Supermarionation
Supermarionation is a style of television and film production employed by British company AP Films 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 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" 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 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 the company's puppet techniques more lifelike.
Definition
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 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 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, -scale filming stages, back projection, live-action inserts and live action-style special effects, and video assist to guide 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". Other commentators have cited the complexity and detail of 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 " 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."
History
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. 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, 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". 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, 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 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 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".
''Supercar'' to ''Thunderbirds''
The puppets and puppet sets of Supermarionation were built in scale, the former being roughly tall. 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 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. 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 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.