“So as a result,” adds Taylor, “he’s got frenetic energy that he’s bottling up. But at the same time he recognizes he has a level of genius that maybe even the emperor doesn’t have, but you have to temper that so that he doesn’t step out of his place in their own hierarchy.” He wants to please the emperor and yet get all the praise that’s coming from all the other Skeksis. “I always feel that he’s kind of in middle management. “The Scientist is a very wound up, uptight character,” notes Taylor. Taylor himself spoke lines for nine characters, with his most prominent character being The Scientist. “Then there’s the fact that you’ve got your arm above your head, and unless you’re a puppeteer, most human beings don’t walk around doing that in their daily life.”Īlthough the characters in Age of Resistance were ultimately voiced by actors such as Taron Egerton, Alicia Vikander and Mark Hamill, on set this was of course done by the puppeteers themselves, while also controlling the puppets.
“The heat in there generates very quickly,” says Taylor. Obviously, it’s like wearing several layers of bed covers over yourself with another human being in there.” It’s got several layers of fabric underneath it, and the details. If it looks like it’s very plush, then it is. And these costumes are made as if you were wearing them as an actor. “The Skeksis do like a lot of costume, they’re very fanciful in what they wear. It was also dealing with, in the case of The Scientist, the sheer weight of the costume he had to wear. It wasn’t just keeping track of all the action, the technical side of things, and performing the lines, adds Taylor. And of course, you need to have learned all your lines like any other actor and deliver them with the correct kind of delivery whilst navigating all this technicality.” They are watching a monitor offset to the side.” And they have to be able to hear me as well, and they can talk to me. “In the case of The Scientist,” details Taylor, “I’ve got a puppeteer who is working the eye mechanism and the brow. If that wasn’t already enough going on during shooting, there was also an outside puppeteer who would be operating any peripheral animatronics. “On top of that,” continues Taylor, “you are wearing a microphone and you’ve got an ear piece so that you can both hear Louis and other directions, but you can also hear the puppeteer who’s next you, who is on a com system.” That ultimately meant the monitor provided a quad-split for the puppeteers four shots of different compositions to keep track of. So that if on the Steadi-cam we come into shot and the camera moves onto somebody else or another piece of the action and you lose yourself, you’ve still got a reference.” We had a couple of cameras on the set that were just like sports cameras hidden in the rig above us or by a door somewhere, which gave us an overview of where the character was in the set. “And on top of that we also had witness cams. “You’ve got two shots on your monitor, which are both moving,” says Taylor. This aided in checking their performance was working.
The puppeteers could see the footage – live – on a monitor in front of them. “Then inside there was an assistant puppeteer, who’s quite literally tucked under my right armpit, and the whole Skeksis is strapped to my back.”ĭirector Louis Leterrier orchestrated the shoot so that the action was generally filmed with two cameras, including a Steadi-cam. “My right hand was in his head and then my left hand operates his left arm,” details Taylor. In terms of operating the puppet, about two-thirds of Taylor’s body was completely within The Scientist. With Taylor’s six foot stature, the result is that The Scientist sat around four feet tall. Then there was a false floor about two feet high. The set floor was actually removed, which means the set sat about four feet off the floor. When he was puppeteering a Skeksis character – Taylor’s main performance was as The Scientist – the puppeteer was concealed inside the costume of the puppet.
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