100-515: Supermarionation (a portmanteau of the words "super", " marionette " and " animation ") is a style of television and film production employed by British company AP Films (later Century 21 Productions) in its puppet TV series and feature films of the 1960s. These productions were created by Gerry and Sylvia Anderson and filmed at APF's studios on the Slough Trading Estate . The characters were played by electronic marionettes with
200-413: A blend —also known as a blend word , lexical blend , or portmanteau —is a word formed by combining the meanings, and parts of the sounds, of two or more words together. English examples include smog , coined by blending smoke and fog , as well as motel , from motor ( motorist ) and hotel . A blend is similar to a contraction . On the one hand, mainstream blends tend to be formed at
300-672: A "trademark". According to Sylvia Anderson, the term was used to "distinguish the pure puppetry of the stage from our more sophisticated filmed-television version". Lou Ceffer of the website Spy Hollywood calls Supermarionation a "marketing term". A 1960s supplement of the British trade newspaper Television Mail described Supermarionation as a "technical process" whose main features, besides electronic puppet control, were use of 35 mm colour photography, 1 ⁄ 5 -scale filming stages, back projection , live-action inserts and live action-style special effects, and video assist to guide
400-414: A car battery. 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. Noting that Gerry Anderson would have preferred to make live-action productions instead of puppet series, Percy argues that his style of filming was developed to "make
500-535: A form suitable for carrying on horseback; (now esp.) one in the form of a stiff leather case hinged at the back to open into two equal parts". According to The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language ( AHD ), the etymology of the word is the French porte-manteau , from porter , "to carry", and manteau , "cloak" (from Old French mantel , from Latin mantellum ). According to
600-427: A kind of bath), the attributive blends of English are mostly head-final and mostly endocentric . As an example of an exocentric attributive blend, Fruitopia may metaphorically take the buyer to a fruity utopia (and not a utopian fruit); however, it is not a utopia but a drink. Coordinate blends (also called associative or portmanteau blends) combine two words having equal status, and have two heads. Thus brunch
700-622: A mere splinter or leftover word fragment. For instance, starfish is a compound, not a blend, of star and fish , as it includes both words in full. However, if it were called a " stish " or a " starsh ", it would be a blend. Furthermore, when blends are formed by shortening established compounds or phrases, they can be considered clipped compounds , such as romcom for romantic comedy . Blends of two or more words may be classified from each of three viewpoints: morphotactic, morphonological, and morphosemantic. Blends may be classified morphotactically into two kinds: total and partial . In
800-471: 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
900-450: A moveable lower lip, which opened and closed in time with pre-recorded dialogue by means of a solenoid in the puppet's head or chest. The productions were mostly science fiction with the puppetry supervised by Christine Glanville , art direction by either Bob Bell or Keith Wilson , and music composed by Barry Gray . They also made extensive use of scale model special effects, directed by Derek Meddings . The term "Supermarionation"
1000-485: A new, flexible material, but the results proved unsatisfactory and the idea was abandoned. As the reduced head size made it harder to sculpt faces in Plasticine, guest characters were now played by a group of permanent, all-fibreglass puppets that were made to the same standards of workmanship as the regular characters. Likened to a " repertory company ", these puppets could be superficially altered from one appearance to
1100-487: A nod to Supermarionation, the series was credited as being "created in Hypermarionation". According to Anderson, Hypermarionation was not simply animation, but a "photo-real" production method combining CGI, high-definition picture and surround sound. Garland suggests that through Hypermarionation, Anderson sought to achieve a "hyperreal simulation of his live-action film utopia". In 2014, a Kickstarter campaign
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#17327826093661200-401: A particular historical moment followed by a rapid rise in popularity. Contractions, on the other hand, are formed by the gradual drifting together of words over time due to them commonly appearing together in sequence, such as do not naturally becoming don't (phonologically, / d uː n ɒ t / becoming / d oʊ n t / ). A blend also differs from a compound , which fully preserves
1300-415: A projector are directed at a beam splitter oriented at forty-five degrees. Two retro reflective screens are used, one to return the reflected image and one to return the pass through image. Set between the beam splitter and the retro reflective screens are mattes with cut outs that allow the projected image to strike each retro reflective screens in select areas. This combination, as seen by the camera, gives
1400-603: A puppet series called Moon Rangers . The episode features story-within-a-story marionette sequences that were written and filmed as a tribute to Supermarionation. The puppet series Space Patrol , created by Roberta Leigh and Arthur Provis and filmed by Leigh's company National Interest Picture Productions , used marionettes similar to those of APF's early series (including the use of automatic mouth movement). However, they were made in natural body proportions. The Japanese series Aerial City 008 (1969) and X-Bomber (1980) also featured Supermarionation-style puppets, with
1500-412: A screen made of a retroreflective material such as Scotchlite , a product of the 3M company that is also used to make screens for movie theaters . Such material is made from millions of glass beads affixed to the surface of the cloth. These glass beads reflect light back only in the direction from which it came, far more efficiently than any common surface. The actor (or subject) performs in front of
1600-417: A stage at Elstree Studios and combined with footage of Africa (the effect is revealed in the leopard 's glowing eyes reflecting back the light). Dennis Muren used a very similar solution for his 1967 debut film Equinox , although Muren's technique didn't employ Scotchlite. Two British films released in 1969, On Her Majesty's Secret Service and The Assassination Bureau , used the technique, as did
1700-584: A surface realism often associated with naturalism) borne of an unfulfilled desire to make live-action films for adults", further commenting that Anderson's typecasting as a puppet TV creator "led him on a lifelong quest to perfect a simulation of reality". He notes that Anderson's involvement with puppets began at a time when Western puppet theatre "had become increasingly marginalised to a niche, to an association with children's entertainment", and that APF's productions used an "aesthetic of incremental realism" to appeal to children and adults alike (a target audience that
1800-486: A total blend, each of the words creating the blend is reduced to a mere splinter. Some linguists limit blends to these (perhaps with additional conditions): for example, Ingo Plag considers "proper blends" to be total blends that semantically are coordinate, the remainder being "shortened compounds". Commonly for English blends, the beginning of one word is followed by the end of another: Much less commonly in English,
1900-403: Is frankenword , an autological word exemplifying the phenomenon it describes, blending " Frankenstein " and "word". Front projection effect A front projection effect is an in-camera visual effects process in film production for combining foreground performance with pre-filmed background footage. In contrast to rear projection , which projects footage onto a screen from behind
2000-477: Is a Japanese blend that has entered the English language. The Vietnamese language also encourages blend words formed from Sino-Vietnamese vocabulary . For example, the term Việt Cộng is derived from the first syllables of "Việt Nam" (Vietnam) and "Cộng sản" (communist). Many corporate brand names , trademarks, and initiatives, as well as names of corporations and organizations themselves, are blends. For example, Wiktionary , one of Misplaced Pages 's sister projects,
2100-496: Is a blend of wiki and dictionary . The word portmanteau was introduced in this sense by Lewis Carroll in the book Through the Looking-Glass (1871), where Humpty Dumpty explains to Alice the coinage of unusual words used in " Jabberwocky ". Slithy means "slimy and lithe" and mimsy means "miserable and flimsy". Humpty Dumpty explains to Alice the practice of combining words in various ways, comparing it to
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#17327826093662200-440: Is both phonological and orthographic, but with no other shortening: The overlap may be both phonological and orthographic, and with some additional shortening to at least one of the ingredients: Such an overlap may be discontinuous: These are also termed imperfect blends. It can occur with three components: The phonological overlap need not also be orthographic: If the phonological but non-orthographic overlap encompasses
2300-699: Is neither a breakfasty lunch nor a lunchtime breakfast but instead some hybrid of breakfast and lunch; Oxbridge is equally Oxford and Cambridge universities. This too parallels (conventional, non-blend) compounds: an actor–director is equally an actor and a director. Two kinds of coordinate blends are particularly conspicuous: those that combine (near‑) synonyms: and those that combine (near‑) opposites: Blending can also apply to roots rather than words, for instance in Israeli Hebrew : "There are two possible etymological analyses for Israeli Hebrew כספר kaspár 'bank clerk, teller'. The first
2400-405: Is that it consists of (Hebrew>) Israeli כסף késef 'money' and the ( International /Hebrew>) Israeli agentive suffix ר- -ár . The second is that it is a quasi- portmanteau word which blends כסף késef 'money' and (Hebrew>) Israeli ספר √spr 'count'. Israeli Hebrew כספר kaspár started as a brand name but soon entered the common language. Even if the second analysis is the correct one,
2500-457: Is used in the pass through image path. The more complicated setup involves the use of two cameras, two projectors and multiple beam-splitters , light traps, filters and aperture control systems. This setup provides the opportunity to use different content for foreground and background. Introvision was first used in 1980–81 during the filming of the science-fiction movie Outland to combine star Sean Connery and other performers with models of
2600-626: The Io mining colony. It was also used in the telefilm Inside the Third Reich to place actors portraying Adolf Hitler and Albert Speer in the long-destroyed Reichstag, as well as Under Siege , Army of Darkness and The Fugitive , where it seemed to place Harrison Ford on top of a bus that was then rammed by a train. Adventures in Babysitting employed IntroVision to place children in multiple situations of peril such as hanging from
2700-533: The OED Online , the etymology of the word is the "officer who carries the mantle of a person in a high position (1507 in Middle French), case or bag for carrying clothing (1547), clothes rack (1640)". In modern French, a porte-manteau is a clothes valet , a coat-tree or similar article of furniture for hanging up jackets, hats, umbrellas and the like. An occasional synonym for "portmanteau word"
2800-451: The projector . These zoom lenses are synchronized to zoom in and out simultaneously in the same direction. As the projection lens zooms in, it projects a smaller image on the screen; the camera lens zooms in at the same time, and to the same degree, so that the projected image (the background plate) appears unchanged, as seen through the camera. However, the subject placed in front of the front projection screen appears to have moved closer to
2900-432: The stems of the original words. The British lecturer Valerie Adams's 1973 Introduction to Modern English Word-Formation explains that "In words such as motel ..., hotel is represented by various shorter substitutes – ‑otel ... – which I shall call splinters. Words containing splinters I shall call blends". Thus, at least one of the parts of a blend, strictly speaking, is not a complete morpheme , but instead
3000-422: 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
3100-459: The 1968 films Barbarella and Where Eagles Dare . Front projection was chosen as the main method for shooting Christopher Reeve 's flying scenes in Superman . However, they still faced the problem of having Reeve actually fly in front of the camera. Effects wizard Zoran Perisic patented a new refinement to front projection that involved placing a zoom lens on both the movie camera and
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3200-601: The Andersons referred to as " kidult "). Garland suggests that this drive towards increased realism echoed "19th-century marionette theatre's own attempts to distinguish itself from other forms of puppetry (especially glove puppets ), which also involved a tethering to the newly-emergent realist aesthetic across the arts". In 1983, Gerry Anderson returned to puppetry with his independent science-fiction TV series Terrahawks . The characters of this series were made as three-foot-tall (0.91 m) rubber hand puppets, operated from
3300-796: 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. In practice, jaw movement was difficult to control due to the bobbing of the puppets' heads. By now all puppet sets were three-dimensional. They had also become more detailed, being made mostly of cardboard with fibreglass props. 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,
3400-517: The Magic Carpet . Introvision is a front projection composite photography system using a pair of perpendicular reflex screens to combine two projected scenes with a scene staged live before the camera in a single shot. It allows foreground, midground and background elements to be combined in-camera: such as sandwiching stage action (such as actors) between two projected elements, foreground and background. In its simplest form, images from
3500-546: The actor becomes their own matte . The combined image is transmitted through the mirror and recorded by the camera. The technique is shown and explained in the "making-of" documentary of the 1972 sci-fi film Silent Running . Front projection was invented by Will Jenkins . For this he holds U.S. patent 2,727,427 , issued on December 20, 1955 for an "Apparatus for Production of Light Effects in Composite Photography" and U.S. patent 2,727,429 , issued
3600-426: The appearance of images behind the actors (reflected image) and in front of the actors (pass through image). The camera sees the pass through image on the reverse side of the beam splitter and the reflected image through the beam splitter and combines the two eliminating the need for compositing in post production. To compensate for the large difference in the distance from the camera to the two screens an additional lens
3700-502: The beginning of one word may be followed by the beginning of another: Some linguists do not regard beginning+beginning concatenations as blends, instead calling them complex clippings, clipping compounds or clipped compounds . Unusually in English, the end of one word may be followed by the end of another: A splinter of one word may replace part of another, as in three coined by Lewis Carroll in " Jabberwocky ": They are sometimes termed intercalative blends; these words are among
3800-664: The camera; thus Superman flies towards the camera. The technique is analogous to the more commonly discussed dolly zoom effect. Perisic called this technique "Zoptic". The process was also used in two of the Superman sequels (but not used in the fourth movie due to budget constraints), Return to Oz , Radio Flyer , High Road to China , Deal of the Century , Megaforce , Thief of Baghdad , Greatest American Hero (TV), as well as Perisic's films as director , Sky Bandits (also known as Gunbus ) and The Phoenix and
3900-422: 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. In 2006, Anderson stated that the transition to this genre "wasn't a conscious move at all", but rather a natural progression given the basic deficiencies of
4000-441: The company's puppet techniques more lifelike. When we got to making this better class of puppet film, I was looking for a more fitting way to explain how our productions differed from those of our predecessors. I wanted to invent a word that promoted the quality of our work, so we combined the words "super", "marionette" and "animation". It didn't mean anything other than that, and it certainly didn't refer to any specific process. It
4100-458: 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. Around this time, Century 21 also tried to make the puppets' faces more lifelike by crafting them in
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4200-409: The crew. According to Chris Bentley, the term encompasses "all of the sophisticated puppetry techniques" used by APF – the foremost being the automatic mouth movement – "combined with the full range of film production facilities normally employed in live-action filming" (such as front and back projection, location shooting and visual effects ). Other commentators have cited the complexity and detail of
4300-557: The door, you'd cut to the reverse angle and that would be the puppet of Stanley Unwin ... I used Stanley Unwin, married to his own puppet, to enable him to do all the things that the puppet couldn't do." Special effects were created with miniature models and sets in a range of scales. A wide variety of materials were used in their construction – for example, rock faces were made from painted blocks of polystyrene, while miniature vehicles incorporated recycled household objects and parts from toy model kits. The lighting used for effects shooting
4400-405: The effort we were putting in and offer us live-action films ... When we did those early things we asked ourselves what we could do to improve them. Christine Glanville , who was so important to us as we went on with the puppets, came up with improvements all the time. — Sylvia Anderson on the making of APF's early productions (2001) Gerry Anderson's first experience with puppet filming
4500-622: The elaborate style of puppetry" used in APF's productions. Anderson denied that the term referred to a process, stating that he coined it as a promotional tool to separate APF's output from other children's puppet series like Muffin the Mule and Flower Pot Men . This was motivated by his embarrassment in working with puppets as opposed to live actors, and his wish to dispel the notion that APF's marionettes were "the sort of puppets that were used in pre-school programmes". He also likened Supermarionation to
4600-489: 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
4700-599: The final syllable ר- -ár apparently facilitated nativization since it was regarded as the Hebrew suffix ר- -år (probably of Persian pedigree), which usually refers to craftsmen and professionals, for instance as in Mendele Mocher Sforim 's coinage סמרטוטר smartutár 'rag-dealer'." Blending may occur with an error in lexical selection , the process by which a speaker uses his semantic knowledge to choose words. Lewis Carroll's explanation, which gave rise to
4800-485: The front projection process used less studio space, and generally produced sharper and more saturated images, as the background plate was not being viewed through a projection screen. The process also had several advantages over bluescreen matte photography, which could suffer from clipping, mismatched mattes, film shrinkage, black or blue haloing, garbage matte artifacts, and image degradation/excessive grain. It could be less time-consuming, and therefore less expensive, than
4900-444: The hero of Four Feather Falls , avoids walking by riding a horse called Rocky, while the characters of Fireball XL5 , Stingray and Thunderbirds achieve the same through use of personal hovercraft. Supercar and Stingray ' s focus on their eponymous car and submarine, as well as Stingray ' s depiction of Commander Shore as a paralytic reliant on a futuristic "hoverchair", are examples of other devices used to overcome
5000-410: 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. Lip-syncing was a key step in the development of Supermarionation, and Four Feather Falls is regarded by some sources as the first Supermarionation production. The mechanism made it easier for the puppeteers to operate
5100-492: 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
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#17327826093665200-574: The increasing use of digital cameras have made digital the most common method of choice. The last major blockbuster to extensively use front projection was the Sylvester Stallone action thriller Cliffhanger from 1993 . More recently, the film Oblivion made extensive use of front projection (though not retro-reflective) to display various sky backgrounds in the home set. Spectre also used this technique for its snow mountain hospital and glass building interiors. The advantages for
5300-403: The ingredients is the head and the other is attributive. A porta-light is a portable light, not a 'light-emitting' or light portability; light is the head. A snobject is a snobbery-satisfying object and not an objective or other kind of snob; object is the head. As is also true for (conventional, non-blend) attributive compounds (among which bathroom , for example, is a kind of room, not
5400-444: The integrity to match the material." The final Supermarionation series, The Secret Service , used footage of live actors to such an extent that the result according to Stephen La Rivière was "half-way between live action and Supermarionation". Its protagonist, Stanley Unwin, was modelled on the comedian of the same name , who both voiced the puppet character and served as its human body double in long shots and other scenes where
5500-455: The latter of the two referring to its filming style as 'Supermariorama' in reference to Supermarionation. In South Africa, similar techniques were used to make Interster (1982–86). The American puppet series Super Adventure Team (1998) was created in imitation of Supermarionation but with more adult themes and suggestive situations. Team America: World Police , a 2004 puppet film by South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone ,
5600-431: The marionettes in time with their dialogue as it was no longer necessary to learn the characters' lines. According to Anderson, as exaggerated movements were no longer needed, the puppets were finally able to speak "without their heads lolling about a like a broken toy." By now the puppeteers' movements were guided using a basic form of video assist: a TV camera mounted directly behind the film camera, which relayed footage to
5700-495: The morphemes or phonemes stay in the same position within the syllable. Some languages, like Japanese , encourage the shortening and merging of borrowed foreign words (as in gairaigo ), because they are long or difficult to pronounce in the target language. For example, karaoke , a combination of the Japanese word kara (meaning empty ) and the clipped form oke of the English loanword "orchestra" (J. ōkesutora , オーケストラ ),
5800-430: The need to make puppet series as science fiction (2006) 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
5900-451: 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
6000-452: The next – for example, by adding or removing facial hair. In a 2002 interview, Anderson said that during the production of Captain Scarlet he was hoping to move into live-action television and that he endorsed the new puppets as a compromise for his inability to use live actors. 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
6100-495: The original "portmanteaus" for which this meaning of the word was created. In a partial blend, one entire word is concatenated with a splinter from another. Some linguists do not recognize these as blends. An entire word may be followed by a splinter: A splinter may be followed by an entire word: An entire word may replace part of another: These have also been called sandwich words, and classed among intercalative blends. (When two words are combined in their entirety,
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#17327826093666200-416: The performers, front projection projects the pre-filmed material over the performers and onto a highly reflective background surface. In contrast to rear projection , in front projection the background image is projected onto both the performer and a highly reflective background screen, with the result that the projected image is bounced off the screen and into the lens of a camera. This is achieved by having
6300-500: The personality of their precursors, also stating that the increased emphasis on realism hampered the puppeteers' creativeness. Fellow sculptor Terry Curtis believed that the re-design took away the puppets' "charm". According to director Desmond Saunders , APF was trying "anything to get [the puppets] to look like ordinary human beings. But they are not ordinary human beings! ... I often wonder it if would have been better to make them more like puppets, not less like puppets." A drawback of
6400-451: The process of optically separating and combining the background and foreground images using an optical printer . It also allowed the director and/or director of photography to view the combined sequence live, allowing for such effects to be filmed more like a regular sequence, and the performers could be specifically directed to time their actions to action or movement on the projected images. However, advancements in digital compositing and
6500-436: The puppet film as 'respectable' as possible". She also comments that APF's filming techniques "would not only result in a level of quality and sophistication not seen before in a family show, but also give birth to some of the most iconic series in the history of British children's television." Garland describes the underlying theme of Anderson's work as a "self-reflexive obsession with an aesthetic of realism (or more accurately
6600-430: The puppet was impractical to use. According to Anderson, this was another way of avoiding the problem of lack of mobility: "I came up with the idea of getting Stanley Unwin to do all the walking shots, and driving shots in this Model Ford T [the character] had. If, for example, you had a sequence where Stanley Unwin would arrive at a building in his Model T, he would ... get out, walk down the path, and as soon as he opened
6700-495: 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
6800-410: The puppets' lack of mobility. Because we had characters who couldn't stand properly without their knees sagging, and characters who had no expression, it was very difficult to play a love scene and impossible to have a fight. And so it seemed the way to go was anything that was fast-moving and had a lot of excitement, so it seemed that science fiction was the best option. — Gerry Anderson on
6900-759: The puppets, models and sets as aspects of Supermarionation. Marcus Hearn states that the term reflected Gerry Anderson's desire to "promote his company's collective ingenuity as a proprietary process" and "[ally] his productions with Hollywood photographic techniques such as CinemaScope and VistaVision ." He adds that it "encompassed the full panoply of APF's expertise – production values in model-making, photography, special effects, editing and orchestral music that had never been so consistently applied to any type of children's programme, let alone those featuring puppets." We were determined to break away from [children's puppet programmes], so we treated those programmes as if they were something really special and hoped people would see
7000-406: The puppets. Sylvia said that the reasons were budgetary, due to the fact that APF could not yet afford to work with live actors: "... we were picking subjects that we could easily do in miniature scale." David Garland calls character movement Anderson's " bête noire " and states that the puppets' limited mobility resulted in "vehicle-heavy science fiction" becoming his "preferred genre". He considers
7100-621: The rafters and scaling the " Smurfit-Stone Building " in Chicago, and Stand By Me used IntroVision during the train sequence. Most movie companies brought small units to the Introvision sound stages near Poinsettia and Santa Monica Boulevard in Hollywood, California. Scenes were often shot near the end of the production schedule to allow for the shooting of "live" plates to have been done while on location. Compared to back projection ,
7200-418: The reflective screen with a movie camera pointing straight at them. Just in front of the camera is a one-way mirror angled at 45 degrees. At 90 degrees to the camera is a projector which projects an image of the background onto the mirror which reflects the image onto the performer and the highly reflective screen; the image is too faint to appear on the actor but shows up clearly on the screen. In this way,
7300-453: The result is considered a compound word rather than a blend. For example, bagpipe is a compound, not a blend, of bag and pipe. ) Morphologically, blends fall into two kinds: overlapping and non-overlapping . Overlapping blends are those for which the ingredients' consonants, vowels or even syllables overlap to some extent. The overlap can be of different kinds. These are also called haplologic blends. There may be an overlap that
7400-416: The same day for an "Apparatus for Production of Composite Photographic Effects." It was first experimented with in 1949, shortly after the invention of Scotchlite, and had appeared in feature films by 1963, when the Japanese film Matango used it extensively for its yacht scenes. Another early appearance was in 1966, during the filming of 2001: A Space Odyssey . The actors in ape suits were filmed on
7500-417: The smaller heads was that they upset the weight distribution; this made the puppets harder to control, to a point where they would often have to be fixed to G-clamps to be kept steady. In addition, problems achieving realistic depth of field made it considerably harder to film close-up shots. A major limitation of the marionettes was their inability to walk convincingly. This was due to their low weight and
7600-421: 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 ...
7700-612: 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. When activated by the signals, the solenoid in the head caused the puppet's lower lip to open and close with each syllable. 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
7800-421: The studio floor in a process called "Supermacromation". This was similar to the techniques employed by American puppeteer Jim Henson . In 2004, Anderson created a Captain Scarlet remake titled New Captain Scarlet , which was produced using computer-generated imagery (CGI) and motion-capture techniques. Motion capture was used heavily for action sequences as it provided more convincing character movement. As
7900-443: The term to increase the "respectability" of puppetry, a medium he had not originally intended to work with. According to Sylvia, the productions were described as "Supermarionation" to distinguish them from traditional puppet theatre. Noting that a major disadvantage of APF's marionettes was their inability to walk convincingly, commentators have argued that the term expressed Gerry's preference for artistic realism and his wish to make
8000-484: The then-common type of luggage , which opens into two equal parts: You see it's like a portmanteau—there are two meanings packed up into one word. In his introduction to his 1876 poem The Hunting of the Snark , Carroll again uses portmanteau when discussing lexical selection: Humpty Dumpty's theory, of two meanings packed into one word like a portmanteau, seems to me the right explanation for all. For instance, take
8100-470: 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. 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
8200-411: 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." Thom believes that the re-design reflected Anderson's desire for greater "realism and spectacle". Not all of Anderson's colleagues welcomed the change. Puppet sculptor and operator John Blundall pejoratively referred to the new puppets as "little humans" that lacked
8300-462: The two words "fuming" and "furious". Make up your mind that you will say both words, but leave it unsettled which you will say first … if you have the rarest of gifts, a perfectly balanced mind, you will say "frumious". In then-contemporary English, a portmanteau was a suitcase that opened into two equal sections. According to the OED Online , a portmanteau is a "case or bag for carrying clothing and other belongings when travelling; (originally) one of
8400-497: 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
8500-406: The use of 'portmanteau' for such combinations, was: Humpty Dumpty's theory, of two meanings packed into one word like a portmanteau, seems to me the right explanation for all. For instance, take the two words "fuming" and "furious." Make up your mind that you will say both words ... you will say "frumious." The errors are based on similarity of meanings, rather than phonological similarities, and
8600-534: The use of marionettes – the kind of puppet "perhaps most unsuited" to an action format – to be "one of the most striking paradoxes" of the Anderson productions. 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'
8700-457: The various monitors around the studio. 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". The puppets and puppet sets of Supermarionation were built in 1 ⁄ 3 scale, the former being roughly two feet (61 cm) tall. Each marionette
8800-542: The whole of the shorter ingredient, as in then the effect depends on orthography alone. (They are also called orthographic blends. ) An orthographic overlap need not also be phonological: For some linguists, an overlap is a condition for a blend. Non-overlapping blends (also called substitution blends) have no overlap, whether phonological or orthographic: Morphosemantically, blends fall into two kinds: attributive and coordinate . Attributive blends (also called syntactic or telescope blends) are those in which one of
8900-408: 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
9000-415: 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
9100-496: Was first used during the production of Supercar , whose final 13 episodes were the first to be credited as being "filmed in Supermarionation". Some sources consider its precursor, Four Feather Falls , to be the first Supermarionation series because it saw the introduction of the electronic lip-syncing mechanism that featured in all of APF's later puppet productions. The term was coined by Gerry Anderson, who regarded it as APF's trademark. In later life, he said that he invented
9200-459: Was five times as strong as that normally used on a live-action production. Effects were typically shot at high speed (72 to 120 frames per second ) with the footage slowed down in post-production to give a sense of greater weight or steadiness, thus making the sequences look more realistic. High-speed filming was essential for shots on water in order to make the small ripples inside the filming tank look like ocean waves. As sets were built to scale, it
9300-459: 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
9400-429: Was inspired by Thunderbirds and has been described as an imitation or spoof of Supermarionation productions. Stone and Parker dubbed their filming process "Supercrappymation" (or "Supercrappynation") as the wires were deliberately left visible. A Stargate SG-1 episode, " 200 " (2006), features a self-parody in which the characters are played by Supermarionation-style puppets. Portmanteau In linguistics ,
9500-425: 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. Tex Tucker,
9600-404: Was launched to fund a remake of the anime series Firestorm , to be produced using a technique called "Ultramarionation". In the 2010s, Stephen La Rivière and his production company Century 21 Films began a revival of Supermarionation. Their productions are listed below. Century 21 Films also worked on "Apollo", a 2019 episode of Endeavour that is set partly in a TV studio which is making
9700-603: 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
9800-399: Was often hard to maintain a realistic sense of depth. 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
9900-526: Was our trademark, if you like. — Gerry Anderson on the origin of the term (2002) The term was coined in 1960 by Gerry Anderson. Sources describe Supermarionation as a style of puppetry, a production technique or process, or a promotional term. Emma Thom of the National Science and Media Museum defines it as APF's use of electronics to synchronise puppets' lip movements with pre-recorded dialogue. According to Jeff Evans , it "express[es]
10000-430: Was suspended and controlled with several fine tungsten steel wires that were between 1 ⁄ 5000 and 1 ⁄ 3000 of an inch (0.0051–0.0085 mm) 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
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