CMS Intern, and Dick Smith Scholarship Recipient, Wayne
Anderson gives us his report:
Our first stop was at Rick Lazzarini’s “The Character Shop” where they
specialize in animatronic animals, puppets, robots, creatures
and characters. Feature films [they’ve done] include Aliens, Mimic, Snakes on a Plane, Nightmare on Elm Street, Ghostbusters
II, and many, many more. They’ve also
worked on a pile of commercials for major companies like Cadbury chocolate, DiGiorno pizza, Sprint and Budweiser.
Rick Lazzarini shows
us an animatronic Puma. Foam latex is used for the skin of the Puma and the skull
is made out of vacuform plastic, the whole thing’s hollow so Rick can run all
the cables and servos. Rick used radio controls to give
the Puma life. Just the head can be outfitted with 20 plus servos! Rick explained
how the radio controller transmits to the servos that pull and push cables to
give the puma expressions.
In
the front you can see the “Foster Imposters,” a pair of goofy
chicken character puppets from TV spots for Foster Farms. On the upper shelf are a grinning trio of “Desperate
Hyenas” from Cadbury ads. The hyenas have rod-controlled head and legs, with
animatronic facial expressions .
Just looking around the Character
shop you’ll be inspired to start creating your own animatronic puppet!
Next stop was ADI. ADI is known for
animatronics, animals, specialty costumes, makeup and human replicas. Alec Gillis and Tom Woodruff Jr. are the
owners of ADI. You can see their work in some of the biggest hit movies like: AVP: Alien vs. Predator , Death Becomes Her (Academy
Award Winner), ALIEN 3 (Academy Award Nominee),
Hollow Man ( Academy Award Nominee), and Starship Troopers (Academy Award Nominee). We couldn’t take
many photos at ADI because they’re working on a new movie that is strictly
confidential.
As CMS students arrived, we signed
disclosure agreements and handed over our cameras so pictures were limited.
We did get to snap one shot of the Predator
bust from AVP and models of the Aliens
to its right.
We had a really great time at both
shops! The pros were very nice, super knowledgeable and happy to answer all of
our questions!
-W.A.
Rick Lazarrini, via Twitter, had even higher praise for Wayne
and the rest of the group from CMS:
“It was AWESOME! Lots of talented
and interested students with great questions took the tour. Hope to see ‘em in
the workplace!”
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