Step 1) Pre-Prawn-duction Pre-Production

Now to make an animatronic puppet you must first sculpt a full-sized model in clay of what you want the finished puppet to look like. So that’s what I’ve been doing so far (as well as a lot of research into puppetry and animatronics when I didn’t have time to actually get into my workshop – but more on that in the future).

First, I gathered as many pics of CJ as I could, from places like the websites for Weta Workshop, and Image Engine (the FX shops who, respectively, designed and did the CG for the movie), fansites like D9fans.com (who have a huge gallery of screen caps), and just my own copy of the District 9 DVD. These all got printed out and set up on my bulletin board like so:



Guess this makes me a member of the Prawn-parazzi eh? ;)

(Sorry – the puns are only going to get worse from here on in – I have a condition)

I found some fantastic high res photos on Weta’s site (including a nice close-up of the CJ maquette they had at their SDCC booth this year) but I soon noticed a problem. Compare that Weta maquette shot I was so excited about on the left with the screen cap of CJ from the movie on the right.

Yes, the angles are slightly different but it’s also clear that the whole front of CJ’s face is different on the maquette (for instance the area between the eyes is concave on the model and convex on the CG CJ). Meaning my lovely big, sharp, highly detailed print out was now, not useless, but less helpful than I was hoping as its accuracy to the finished on-screen CJ was suspect. ***

Well …. *insert Wikus’ favorite word here* :P

So I also took a turn playing Pablo Prawn-casso (told you…) and did a couple sets of sketches/plans, both to scale (top) and full-sized (bottom) in order to help me amalgamate the info from the various reference pics and get my head around the design better.

Did I NEED to do a full size set of plans in addition to the scale ones? Maybe not ... but as this was primarily meant to be a learning experience I figured it was good drawing practice. And they did come in handy later…

*** Note from future me: I got The Art Of District 9 for Christmas (Great book!) and they explain in the book that the facial designs changed because once Image Engine tried to animate the Weta designs they found they were having trouble getting them to emote properly. The overlapping facial plate design in the final film was meant to allow for more facial movement while retaining a very insect-like look. So it sounds like the rest of the maquette is probably screen accurate then – but of course I didn’t know that when I started the project back in the fall.***