Mois
Active Member
Agree 100%.
The arms and hands look too thin as well - it's lost that "tough" feel and comes across as too elegant.
Maybe not gay, but definitely ghey.
Terminator 1984 - Stop Motion Puppet Endoskeleton
- Thread starter nick daring
- Start date
Agree 100%.
The arms and hands look too thin as well - it's lost that "tough" feel and comes across as too elegant.
Maybe not gay, but definitely ghey.
Contec
Master Member
jkno
Legendary Member
Well, the skirt and handbag sure diden't help with the tough image they wanted..
lollol:lol
Darth_Pain
Well-Known Member
The CM endo rules! You guys are just mad you don't have one.
Seriously though, I think the CM has lineage to the original puppet. The SWS guys made a copy for Stan and then George (CM) made theirs from Stan Winstons maquette. I'm just not sure if they made Stan's maquette from the T1 puppet or one used in T2.
Seriously though, I think the CM has lineage to the original puppet. The SWS guys made a copy for Stan and then George (CM) made theirs from Stan Winstons maquette. I'm just not sure if they made Stan's maquette from the T1 puppet or one used in T2.
I've been reading a massive fan written biography on James Cameron called in which there a is a big chunk of info collected about the stop-motion Endo puppet. I thought I'd post it here for posterity-
The final job Fantasy II had was the stop-motion Terminator puppet. As noted in Chapter 5,Cameron had envisioned the T-800 endoskeleton shots being done through stop-motion animation.But Winston had told Cameron, “Jim, I really think we can create the endo full-size and get a lot of performance out of the real thing, doing it with puppetry and animatronics.” This, obviously, was visionary of Winston and wise of Cameron, because the full-size puppet had worked out terrifically, asnoted in Chapter 6. However, a number of shots of the Terminator still needed to be achieved through stop-motion animation. Gene Warren says, “While the whole film could have been done with only thefull-scale model, it would have meant another six months in post-production. ….Miniature stop-motionis used when you need a particular kind of action [displaying] the entire puppet. This is used when, for monetary and technological reasons, it becomes too difficult to do in full scale.”
Doug Beswick was the leader of the miniature puppet's construction team. Gene Warren says,“[Beswick] had a couple of helpers on it, whom he supervised. Doug worked closely with Stan as he built the full-sized one. Stan had to keep making changes in the large version and Doug had to wait for the parts to come out. If changes were made on something he'd already done, Doug would have to change his model to match Stan's.”
So, since Stan Winston Studios was responsible for the actual design of the robot, and since the full-size puppet was shot first, all of Fantasy II's work depended upon Stan Winston and his team first finishing their work. And since Stan Winston's team took longer than anticipated (finishing the puppet so late that Cameron never had time to rehearse with it), Fantasy II necessarily fell behind as aresult. Peter Kleinow, who would do the animating on the puppet that Beswick built, said that StanWinston Studios's falling behind schedule meant that he had “six weeks chopped right off the animation schedule.”
In constructing the puppet, Beswick's goal was to simply copy Winston's work, piece for piece.He says, “We worked very closely with Stan Winston. As soon as he completed each piece, we would copy it exactly, only on a scale one-third the size.” While the full-sized puppets parts were predominantly cast from molds, the tiny components for the miniature were usually machined out of aluminum. There were “hundreds” of these parts. Some of them were so tiny that traditional machining techniques – milling and screwing – didn't have the dexterity to craft them in the same detail as the full-sized puppet, and so Beswick and his team had to carve and sculpt them by hand.Two things that were not aluminum were its feet. Beswick explains, “The feet were made out of steel,for extra strength. Since the ankle joints had to support a two-foot tall puppet – which is pretty goodsize – and since they were human proportioned and thus very small in relation to the rest of the figure,they had to be the strongest joints in the puppet.”
As one can imagine, this was an extremely arduous process. Even once all the parts werefinally crafted, Beswick says that his team, “spent about two full weeks assembling the model.” Theythen painted chrome on the miniature to match the look of the full-sized puppet. All told, it reportedly took Beswick and his team five months to build it versus a planned three months. Sounding very proud, Beswick says, “I feel it was worth the extra effort, though. The end result is what everybody remembers, and that robot segment was very important.”The work was then handed over to Peter Kleinow who would painstakingly move Beswick's puppet, one-twenty-fourth of a second at a time. But, Gene Warren says, its late arrival to the animator, “put a big crunch on this part of the operation....we had very little time to familiarize ourselves with the model.”One unusual difficulty Kleinow had for this puppet was its size.
According to Kleinow, “the larger the puppet, the less control you have over it.” Of course, this puppet had to be larger because, as Kleinow notes, “the detail on the full-scale puppet was so great that we couldn't go any smaller and still have working detail.” This made the animation that much more time-consuming and cumbersome. “The difficulty in animating a larger puppet is a question of using reference points. When you're animating, you set up a reference gauge over the puppet so that you know you're always moving it in the same direction. If you have to set up a whole bunch of reference points,it makes it much more complicated. On a big puppet,you can't get by with just one reference point – you need two or three gauges.”
(See sidebar.)
The basic procedure for Kleinow was to use rear-projection plates from the movie behind the puppet, then take a photograph of them together.Next, advance the rear-projection footage one frame,move the Terminator puppet accordingly, and repeat that process 24 times per second of film-time. So, it might seem that, issues with the puppet's large size aside, animating the Terminator in stop-motion would be a relatively straightforward – however laborious –process. However, there were two major challenges involved with the stop-motion in The Terminator that don't exist in the cartoons that might be most commonly associated with stop-motion (such as the Christmas cartoons like Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer).
First, the angle of the Terminator had to match the angle from the “plates” (this is an absolute requirement for every type of composite in film and video production). For some shots, such as when the Terminator is charging toward the factory floor, this wouldn't be much of a problem: the plates were shot at eye-level, so they simply needed to photograph the Terminator and the plates from about the eye-level of the puppet. But there were a few shots where the plates were at fairly extreme angles. So there, Kleinow had to set up the puppet so that it precisely matched the angle of the shot.This is not as easy as it sounds, because the rear-projection plate and the camera must always be symmetrically locked together (because, if the camera was at an extremely low angle looking up at the2D background plate, the background plate's 2D nature would be exposed; it would look like the Terminator was standing in front of falling poster-board.) Gene Warren says that, “We experimented with tilting the set at a funny angle, but then the animation became virtually impossible because of the effect of gravity. On a two-legged [puppet], when it's walking and it's on one leg in mid-step, the leverage puts it off-balance.”
The second major challenge was that,although the Terminator puppet would always bein front of the plate (it's called “rear-screen projection”, after all!), very often the Terminator was supposed to be behind objects in the foreground. For instance, there was a plate of Reese battering the Terminator with a pipe(which was just empty air on the footage for theplate) where the two are standing behind a handrail and other obstacles. If Kleinow just shot the puppet in front of that plate, the handrail wouldn't obscure the Terminator in the frame,and the illusion would be totally shattered. So,for each of the shots where there's an obstacle inthe foreground, Kleinow, Gene Warren, and others at Fantasy II had to actually re-create those foreground sets in miniature, and then match them up in the shot. Kleinow says, “That was extremely complicated, not because of the construction, but because the miniature had to be foreshortened to match the plate because the camera angles were all weird. ….If you could have seen the foreground pieces on the set you would swear they were all totally wrong: they had to be built at strange angles, the bottom of the stairs [were] two inches wide and the top of the stairs [were] four inches wide.”
Gene Warren uses words like “tough” and“time-consuming” to describe these challenges.Peter Kleinow was more explicit, calling it, “Just horrendous.”
A much more traditional stop-motion challenge for Kleinow was matching the limp that the Terminator, as played by Schwarzenegger, had endured after being hit by the truck. Kleinow had no problems, “The limp gives it a little more believability as far as I'm concerned.”Kleinow and the Fantasy II team used a few tricks to hide the fact that it was stop-motion from viewers. “Usually, stop-motion is shot with the camera locked off in a stationary position, which tends to subliminally draw the viewer's attention to the fact that it's not real. To counter this, we added little camera moves to the shots, just like a live action cameraman does. It adds a subliminal sense of reality.” Another trick he, says, was “blurring the Terminator's movements. A lot of his movements are very rapid, so we would add blurs, just like a live-action film is blurred. We did that by putting a piece of glass between the camera and the puppet and blurring the [glass] by smearing Vaseline on [it].”
(See sidebar for blurring in stop-motion.)
James Cameron noted that Kleinow did from two to five takes of each one of his shots. “We had originally intended to do twelve to fourteen stop-motion shots. There are eight in the film, and Ifeel we came out even. Pete did a great job with them.”
All of this work by Gene Warren, Joe Vaskocil, Ernest Farino, Doug Beswick, Peter Kleinow,and a large number of unnamed people in their teams resulted in effects that were, for the time and budget limitations involved, remarkably effective. Certainly, if somebody wants to be critical, there are some shots where the artifice is obvious, but that that was really because traditional effects methods were reaching peak efficiency around this time, and so there were certain things that were all but impossible to achieve with the available technologies (unless they were operating with a U.S. defense contractor's budget.)
Cameron says of the effects crews, “I think the reason people were so excited about working on The Terminator was that they were initially impressed by the script. Often people involved in thetype of work done by Stan Winston and Fantasy II find themselves doing a lot of bad 'blood and guts'movies just to bring in revenue and survive. So when they get a chance to work on a movie with agood script, they are willing to work that much harder to produce something they can be proud of andthat people will enjoy. Whatever the reason, everyone involved with The Terminator did a terrific job.”
Perhaps the greatest praise that Fantasy II received, it can be assumed, was that Cameron opted to open the movie with their work. In a change from the screenplay, the final movie began with a series of shots of the Gene Warren's HK's and flying HK's, Joe Viskocil's explosions, and Ernie Farino's laser blasts. Even more tellingly, when Cameron set out to make Terminator 2 in 1990 – this time, with virtually bottomless financial resources – almost every effects technician from the low-budget first picture was re-hired.
And also a Sidebar article-
The Best Machine is the One....Superficially, it might seem like it would be easier to animate a large puppet (like the 2' Terminator puppet) than a small one in stop-motion. It would probably be easier to grab and manipulate larger parts than nearly-microscopic parts, easier tovisually mark you progress, and a larger puppet'sgreater mass would make it less susceptible to being harmed by twitchy or nervous fingers.However, this was clearly not the case for Kleinow. The explanation for the seeming paradoxlies in the fact that an entity like the Terminator would move as a whole, not in piecemeal fragments. But moving a larger puppet is more fragmentary. So, when you move one part, there'sno response from a neighboring part as there would be in a smaller puppet, causing an unnatural look.Kleinow explains that, with a larger puppet, “You can't grab more than one joint of the puppet at once when it's so big, which detracts from the smooth flowing motion you can get with a smaller puppet.….You have to bend the forearm and then you have to bend the upper arm, and then you have to bend the torso, the neck, and the shoulder.”When humans move (or, in this case, the Terminator), there's a constant chain reaction of body parts as we move and position ourselves.Thus, the fragmented components of the large Terminator puppet would make it look more artificial....were it not for Kleinow's craftsmanship.
There's another Sidebar article about stop-motion vs go-motion that wouldn't copy over correctly. It mentions that the original T1 puppet was converted into a go-motion puppet for T2 production.
The whole book can be read online here-
James Cameron Biography - "The Coming Storm" by David Brennan
It's a great collection of detailed production info from James Cameron's early Corman work to his work on the Abyss.
The final job Fantasy II had was the stop-motion Terminator puppet. As noted in Chapter 5,Cameron had envisioned the T-800 endoskeleton shots being done through stop-motion animation.But Winston had told Cameron, “Jim, I really think we can create the endo full-size and get a lot of performance out of the real thing, doing it with puppetry and animatronics.” This, obviously, was visionary of Winston and wise of Cameron, because the full-size puppet had worked out terrifically, asnoted in Chapter 6. However, a number of shots of the Terminator still needed to be achieved through stop-motion animation. Gene Warren says, “While the whole film could have been done with only thefull-scale model, it would have meant another six months in post-production. ….Miniature stop-motionis used when you need a particular kind of action [displaying] the entire puppet. This is used when, for monetary and technological reasons, it becomes too difficult to do in full scale.”
Doug Beswick was the leader of the miniature puppet's construction team. Gene Warren says,“[Beswick] had a couple of helpers on it, whom he supervised. Doug worked closely with Stan as he built the full-sized one. Stan had to keep making changes in the large version and Doug had to wait for the parts to come out. If changes were made on something he'd already done, Doug would have to change his model to match Stan's.”
So, since Stan Winston Studios was responsible for the actual design of the robot, and since the full-size puppet was shot first, all of Fantasy II's work depended upon Stan Winston and his team first finishing their work. And since Stan Winston's team took longer than anticipated (finishing the puppet so late that Cameron never had time to rehearse with it), Fantasy II necessarily fell behind as aresult. Peter Kleinow, who would do the animating on the puppet that Beswick built, said that StanWinston Studios's falling behind schedule meant that he had “six weeks chopped right off the animation schedule.”
In constructing the puppet, Beswick's goal was to simply copy Winston's work, piece for piece.He says, “We worked very closely with Stan Winston. As soon as he completed each piece, we would copy it exactly, only on a scale one-third the size.” While the full-sized puppets parts were predominantly cast from molds, the tiny components for the miniature were usually machined out of aluminum. There were “hundreds” of these parts. Some of them were so tiny that traditional machining techniques – milling and screwing – didn't have the dexterity to craft them in the same detail as the full-sized puppet, and so Beswick and his team had to carve and sculpt them by hand.Two things that were not aluminum were its feet. Beswick explains, “The feet were made out of steel,for extra strength. Since the ankle joints had to support a two-foot tall puppet – which is pretty goodsize – and since they were human proportioned and thus very small in relation to the rest of the figure,they had to be the strongest joints in the puppet.”
As one can imagine, this was an extremely arduous process. Even once all the parts werefinally crafted, Beswick says that his team, “spent about two full weeks assembling the model.” Theythen painted chrome on the miniature to match the look of the full-sized puppet. All told, it reportedly took Beswick and his team five months to build it versus a planned three months. Sounding very proud, Beswick says, “I feel it was worth the extra effort, though. The end result is what everybody remembers, and that robot segment was very important.”The work was then handed over to Peter Kleinow who would painstakingly move Beswick's puppet, one-twenty-fourth of a second at a time. But, Gene Warren says, its late arrival to the animator, “put a big crunch on this part of the operation....we had very little time to familiarize ourselves with the model.”One unusual difficulty Kleinow had for this puppet was its size.
According to Kleinow, “the larger the puppet, the less control you have over it.” Of course, this puppet had to be larger because, as Kleinow notes, “the detail on the full-scale puppet was so great that we couldn't go any smaller and still have working detail.” This made the animation that much more time-consuming and cumbersome. “The difficulty in animating a larger puppet is a question of using reference points. When you're animating, you set up a reference gauge over the puppet so that you know you're always moving it in the same direction. If you have to set up a whole bunch of reference points,it makes it much more complicated. On a big puppet,you can't get by with just one reference point – you need two or three gauges.”
(See sidebar.)
The basic procedure for Kleinow was to use rear-projection plates from the movie behind the puppet, then take a photograph of them together.Next, advance the rear-projection footage one frame,move the Terminator puppet accordingly, and repeat that process 24 times per second of film-time. So, it might seem that, issues with the puppet's large size aside, animating the Terminator in stop-motion would be a relatively straightforward – however laborious –process. However, there were two major challenges involved with the stop-motion in The Terminator that don't exist in the cartoons that might be most commonly associated with stop-motion (such as the Christmas cartoons like Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer).
First, the angle of the Terminator had to match the angle from the “plates” (this is an absolute requirement for every type of composite in film and video production). For some shots, such as when the Terminator is charging toward the factory floor, this wouldn't be much of a problem: the plates were shot at eye-level, so they simply needed to photograph the Terminator and the plates from about the eye-level of the puppet. But there were a few shots where the plates were at fairly extreme angles. So there, Kleinow had to set up the puppet so that it precisely matched the angle of the shot.This is not as easy as it sounds, because the rear-projection plate and the camera must always be symmetrically locked together (because, if the camera was at an extremely low angle looking up at the2D background plate, the background plate's 2D nature would be exposed; it would look like the Terminator was standing in front of falling poster-board.) Gene Warren says that, “We experimented with tilting the set at a funny angle, but then the animation became virtually impossible because of the effect of gravity. On a two-legged [puppet], when it's walking and it's on one leg in mid-step, the leverage puts it off-balance.”
The second major challenge was that,although the Terminator puppet would always bein front of the plate (it's called “rear-screen projection”, after all!), very often the Terminator was supposed to be behind objects in the foreground. For instance, there was a plate of Reese battering the Terminator with a pipe(which was just empty air on the footage for theplate) where the two are standing behind a handrail and other obstacles. If Kleinow just shot the puppet in front of that plate, the handrail wouldn't obscure the Terminator in the frame,and the illusion would be totally shattered. So,for each of the shots where there's an obstacle inthe foreground, Kleinow, Gene Warren, and others at Fantasy II had to actually re-create those foreground sets in miniature, and then match them up in the shot. Kleinow says, “That was extremely complicated, not because of the construction, but because the miniature had to be foreshortened to match the plate because the camera angles were all weird. ….If you could have seen the foreground pieces on the set you would swear they were all totally wrong: they had to be built at strange angles, the bottom of the stairs [were] two inches wide and the top of the stairs [were] four inches wide.”
Gene Warren uses words like “tough” and“time-consuming” to describe these challenges.Peter Kleinow was more explicit, calling it, “Just horrendous.”
A much more traditional stop-motion challenge for Kleinow was matching the limp that the Terminator, as played by Schwarzenegger, had endured after being hit by the truck. Kleinow had no problems, “The limp gives it a little more believability as far as I'm concerned.”Kleinow and the Fantasy II team used a few tricks to hide the fact that it was stop-motion from viewers. “Usually, stop-motion is shot with the camera locked off in a stationary position, which tends to subliminally draw the viewer's attention to the fact that it's not real. To counter this, we added little camera moves to the shots, just like a live action cameraman does. It adds a subliminal sense of reality.” Another trick he, says, was “blurring the Terminator's movements. A lot of his movements are very rapid, so we would add blurs, just like a live-action film is blurred. We did that by putting a piece of glass between the camera and the puppet and blurring the [glass] by smearing Vaseline on [it].”
(See sidebar for blurring in stop-motion.)
James Cameron noted that Kleinow did from two to five takes of each one of his shots. “We had originally intended to do twelve to fourteen stop-motion shots. There are eight in the film, and Ifeel we came out even. Pete did a great job with them.”
All of this work by Gene Warren, Joe Vaskocil, Ernest Farino, Doug Beswick, Peter Kleinow,and a large number of unnamed people in their teams resulted in effects that were, for the time and budget limitations involved, remarkably effective. Certainly, if somebody wants to be critical, there are some shots where the artifice is obvious, but that that was really because traditional effects methods were reaching peak efficiency around this time, and so there were certain things that were all but impossible to achieve with the available technologies (unless they were operating with a U.S. defense contractor's budget.)
Cameron says of the effects crews, “I think the reason people were so excited about working on The Terminator was that they were initially impressed by the script. Often people involved in thetype of work done by Stan Winston and Fantasy II find themselves doing a lot of bad 'blood and guts'movies just to bring in revenue and survive. So when they get a chance to work on a movie with agood script, they are willing to work that much harder to produce something they can be proud of andthat people will enjoy. Whatever the reason, everyone involved with The Terminator did a terrific job.”
Perhaps the greatest praise that Fantasy II received, it can be assumed, was that Cameron opted to open the movie with their work. In a change from the screenplay, the final movie began with a series of shots of the Gene Warren's HK's and flying HK's, Joe Viskocil's explosions, and Ernie Farino's laser blasts. Even more tellingly, when Cameron set out to make Terminator 2 in 1990 – this time, with virtually bottomless financial resources – almost every effects technician from the low-budget first picture was re-hired.
And also a Sidebar article-
The Best Machine is the One....Superficially, it might seem like it would be easier to animate a large puppet (like the 2' Terminator puppet) than a small one in stop-motion. It would probably be easier to grab and manipulate larger parts than nearly-microscopic parts, easier tovisually mark you progress, and a larger puppet'sgreater mass would make it less susceptible to being harmed by twitchy or nervous fingers.However, this was clearly not the case for Kleinow. The explanation for the seeming paradoxlies in the fact that an entity like the Terminator would move as a whole, not in piecemeal fragments. But moving a larger puppet is more fragmentary. So, when you move one part, there'sno response from a neighboring part as there would be in a smaller puppet, causing an unnatural look.Kleinow explains that, with a larger puppet, “You can't grab more than one joint of the puppet at once when it's so big, which detracts from the smooth flowing motion you can get with a smaller puppet.….You have to bend the forearm and then you have to bend the upper arm, and then you have to bend the torso, the neck, and the shoulder.”When humans move (or, in this case, the Terminator), there's a constant chain reaction of body parts as we move and position ourselves.Thus, the fragmented components of the large Terminator puppet would make it look more artificial....were it not for Kleinow's craftsmanship.
There's another Sidebar article about stop-motion vs go-motion that wouldn't copy over correctly. It mentions that the original T1 puppet was converted into a go-motion puppet for T2 production.
The whole book can be read online here-
James Cameron Biography - "The Coming Storm" by David Brennan
It's a great collection of detailed production info from James Cameron's early Corman work to his work on the Abyss.
A bit of the model being animated by hand in T2-
The Making of Terminator 2 (1991) Part 2/2 HD - YouTube
The Making of Terminator 2 (1991) Part 2/2 HD - YouTube
MonsieurTox
Master Member
Thank you for the article and the link to the making of Nick ! I'd love to build a replica of the stop mo puppet !
A storyboard artist for T@ is selling his original storyboard artwork and with the lot of drawing he is including a series of reference polaroids of the orgiinal T1 stop motion model that he used to draw from.
IN the auctions description he mentions that these were taken at James Cameron's house. Too cool.
IN the auctions description he mentions that these were taken at James Cameron's house. Too cool.
Also check out the Nell spaceship model sitting in the background from Battle Beyond the Stars that Cameron personally built 10 years before!
Came across a few more interesting pieces of reference.
6.4 minutes worth of exposure for a single second of footage, whoa quite a lot of time
Mike J.
Master Member
And that doesn't include the time setting up the markers and moving the model and or the camera, and then taking the markers away....
A very long exposure time is necessary because of the f-stop needed to keep the entire model in focus, and make it look 6 feet tall and not 6 inches tall.
-MJ
A very long exposure time is necessary because of the f-stop needed to keep the entire model in focus, and make it look 6 feet tall and not 6 inches tall.
-MJ
Some great video of the T1 miniature endo being animated for T2.
https://youtu.be/B2X_JKH3uuQ?t=1m
Edit:
Oops, looks like I posted this earlier but that previous link is now dead.
https://youtu.be/B2X_JKH3uuQ?t=1m
Edit:
Oops, looks like I posted this earlier but that previous link is now dead.
Last edited:
HopeOfTheFuture
Active Member
From which interview is this shot? Do you have a bigger version of it perhaps? Looks like there are some great Terminator items on it. The molten T-1000 head from the omitted Travis Gant sequence, another endo head, something that looks like a T-Meg statue from T23D on the center right shelve. And more...
Would love to see a higher resolution shot of it.
