Ep 149 | Craig Caton-Largent — Jurassic Park Raptors, ET & Digital Domain
The Filmumentaries PodcastShow Notes
In this episode, I chat with creature effects artist, puppeteer and digital pioneer Craig Caton-Largent about a career that arguably traces the entire arc of modern visual effects — from foam latex and animatronics to motion control, performance capture and full CG animation.
Craig talks about growing up on a sheep and cattle ranch in Washington State, being captivated by the 1960s Batman TV show and then Planet of the Apes, and teaching himself prosthetics from Dick Smith's Monster Makeup Handbook. After tracking down Dick Smith's address in Who's Who in America, he wrote a letter that led to a year of mentorship over cassette tapes and ultimately introductions to Rick Baker, Stan Winston and Tom Burman.
We get into his first job on Charles Band's Metal Storm: The Destruction of Jared-Syn, working on the Olympic alien for the 1984 closing ceremonies, sculpting barnacles on Cocoon, building Spock's seamless silicone ears on Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, undulating menacingly under shaving cream on Larry Cohen's The Stuff, and puppeteering Slimer's mouth on the original Ghostbusters. A big part of the conversation focuses on Jurassic Park, including the design evolution of the T-Rex, the helicopter convention moment that led to the McFadden motion base, the logistics of moving the full-size animatronic across the San Fernando Valley at night, and Craig's work as the Raptor puppeteer, including the now-legendary "head tilt" at the kitchen window that earned an on-set "It's like Alien, I love it" from Spielberg.
We also talk about Craig's twenty-year stint as the caretaker, or "doctor", to the original ET puppet, including the time the LAPD turned up at his garage door thinking he was running a crack lab while he was actually repainting ET.
Plus the story of how Stan Winston handing him a couple of SGI machines led, almost overnight, to him becoming one of the eight co-founders of Digital Domain alongside James Cameron and Scott Ross. Later in the conversation we move into Craig's animation career as a final layout artist and character TD at DreamWorks and Disney, with credits on Tangled, Rise of the Guardians, How to Train Your Dragon 2 and Turbo, and stories from working with Guillermo del Toro at DreamWorks. We finish on Craig's current role as Creative Director of the 3D Animation and Visual Effects department at the New York Film Academy in Burbank.
Topics covered Growing up on a Washington State ranch and falling in love with Planet of the Apes Famous Monsters of Filmland and Dick Smith's Monster Makeup Handbook Cold-writing to Dick Smith and a year of cassette-tape mentorship Arriving in Hollywood at the start of the "golden age" of effects First feature work on Metal Storm: The Destruction of Jared-Syn The closing ceremonies of the 1984 LA Olympics and Ron Cobb's alien Sculpting barnacles and cocoons for Cocoon (1985) Seamless silicone Spock ears on Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home The Stuff with Larry Cohen and "undulating menacingly" Puppeteering Slimer's mouth on Ghostbusters Designing the T-Rex around helicopter flight simulator technology Working with McFadden Simulation on the T-Rex motion base Moving the full-size T-Rex across the San Fernando Valley Building a 70lb Steadicam-rigged Raptor insert head for Jurassic Park Using parrots as reference for bird-like Raptor movement The kitchen porthole head tilt, and Spielberg's "It's like Alien" reaction Using Kermit the Frog's voice on set as the Raptor performer Twenty years as ET's "doctor", and the LAPD crack-lab incident ET's arm in a rifle case at JFK a week after 9/11 Motion capture experiments and blood-spread effects on Interview with the Vampire A flying logo on an Amiga, and becoming a co-founder of Digital Domain Working with Stan Winston, James Cameron and Scott Ross Moving into animation: character rigging at Disney on Tangled Final layout and virtual camera work at DreamWorks on Rise of the Guardians, How to Train Your Dragon 2 and Turbo Lunches wi
More from The Filmumentaries Podcast
John Knoll is Chief Creative Officer at ILM and visual effects supervisor on The Mandalorian and Grogu, the first time Mando and Grogu have been on a cinema screen. He describes two forces pulling against each other. It had to feel like it came from the same group of people who made the series, which meant keeping the handcrafted approach — puppets, creatures in rubber masks, motion control miniatures, stop motion.
This one's a bit different. It's shorter, and it's about a film that doesn't exist yet. Christopher Jacobsen is an actor and filmmaker, and full disclosure, the brother of one of my good friends. He's trying to get a documentary made about Daragh O'Malley, who played Sergeant Patrick Harper in Sharpe.
Sean England has been at Skywalker Sound since 1993. He didn't arrive as a foley artist. He came in on the technical side, in the machine room and the transfer department, back when everything went to analog tape and film was spliced on a Kem. He calls those years his film school. He watched sound get made from one end of a picture to the other, then became a foley recordist, then a mixer, then went through the glass and became the artist.
Ep 154 — Wolf Kahler — Colonel Dietrich in Raiders of the Lost Ark
Brad Fiedel wrote one of the most recognisable pieces of music in film history, and he did it on a drum machine, a sequencer and a keyboard chained together with a computer ribbon cable, before MIDI was really a thing. The famous lurch in the rhythm is him hitting a button by hand and deciding the wobble was better than the fix. Years later Henry Mancini rang up wanting to record it with a big band, and the man writing the lead sheet couldn't work out the time signature.