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GO MOTION / DRAGONSLAYER (1981)
Industrial Light & Magic's Go Motion Puppet Mover for Dragonslayer (1981). External Rods attached to various points on puppet. Rods moved by stepper motors, which are programmed by computer. This is done single frame at at time. All this set-up required for just ONE puppet! Complex and tedious compared to just animating puppet by hand. (see pic below) Above, closer photo showing external rods attached to Wings. Entire body also attached to Huge Rig below the puppet (see 1st photo) that moved along a track, and controlled by stepper motors . All this effort in order to obtain Smoother frame to frame incremental Stop Motion movements and it also added motion blurs (camera shutter kept to create blur on film) at key frames of very fast action/movement. Not used in Dragonslayer, there are other old school special effects methods of adding simulated motion blurs such as smearing petroleum jelly on clear glass placed very close to camera lens. The image distortion caused the the petroleum jelly creates a motion blur-like streaked image on the frame. -
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_Today, we have specific Stop Motion software called Frame Grabbers, to preview the frame by frame puppet movements in order to more consistently achieve smoother animation. Also, there are now programs that can create & add to the images, simulated motion blurs. This is digitally done in post production after the completion of the animation. Okay ... enough with just only behind the scenes photos. Here is a rare 'making of' about
Before Dragonslayer, a much simpler Go-Motion method used on
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