learn not only to be an actor, but to channel that through an inanimate object that they bring to life?
Miller: 200 puppets. What does it mean to make 200 different puppets for a single movie?
Hayns: Well, the great fun thing about Pinocchio is that we had different teams working on those 200 puppets. So we had a big team in Portland on site which is where we filmed it. And we probably made, I would say, 150 of those puppets. But then we were working with the team in England, Mackinnon and Saunders who were actually the people that trained me. I had worked with them many years ago. They had already been brought into the project by Guillermo because of their experts in head mechanics. So they did some of the hero characters in England. And then we also work with a small team of puppet makers and animators in Guadalajara, Mexico, which is where Guillermo is from, and they were working on them.
When you say 200 puppets, it’s not 200 different puppets. When you get involved in a movie like this, it’s broken down before you start: making the puppets, as to how many animators they’re going to need, how many sets they’re going to need, how long it’s gonna take to make this movie, and therefore how many of each character they’re going to need. So you know on Pinocchio, we had around about 30 animators, and they were shooting on about 55 stages, so it meant that if they all needed a Pinocchio in their shot, we had to make 30 Pinocchios. So we had around about 30 Pinocchios, and then as it gets to the sort of lesser characters in the movie, you make less of them. But that’s one of the challenges about making a stop-motion puppet. You make the first one, but you have to set up the process for a production line of making duplicates so they’re all the same.
Miller: You came to Portland to work at Laika and the first big movie you worked on here was Coraline. What was that experience like?
Hayns: It was amazing. It was terrifying, amazing.
Miller: What was terrifying about it, and what was amazing about it?
Hayns: So the terrifying part of it was that I left, I uprooted from England and came to Portland. I didn’t know anybody here. So it was a huge life change for me. And then it was his first stop-motion feature film. So the amazing thing was we were building a studio, we were making our first feature working for Henry Selick who you know was already a world famous stop-motion director at that point, from Nightmare Before Christmas and James and the Giant Peach. It was an incredible sort of coming together of what has ended up being a foundation of artists in Portland that now are working across three to four different studios, working on feature films, not just Laika feature films. ShadowMachine and Netflix funded two films over the last four years in stop-motion. And then Laika’s working on theirs. So it was sort of like the birth of this industry, even though Will Vinton had already … he was the founder of stop-motion I would say in Portland, and he had started all of that. But Coraline took it to a bigger level.
Miller: The 21st century version of it. Where would you put Portland right now on the global map in terms of stop-motion animation?
Hayns: I would say it’s probably at the head of it.
Miller: The global capital?
Haynes: Yeah, the global capital of stop-motion.
Miller: And is it as simple as saying that Laika was a magnet, following Will Vinton that brought people here, or do you think there’s something about Portland that makes it a good fit for stop-motion?
Hayns: I think it’s all of the above. I think that Laika was able to thrive as a stop-motion studio here, because it’s Portland, Oregon. Because it’s a creative city. When I moved here, I was only intending to stay a year and a half, and here I am 16 years later. And it’s not just because of the work. It’s also because of the environment, just the love of the arts here. There was already a great sort of talent pool here of artists, engineers and crafts people who, with a little bit of training, could become part of our world of stop-motion, either in carpentry, or in metal skeleton building. It was already primed to work.
Miller: What do you see? We’re talking about dozens or hundreds of people, but I wonder if you think that you’ve found commonalities in terms of people who gravitate to stop-motion in particular?
Hayns: Maybe. I do think what’s amazing about stop-motion is the diversity of people that work with us. It’s an amazing world that like myself when I was growing up, I was struggling with who I was and what I wanted to do with my life. And I do think stop-motion gives people like myself a home in the world and gives them a career, and you can . . .
Miller: Outsiders to some extent?
Hayns: Outsiders. Absolutely, because we’re all outsiders. Yeah, we’re a family of outsiders.
Miller: From an outside perspective, meaning someone who’s not obviously a stop-motion animator, it has always seemed that what you do requires two things that could be at odds: the whimsy and weirdness and creativity to create these often fantastical creatures, and then an incredible level of discipline. And when I say this, I think it would go for animators as well. But if you’re talking about something that has to move in these very specific parameters and do these things and be you know, one 24th of of a second of a smile or of whatever, making your mouth in an O shape, to have that be combined with the kind of the looseness that I imagine is also necessary, that seems like a really hard combination.
Hayns: Yeah. I mean, I think the other thing to remember when you’re so from a puppet making standpoint, when you’re making a puppet, it’s not just one person that’s making one puppet. It is a group of you. So I think everybody has their part to play in multiple characters. And I think that’s what keeps the interest. And then all of these people that my team I work alongside with, they’re all masters in . . .
Miller: Fabric or whatever.
Haynes: Yeah, we have absolutely, and that’s what they live for. I’m an interesting one because I’ve got the very personable side and the artistic side. And I think that that’s what allowed me to do the job that I’m doing, which is the sort of creative overseeing, of reminding artists to talk to the artist next door to them all the time, because artists naturally want to just go into their own little world and focus on their own thing. But when you’re working, especially on a feature film, you’ve all got to understand where your part of the puppet making process plays in the bigger picture of the puppet build. So you might be making the internal skeleton, but that internal skeleton has got to go straight to the casting department, who puts the skin on it once the skin on it, then that puppet’s got to go to the costume department to have costumes patterned onto it. So it’s a team that’s working together. And the great thing is there’s always a great camaraderie, there’s laughter. There’s tears sometimes, but most of the time it’s laughter.
Miller: Have you at your level, are you able to take puppets home and keep them forever after a production? At least some from the films you work on?
Hayns: I have one puppet from one of the films that I worked on at Laika.
Miller: Only one out of all the ones you worked on? You couldn’t grab some Coralines that were just hanging around here or there?
Hayns: No, they don’t hang around, because they’re very very valuable objects. At the end of filmmaking we take them out and exhibit them around the globe. We had a wonderful exhibition at PAM, at Portland Art Museum several years ago which was the work of Laika. And because we hadn’t given all the puppets away, we were able to show an exhibit of the history of all of the puppets from the different shows that they worked on.
Miller: So you only have one then, which one do you have?
Hayns: I have a ParaNorman puppet.
Miller: Did you choose that one in particular?
Hayns: I did yes.
Miller: Why?
Hayns: Well, it was actually while I was at the end of working on ParaNorman, and Travis Knight asked me which character I would like, and I said I would love that ParaNormal puppet. But even more special than that is when I left my crew made a puppet of myself and my dog, which is astonishing.
Miller: It would have to be good not to be creepy if you know what you look like.
Hayns: It was.
Miller: That’s a labor of love. Georgina Hayns, thanks very much for coming in.
Hayns: Thank you so much.
Miller: That is Georgina Hayns, director of character fabrication for stop-motion at ShadowMachine. It’s an animation studio in Portland, director of character fabrication for Guillermo Del Toro’s Pinocchio.
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