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To understand whatDark Crystal: Age of Resistanceis, it helps to first understand what it might have been.
Thra is a world filled with puppets.
He didnt know what puppets cant do.
So he just said, This is what the puppets will do.
And we said, quietly to ourselves, Puppets cant do that.
She pauses, then continues.
And then we figured out how to make it happen.
Leterrier, however, tells the story a little differently.
I actually knew what puppets could do, he says.
But I didnt accept it.
[…] I didnt accept physics, in a sense.
I was like, I know, I know.
But lets keep going.
Lets go a little bit further.
The Muppets are performing, Hensontold the New YorkTimesahead of the films release.
These characters are acting.
[…] They cant fight, cant reach over and pick up props.
We had to be like magicians, with a whole series of tricks and illusions to fool the audience.
Not that its creators could have known this at the time.
No, we didnt know, Froud replies when asked if they anticipated its second life.
It was of an age when things werent so focused on who it was for.
It always felt like we made a film everybody would want to watch.
I feel like I was born into it, Toby says with a laugh.
But making that family collaboration possible required a few false starts.
Dont ever talk about something at Comic Con unless you actually have the money to make it.
Because the fans were very disappointed in us.
But thats cause Im a control freak.
Its a magic trick.
Oftentimes, if you look at them in real space, theyre not looking at each other at all.
Which is why its hard to shoot two cameras at once on puppets.
They could be looking directly past each other and its quite obvious from one angle.
[But] from the cameras angle, it looks like theyre staring right into each others eyes.
I sort of retrofitted my camera and my camerawork and my tools to make it work for puppets.
To sell the illusion, he relied on some old-fashioned bits of movie magic.
There were normal techniques, funny techniques, little old techniques, Leterrier says.
That doesnt mean 21st-century technology didnt play a part as well.
Puppets dominateDark Crystal: Age of Resistance, but it does feature some CG enhancements.
We had to shoot everything on a stage and we had a stage that was a little short.
Sometimes we had to extend the sky.
Thats what CG was used for.
It was never used to replace anything.
And it becomes a magical thing.
