Brian Henson The Jim Henson Company

By Kristin Brzoznowski

Whether it’s puppets, animatronic creatures or real-time animation, Jim Henson’s Creature Shop brings characters to life that are full of personality and expression. The shop continues to innovate its groundbreaking technology, the Henson Digital Puppetry Studio, which allows performers to puppeteer and voice beautifully rendered CG characters in real time. Brian Henson, producer, director, writer, puppeteer and chairman of the board at The Jim Henson Company, takes TV Kids inside the pioneering studio.

TV KIDS: Tell us about the ethos at the heart of Jim Henson’s Creature Shop.

HENSON: We’re entertainers at heart, so it’s part of the soul of Jim Henson’s Creature Shop to create charac ters—not special effects—that can deliver nuanced performances for our shows and our thirdparty clients’ productions.

TV KIDS: What role does innovation play?

HENSON: We often begin a production with a challenge that we have no idea exactly how we’re going to deliver, but we’re confident we can figure it out. And that’s where innovation comes in. We are always solving problems that no one’s ever solved. And we’re searching for the innovation that will solve that problem in a way that’s better than falling back on old techniques.

For example, our series Dinosaurs was so complicated because of the animatronics and long shooting hours for the performers. We realized if we could build a digital character and perform it like an animatronic character, it would be easier on the performers and allow us to create our unique approach to animation, the Henson Digital Puppetry Studio.

There’s a feeling of spontaneity that gives a realness to the characters. It doesn’t have the precision of keyframe animation. Instead, it has a looseness that’s more organic and, in our minds, a more delightful way to create and perform a character.

TV KIDS: How does it differ from other approaches to performed animation or motion capture?

HENSON: We are producing the final animation much more efficiently. We develop characters in their environments in advance, and then we’re in production—doing everything in that one production step just like you would in live action and jumping over all of the intermediate steps and extra work of traditional keyframe animation. While other motion-capture animation systems are creating characters and later deciding how to shoot it, we remove all that extra work and capture it all in real time—the movement, the lighting, the props, everything. There’s a great efficiency in that.

TV KIDS: What are some of the latest innovations?

HENSON: Most recently, we’ve been able to work with Epic Games to integrate their Unreal Engine into the real-time rendering of our whole system. Now, when we’re in production, our imagery is at full resolution, so we can incorporate real-time lighting, and the director of photography can adjust lighting in real time, and a finished (or nearly finished) animated product is coming off the floor. Since it’s CG, we can still make adjustments in postproduction if we want to, which is terrific. We’re getting the best of both worlds: the spontaneous performance of puppetry with the endless possibilities of CG animation.