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.***

The PLAN! The CUNNING Plan!

Here’s a VERY rough sketch out of my notebook of the basic concept for my CJ puppet.

Since I’m building him primarily to use at SF cons, I like this design for 3 reasons:

1. It means I can walk around at con without constantly having my arms full of prawnling
   
   
2. He’s easier to spot if he’s up high
   (hey, I’m short – anything that gives me extra height is a good thing!)
   
   
3. Piggybacks are cute darn it! ;)
   
   

The controls for manipulating CJ will be hidden in the backs of his legs, in order to hide as much as possible the fact I am manipulating the puppet – at a quick glance it will just look like I’m holding onto him to keep him balanced, as you would with any kid you had on your shoulders.

In order to keep this relatively simple I decided to keep CJ’s movements fairly basic:

Movements He MUST Have

- Head back and forth

- Head up and down

- Eyeblinks
(Because if he has full movement of his head, and a blink for realism, I don’t know if full eye movement is 100% needed – I think I can still get a lot of expression without it)

Movements I’d Like Him To Have If At All Possible

- Full eye movement (up, down, and side to side, independent of his head’s movement)

- An antennae wiggle (no specific directional control but just enough to make them look real)

- A tentacle wiggle (again just a general twitch, nothing specific)

- Some sort of sound bite(s) of clicking or chirping (or even better a sound bite of dialogue from the movie) so that it sounds like he’s talking

Totally Bonus Movements Which Would Be Cool But Almost Certainly Not Going To Happen

- Undulating gills

- Palps flicking (those little folded paddle shaped tentacles in front of CJ’s mouth)

- Binary arm wiggle

I have no intention of manipulating his main arms or legs – goodness knows I’ve got enough work cut out for me just getting his head to move! CJ’s arms and legs will be strictly for balance.

So that’s The PLAN – now it’s just a case of implementing it!