Behind the Puppet Performances on Small Soldiers (1998)
Small Soldiers (1998), Joe Dante’s film about action figures that are brought to life through high-tech military ‘smart’ chips.
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- Puppeteering the Commando Elites, Gorgonites, and Gwendy Dolls
- Designing the Small Soldiers Toys
- Bringing the Small Soldier Characters to Life
- Creating a Live-action Performance With Small Soldiers Puppets, and Actors
Puppeteering the Commando Elites, Gorgonites, and Gwendy Dolls
Stan Winston Studio designed and built two categories of characters for the film — Commando Elite soldiers and alien Gorgonites, all of which were realized as articulated puppets. In total, Small Soldiers would feature fourteen distinct characters: six Commandos, seven Gorgonites, and a ‘Gwendy’ fashion doll. Although Gwendy would require only one type of puppet, the action requirements in the script mandated that each of the remaining thirteen characters be realized, initially, in three configurations: as a self-contained, battery-powered puppet, a rod puppet, and a non-articulated stand-in.
(The full squad of Commando Elites, the entire cast of Gorgonites, and the Gwendy Dolls.)
Designing the Small Soldier Toys
The Winston crew began designing the toy characters, on paper and in sculptures a mere five months prior to the start of filming. Due to a deal with Hasbro to mass-produce a Small Soldiers toy line, and the necessity for the film’s release to be timed precisely with the debut of that toy line, every aspect of the production was subjected to a similarly tight schedule.
(Stan Winston and artist Joey Orosco discuss some of the concept designs for Small Soldiers.)
(L: SWS artist Joey Orosco’s final design for Archer. R: Chip Hazard concept sketch by SWS artist John Rosengrant.)
(A variety of SWS Commando Elite and Gorgonite designs. Clockwise from top left Ocula, Brick Bazooka, Kip Killigan, Insaniac, Freakenstein, Nick Nitro, Slamfist, Punch-It.)
Bringing the Small Soldiers' Characters to Life
One of the early aesthetic issues for Winston and his crew was determining whether the Commandos and Gorgonites should look and move like plastic action figures or like real, organic characters.
“The question was,” said Winston, “do we design the same limitations we saw in real action figures into our characters? Or do we go beyond those limitations to give them more life? We decided that to create really great performances, we had to give our characters a greater range of motion than a real toy. Our rationale was that these weren’t just toys — they were the coolest toys ever, which had somehow come to life.”
(Lead "Insaniac" artist Christopher Swift poses the figure at SWS. Insaniac concept design by Crash McCreery.)
(Top left: SWS artist Mike Harper adds detail to a "Gwendy" puppet. Right and bottom left: Additional Gwendys come to life at SWS.)
With at least three puppets per character, plus additional insert versions, Stan Winston Studio wound up building more than 200 puppets in only four months. In building these puppets, the studio that had only recently been working with twenty-foot-tall T-rexes and large-scale hydraulics on The Lost World: Jurassic Park suddenly found itself machining tiny, watch-sized mechanisms and fitting them into twelve-inch-tall bodies.
(Top & bottom left: SWS mechanic Rich Haugen assembles the hero Chip Hazard puppet. Right: SWS mechanic Matt Heimlich assembles Archer.)
Creating a Live-action Performance With Small Soldiers Puppets, and Actors
The original production plan was to shoot most of the live-action toy scenes with puppets on a bluescreen stage rather than on the sets. Industrial Light & Magic would then composite those bluescreen elements into final scenes.
Shortly into production, however, Dante abandoned the idea, preferring an in-camera, live-action approach, with the toy puppets right there on his sets, interacting with the actors.
(SWS puppeteer Alan Scott performs Archer on set with Gregory Smith as Alan Abernathy.)
“Those of us who do this for a living are clearly people who don’t want to grow up,” Winston said, laughing. “Some of us could have been doctors or lawyers, but we preferred to play with toys and draw pictures and push clay around. We’re all kids in men’s bodies, and we’re all toy lovers. So who among us wouldn’t want to go to work and play with cool action figures? Small Soldiers was a fantastic experience for all of us.”
-Stan Winston
Excerpted from The Winston Effect: The Art & History of Stan Winston Studio By Jody Duncan
Courses with the Creators of Small Soldiers
- Hybrid Characters: Blending Practical & Digital FX with John Rosengrant
- Hybrid Character Design: Practical To Digital with Christopher Swift
- How To Make An Eye Mechanism - Design, 3D Printing & Assembly with David Covarrubias
- Animatronic Control Systems - Arduino Programming Basics Part 1 with David Covarrubias
- Creature Screenwriting: How To Write Memorable Monsters with Juliet Snowden & Stiles White
- How To Make A Monster Puppet - Rods & Cables with David Monzingo
- Makeup Blood FX - Blow Your Brains Out with David Monzingo
To create your own toys, check out these courses:
- Toy Design & Sculpture For Action Figures & Collectibles - Part 1 with Sandy Collora
- Toy Design & Sculpture For Action Figures & Collectibles - Part 2 with Sandy Collora
To bring your toys to life, check out our Mechanical & Animatronic FX Pathways:
- For Beginners: Mechanical & Animatronic FX Basics
- For Intermediate-Advanced level: Mechanical & Animatronic FX