Moving The Puppets: Wrestling A Shark

Creating a stop-motion sequence is a slow, deliberate process of making tiny changes in the model, shooting one frame of film, making another change, shooting a frame, and so on. Most models are small and fairly easy to manipulate by hand, but the Jaguar Shark was particularly difficult to handle. Kohn had to turn to powerful motors to animate the shark puppet:

"We actually had the biggest puppet, some people said the biggest stop-motion puppet ever made, which was about eight feet long and about 130 lbs. And that thing, I barely even animated it. I animated the jaws and the gills and the fins and the tail and all that stuff. But to actually make it move, make the whole puppet move, that was done on these motion control rigs. Big, powerful motors that were on tracks. So the puppet had three or four controls...We'd say, the puppet goes from here to here in 200 frames. And we'd take the midpoint and move it back and forth on 24 frame increments, and then we'd offset it to the three behind it, and then we'd polish those, to make it look like the whole body was undulating."

Photo courtesy Justin Kohn
The mighty Jaguar Shark

"A 130 pound thing with joints as big as my hip joint would have been really hard for me to move it... When I had to make his head move, I had to put my whole body under the puppet and lift up, just to bend the joint with my legs, 'cause it was such a huge thing. But for the undulation of the body, it would have taken forever to animate it 200 frames with the size of the thing. So we let the go-motion rig do it."

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