Development and use in Anderson productions Gerry Anderson's first experience with puppet filming was in 1956, when Pentagon Films – a group of five filmmakers including Anderson and his friend
Arthur Provis – was contracted to make a series of
Noddy-themed TV advertisements for
Kellogg's breakfast cereal. Around this time, Pentagon also produced a 15-minute puppet film called
Here Comes Kandy. These early efforts were noticed by children's author
Roberta Leigh, who had written a collection of scripts titled
The Adventures of Twizzle and was looking for a film company to turn them into a puppet TV series. By this time, Anderson and Provis had left Pentagon to form their own company, Anderson Provis Films (AP Films or APF). They accepted the commission, disappointed not to be working with live actors but realising that they needed Leigh's investment to stay in business. Before starting production, Anderson and Provis hired three staff: continuity supervisor
Sylvia Thamm (former secretary at Pentagon and Anderson's future wife), art director
Reg Hill and camera operator
John Read. All three would later be made co-directors of the new company and play a significant role in the development of its productions. The puppets of
Twizzle had
papier-mâché heads with painted eyes and mouths and were each controlled using a single carpet thread. Speech was indicated by nodding the heads. Somewhat embarrassed to be making a children's puppet series, Anderson and Provis decided to produce
Twizzle in the style of a feature film, incorporating dynamic shooting and lighting in the hope that the results would bring them bigger-budget commissions with live actors. To add to this more sophisticated look, the series often used three-dimensional sets instead of traditional
flat backgrounds, while puppeteers
Christine Glanville and her team operated the marionettes not from the studio floor, but from a bridge above it. Following the completion of
Twizzle, APF was unsuccessful in securing new clients, so accepted another puppet commission from Leigh:
Torchy the Battery Boy. This series used puppets with wooden bodies and heads of "plastic wood" (a mixture of
cork dust, glue and
methylated spirit). The heads incorporated moveable eyeballs and a hinged jaw that was opened and closed with a string. By now all puppet sets were three-dimensional. After
Torchy, APF severed ties with Leigh and produced its first independent series,
Four Feather Falls, using funding from
Granada. The puppets now had hollow fibreglass shells for heads and
tungsten steel wires instead of strings. Meanwhile, the hinged jaw gave way to an electronic
lip-sync mechanism. Designed by Hill and Read, this was powered by a
solenoid, mounted in the head and fed electric current by two of the wires. The mechanism made it easier for the puppeteers to operate the marionettes in time with their dialogue as it was no longer necessary to learn the characters' lines. The term "Supermarionation" was coined during the production of
Supercar, APF's first series to be made for
Lew Grade's distribution company
ITC Entertainment. Its final 13 episodes were the first to be credited as being "filmed in Supermarionation". Each marionette was suspended and controlled with several fine tungsten steel wires that were between and of an inch () thick, replacing the carpet thread and
twine strings that had been used prior to
Four Feather Falls. To make the wires non-reflective, initially they were painted black; however, this made them thicker and more noticeable, so manufacturers Ormiston Wire devised a method of chemically darkening them to keep them as thin as possible. During filming, the wires often needed to be further concealed using "antiflare" spray (grease mist) or various colours of paint to blend in with the sets and backgrounds. Balancing the weight was crucial: puppets that were too light would be difficult to control; too heavy and their wires would not bear the load.
Inserts of real human hands, arms and legs were used to show complex actions that the puppets could not perform, such as operating machinery. In a 1965 interview, Reg Hill estimated that the Supermarionation productions contained "three or four times" as much
cutting as live-action features because the puppets' lack of facial expression made it impossible to sustain the viewer's interest "for more than a few seconds" per shot. The puppets' distinguishing features were their hollow fibreglass heads and the solenoids that powered the automatic mouth movements. Character dialogue was recorded on two tapes. One of these would be played during filming, both to guide the puppeteers and provide a basis for the soundtrack; the other would be converted into a series of electrical signals. The heads of regular characters were entirely fibreglass; proto-heads were sculpted in clay or
Plasticine and then encased in rubber (or
silicone rubber) to create moulds, to which
fibreglass resin was applied to create the finished shells. Guest characters were played by puppets called "revamps", whose faces were Plasticine sculpted on featureless fibreglass heads. This allowed the revamps to be re-modelled from one episode to the next and play a wider range of characters. Many regulars were modelled on contemporary Hollywood actors. The puppets' eyes were moved by radio control. The placement of the solenoid dictated the puppets' body proportions. Head-mounted solenoids made the heads oversized compared to the rest of the body; the latter could not be scaled up to match as this would have made the puppets too bulky to operate effectively, and would have required all the set elements to be enlarged. According to commentator David Garland, the disproportion was influenced partly by "aesthetic considerations ... the theory being that the head carried the puppet's personality". It resulted in many puppets developing
caricatured appearances, though Anderson stated that this was not intentional.
Captain Scarlet onwards Between
Thunderbirds and
Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons, the development of miniaturised electronic components prompted APF – now called Century 21 Productions – to create a new type of puppet. The option to downsize the components in the head was rejected in favour of moving the entire lip-sync mechanism to the chest, where it was connected to the mouth by a cable that ran through the neck. This made it possible to shrink the heads and make the puppets of
Captain Scarlet and later series in natural proportions. In 2006, he recalled that Century 21 had been "
typecast" for its puppetry: "[S]o, knowing it was the only thing I could get finance for, I desperately wanted to make the thing look as close to live action as possible. And I think it was that that drove me on to bring in all the improvements and techniques." In addition, problems achieving realistic
depth of field made it considerably harder to film close-up shots. This was due to their low weight and the fact that the legs of each puppet were controlled by only two strings, which made complex articulation impossible. According to Sylvia Anderson, the re-design exacerbated the puppets' core deficiencies: "The more realistic our puppets became, the more problems we had with them ... It was just possible to get away with the awkward moments in
Thunderbirds because the proportions of the characters were still caricature. It was later when we had developed a more realistic approach ... that the still imperfect walk was [all] the more obvious." To limit the need for leg movement, many scenes featuring walks were
filmed from the waist up, with motion implied by a puppeteer holding the legs out of shot and bobbing the marionette up and down while pushing it forward. Other scenes showed puppets standing, sitting or driving vehicles.
Supercar and
Stingrays focus on their eponymous car and submarine, as well as
Stingrays depiction of Commander Shore as a paralytic reliant on a futuristic "hoverchair", are examples of other devices used to overcome the puppets' lack of mobility. In a 1977 interview, Gerry Anderson said that the steps taken to make the puppets more lifelike were an attempt to "make the [puppet] medium respectable". On the preparations for
Supercar, APF's first science-fiction production, he remembered "[thinking] that if we set the story in the future, there would be
moving walkways and the puppets would be riding around in the car for much of the time, so it would be much easier to make them convincing." According to interviewer
Kevin O'Neill, this use of future settings for greater realism "almost accidentally" ensured that all of APF's subsequent series would be science fiction. Carolyn Percy of the
Wales Arts Review comments that the inclusion of "futuristic vehicles" like
Supercar allowed APF to devise "more exciting and imaginative scenarios" and "work around the limitations of the puppets ... to give their 'acting' the integrity to match the material."
Special effects Special effects were created with miniature models and sets in a range of scales. The lighting used for effects shooting was five times as strong as that normally used on a live-action production. High-speed filming was essential for shots on water to make the small ripples inside the filming tank look like ocean waves. Underwater sequences were filmed not in water, but on dry sets with a thin aquarium between the set and the camera to distort the lighting. Bubble jets and small fish were added to the aquarium to create
forced perspective. Beginning with
Stingray, shots of aircraft in flight were filmed using a technique called the "rolling sky", which was devised by effects director
Derek Meddings to allow filming of dynamic shots in confined space. It involved painting the sky background on a canvas, which was then wrapped around a pair of electrically driven rollers, and creating an impression of movement by running the canvas around the rollers in a continuous loop as opposed to moving the miniature aircraft itself.
Thunderbirds saw the introduction of the "rolling road", an adaptation of the technique whereby foreground, middleground and background elements of road sequences were created as separate rolls of looped canvas and spun at varying speeds. In the pursuit of realism, newly built models and sets were deliberately "dirtied down" with paint, oil, pencil lead and other substances to give them a used or weathered look.
Jetex propellant pellets were fitted to the undersides of miniature ground vehicles to emit jets of gas resembling dust trails. Over time, the effects used for puppet gunfights became more elaborate: whereas gunshot effects in
Four Feather Falls were created by simply painting marks on the
film negative (which showed up as white flashes on the finished print), for later series the puppets' miniature prop guns were fitted with small charges that were fired using a car battery.
List of Anderson Supermarionation productions The Andersons' puppet work also included
The Investigator (1973), a pilot for an unmade Supermarionation series. This featured both marionettes and live actors but did not include the term "Supermarionation" in the credits. ==Critical response==