A tiny place of wonder

Press, 19 February 1986, Page 16

A tiny place of wonder

The studio near Manchester in Northern England responsible for producing the award-winning series “Wind In The Willows” (Sunday on Two) and other series such as “Danger Mouse” (Mondays on One) is a place of wonder and fascination to anyone who has ever had a dolls house or played with puppets.

In a converted tobacco and sweets warehouse, now called Cosgrove Hall, everything is measured in centimetres or millimetres. It is a world of miniscule poached eggs and tiny, perfectly made cricket bats.

The characters begin life as models in Plasticine built up on to an aluminium frame. Several moulds are taken of each model in dental plaster and this process alone takes about two months. Next a metal skeleton is made so that all joints — knees, feet, elbows, even knuckles and finger joints — can be moved naturally. This skeleton is then fixed inside the mould, and the rubber latex used for the cast is beaten up in a food mixer for 20 minutes until its original creamy milk consistency becomes like stiffened egg white. The body is then cast in latex and the mould is “cooked” in an oven for four hours. The heads of the pupppets are made separately. Joined to the body by a ball-and-socket sys-

tern, the head is full of metal bits and pieces that move the eyes, mouth, nose and ears. All this apparatus ensures that the stars of "Wind In The Willows” can laugh, smile and frown. When Rat grins a key has been inserted into his back pocket by the animator and a tiny adjustment made to the head mechanism. Another key in his right ear opens and closes his mouth. Glass fibre is used for the heads with skin of rubber latex, and they are then painted with theatrical greasepaint and sprayed with a fixative. Every attention is paid to the smallest detail — Auberon Mole’s well-kept fingernails are made from dental acrylic — normally used for repairing false teeth — and his beauti-fully-fitting pince-nez is a perfect miniature. All the

models' feet are cast in a heavy metal, and powerful magnets under the “floor” of the different sets ensure they stand still for the actual filming. As soon as the models are finished they move on to the wardrobe mistress’s department to be dressed. The costume designer, Nigel Cornford, who designed all the models’ costumes individually, had to start from scratch to make suits, overcoats, hats, ties, footwear — even making all the tiny buttons. “I had to print all the costume materials myself” he says. “It would have been impossible to get the details of the printed fabrics by using ordinary lengths of cloth.” Working with the producer, Mark Hall, the entire team followed the book by Kenneth Grahame, from which the series was taken, with meticulous care and painstaking research into the exact period in which it is set. Costumes and cars, boats and bow-ties, furniture and fishing rods are all as they actually were in Britain’s Edwardian times. Even items only glimpsed in the sequences have been researched, designed and modelled with the same exceptional care and craftsmanship. The filming technique used — called stop-frame animation — needs special cameras, and requires each figure to be

moved frame by frame. A single second of film takes up 25 different frames. The hilarious sequence where Toad swings from the chandeliers to evade the stoats and weasels who have invaded' Toad Hall lasts some 10 seconds on screen, but took seven hours to complete. Says Brian Cosgrove, head of the studio: “The incredible skills and inventiveness of all our young designers and model engineers and animators have succeeded in taking the arts of puppetry and animation into an entirely new area such as the facial movements and lip synchronisation of the characters in the story. For example when Toad says ‘I am Toad, a very worthy, well-re-spected and distinguished Toad,’ his lines occupy just four seconds of screen time, but it required more than a hundred frames and took an hour and a half to shoot! “All the time we are inventing and perfecting new, exciting techniques and the further series now in production makes full use of them. Naturally, many of our techniques and formulae of the modelling solutions and design features of the puppet skeletons are closely guarded secrets of our studio.” —DUO. Copyright.