Lost World.

Back in the mid 90’s, the series Lost World came to the studios I worked at in Queensland. As with all these things, the budget and time was very tight. It was decided to show dinosaurs with puppets.

We only had weeks to produce these things and the budget I put in had to be literally cut in half. This meant minimal crew and everything simplified. The puppets were latex over a basic armature.

To operate them was via rods. We had some of them on a walking rig with others free floating. The series had more and more bizarre creatures as it went, including this monstrous bee creature.

One dinosaur was big enough for me to operate from inside. My colleague, Peter Greenwood, put this thing together in a little more than two weeks which blew my mind that he achieved this.

One of the models built was this balloon which is only seen in mid to distance shots. We had to match a full size set piece of the basket.

The next big miniature was the tree house that all the characters live in. This was built as a set on the ground and we had to copy it to show it up in the tree. Again, time was tight.

Good thing for us was that we never saw it close for any length of time and the textures were pretty chaotic so we go away with a lot. All in all, we were able to get it fully detailed to match the set.