"We made an 8' tall buffalo for Radio Flyer, so
a lot of the massive animatronic stuff was worked out,"
says company president Rick Lazzarini. "Some of it
translated, and some of it didn't. But we only had to
make one of those. On this project, our workshop was like
an elephant graveyard with all the parts strewn about.
And as if that weren't enough, then we had to ship them
and our tools and support equipment to Thailand, and
shoot there for six weeks." All of the Character Shop elephants were duplicates of
Tai, the four-ton live elephant who costars with Ray
Liotta and Danny Glover in Operation Dumbo Drop. The
movie is based on a true story about the US Army attempts
to deliver a new elephant to a strategically located
village during the Vietnam War. Many stunts were required
of Tai's character Bo-Tat - including a climactic
parachute drop. Understandably, she needed several
stand-ins. When Lazzarini's shop got the job he sent a crew to
collect Tai's measurements and study movement and
physical attributes. "We got everything you can imagine,
including circumferences, diameters, lengths, widths,
circumference of the globe of the eyes," he says. "We
went in with this 8' long pair of calipers, which when
stretched out, could go to almost 16', and that's what we
used to get around the elephant's bulk. We took massive
amounts of photographs from every angle, and videotaped
her movement from front, profile, and so on. We also took
silicone mold castings of her skin, so that when we did a
full-scale sculpture, we had reference samples to sculpt
from. "To sculpt the full-sized elephant," he continues, "we
built a steel armature that came apart in a number of
pieces - trunk, head, tail, body, legs, and ears were all
separate, so we could take those pieces apart and sculpt
on them separately, but also put them together to see it
in total." Green urethane foam was added to the armature
for bulk, and then water-based clay was used for
sculpting, except for the ears, which were sculpted in a
more crack-resistant oil-based clay. "It took 12 people
four weeks to sculpt," says Lazzarini. "And I kept people
rotating, so that no one sculptor's interpretation would
become discernible in any one area. After the sculpting, a massive silicone mold was made,
backed up with lightweight fiberglass and syntactic foam
jacket to give it shape. "And then we pulled off the mold
and destroyed the sculpture." Lazzarini says. From the
molds, we made the eight elephants." Six were simple
fiberglass shells (weighing in at 400-600 lbs) with
floppy polyurethane ears, tail, and trunk; these were the
models that were dropped from an airplane. The other two,
used for more complicated movement, were animatronics
controlled by a custom-configured computer playback
system. and programmed using Lazzarini's proprietary
Waldo® devices. "We used computer playback during shots where the
helicopter would pick up the animatronic and whisk it out
of sight range, so there's no point in doing a real time
control, since you can't see what you're doing." he says.
"So we would pre-program five minutes worth of movement
into the computer, and just before the helicopter took it
away we would open the elephant's butt flap, yank a pull
cord that started the generator, and start the playback
going." The animatronic capabilities on both models included
"full trunk movement, head up and down and side to side,
flapping ears, blinking eyes, eyes up and down and left
to right, brow movement, mouth movement, and swinging
tail." Further, "one of the animatronics had a spring
system in its legs to allow it to bounce back and forth
passively, and the other one was equipped with a
hydraulic mechanism for swaying side to side." The
animatronics weighed approximately 1,800 lbs - "about
what a Volkswagen Bug used to weigh, certainly less than
a real elephant." Tai, who also appeared in "Rudyard Kipling's The
Jungle Book", was a real pro during her modeling sessions
with The Character Shop crew, but the resulting simulacra
gave her pause. In Thailand, it was decided that the
replicas needed some cosmetic touchups, so Tai was
brought in, in makeup, as a reference. "Here were eight
elephants made in her likeness." Lazzarini recalls. "She
ran her trunk up and down sniffing them, as if to say,
come on, wake up. She was smart enough to know they
weren't real, but she was very curious about them."
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1995-98
WHEN ELEPHANTS FLY
By JOHN CALHOUN
The Character Shop, a
special effects company based in Canoga Park, CA, has
provided reindeer for Tim Allen in The Santa
Clause, chickens for Foster Farms, and
tongue-slinging frogs for Budweiser. But the company's
biggest project so far is the creation of eight
full-sized replicas of Indian elephants, two of which
were animatronically equipped for lifelike movement, for
the Walt Disney movie Operation Dumbo Drop.
Rick's note: TCI is a great magazine,
loaded with lots of in-depth technical info. Pick it up
at Samuel French's or Larry Edmunds!
Article from Theater Crafts
International, October Issue, 1995
Article © TCI 1995, reproduced for review
purposes.
Photograph by The Character Shop
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