Skin and Stone

So about the show! Firebird, in the last three months of pre-production, has been all about textures.

Texture is so important to me. It's why I prefer working in three dimensions. Even when I do concept drawings, I love starting with something like crayon or pastel to get into that tactile space straight away. (Also I don't draw very well so pastels let me smudge and pummel the picture into shape once it's on the paper.)

Wood and wire and old bits of sponge

Human skin is the most amazing thing.  It takes some effort to find a material that is as flexible, durable and both firm and elastic enough to do all the things we demand of it.  It takes colour very well and lights like a dream - it's no wonder we've been using it in the Being-Human industry for so long.  Of course, it's far too expensive, not to  mention ethically questionable to use it on puppets.  So I've tended to work in the past with clay and silicone both of which give you a good texture and flexibility. Particularly when it comes to lip sync.

But there is something about clay, maybe it's the translucence or the range of colours or perhaps just the fact that you can't put make up on it that always makes it look a bit like cartoon.  It would have been totally inappropriate to the mood of the production to have the characters looking like Shaun the Sheep.

I was curious to try latex faced puppets for this one because there's a kind of rugged tension in a rubber skin that makes a puppet look desperate and taut.  I followed an inspiration from Alberto Giacometti to build these craggy skeletal creatures that could only really have wire armatures.

I'd used latex in the past to make costumes:  It gives them a nice, controllable, bounce-back characteristic, and you can glue it rather than sew, but using it as a sculpting medium was new for me.  Build-up techniques poached from Nick Hilligoss got me underway and I learned things about rubber that will serve me for very long time indeed. Like: You only need a TINY amount of thickener!

The monastery is a mix of clay and plaster rendering

The monastery was always going to be in the mountains.  Movie Monasteries are, aren't they?  Of course it has to be remote.  I want that sense of alienation - like it's not even necessarily anywhere on earth.  When you're as devastated as my main character here, anywhere you go you're going to feel a bit distant and isolated.

However, I do want the monastery to be inherently organic - it starts out looking forbidding and lonesome but it needs to develop into something nurturing and strong.

As a child I went on a school camping trip on the slopes of the volcanic Mt Meru. There was a quality in the solidified lava flows that I can't describe but I returned a different person in very important and necessary ways.  In my mind, I guess this film is set on that mountain....