Dancing Brains

by
John Roberts from PuppetCraft
December 2008

It started with a telephone call:
“Do you make marionettes?”
“Yes.”
“Can you make us two for a TV advert?”
“Sure. When do you need them?”
“In two weeks time”
“*^%…???>!”
Well… I managed to make them in 3 weeks. Three weeks of very late nights and help from other makers to do painting, hair and costumes…. and at last two marionettes based on the Thunderbird puppet Brains were ready. I tried to get an original Brains puppet as a reference, but all I had to work from were hundreds of still photos and video clips. I managed to chat to John Blundell to get some background on the techniques used to create the original puppet, but otherwise it was a case of trying to please a team of advertising agency producers, designers, directors, and the client.

Although the puppet had to LOOK like the original Brains, it had to perform the most un-Thunderbird-like moves: that was the idea of the advert: “Drink this particular bottled water and… dance like this!” So I had to devise techniques to achieve shoulder shrugs, hip trusts, spins, water drinking, etc.

When I was given a video of a dancer doing the moves that were wanted, I realised we needed five highly skilled string-puppet operators. I was able to get Ronnie LeDrew on board, who arranged the rest of the team: Sue Dacre, Libby Granger and Sarah Wright. It seems a lot of hands to work just one small puppet, but most moves needed three puppeteers, while sometimes all five of us crowded in to work a complex two-second take. We were able work close to the puppet, as we were later wiped out by the magic of CGI. This did require us to wear “lovely” pink head-to-toe suits, so we would not cast other colours onto the bright pink set. We had a few days to rehearse the moves, with a choreographer and two fantastic dancers taking us through the routine. The dancers were also wearing strange costumes with reflective markers all over them, so that their moves were recorded and used to generate computer images that were mixed in with the images from the puppet. Then it was two long days of on-set filming….. and a few months of postproduction work before the advert hit the telly and the Internet in May /June.

It has been a hugely successful advert with millions of viewings on YouTube, and people making their own versions based on the puppet’s moves. The advert cost £5.5million…. unfortunately not a lot of this went to the puppeteers. We should have charged more!

Why did I make two puppets? One head needed a moving mouth for the drinking shot. Two sets of hands were used for different moves. The other bits of the second puppet were never used for filming, but have now been put together so the advertising agency has one for display and the other to take around for promotions. As someone once said: “Two Brains are better than one”

Brains head being carved, with cardboard glasses!!