The Jim Henson Company
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Jim Henson's Creature Shop is the world-renowned studio that creates puppets, animatronics, and digital characters for film, TV, and live entertainment. Browse their portfolio of projects, from Earth to Ned to The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance.
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HENSON DIGITAL PUPPETRY STUDIO. The Henson Digital Puppetry...
- Projects
projects FILM Five Nights at Freddy’s Blumhouse Happytime...
- Case Studies
Case Studies - Jim Henson's Creature Shop ... case studies
- Team
Jim Henson’s Creature Shop™ is – at its core – a CHARACTER...
- History
After Jim Henson’s passing in 1990, his son Brian took the...
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Coldplay's The Weirdos - Home - Jim Henson's Creature Shop
- Sesame Street
Sesame Street - Home - Jim Henson's Creature Shop
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Learn about the visual effects company founded by Jim Henson, creator of The Muppets. Find out its history, locations, projects, and types of puppets and creatures.
- Overview
- The London Creature Shop (1978-2005)
- The Los Angeles Creature Shop (1990-present)
- The New York Creature Shop (2004-present)
- See also
- Sources
Jim Henson's Creature Shop is a special effects house and puppet workshop that provides digital visual effects, animatronic creatures, animation and soft puppets to the international film, television, online and advertising industries. The Shop is currently based in Los Angeles and New York with satellite shop capabilities.
The London based workshop owned by the Jim Henson Company found at Oval Road, Camden. Distinct from The Muppet Workshop, the Creature Workshop had its roots in the pre-production for The Dark Crystal, beginning in 1978, assembling technicians, sculptors, and production designers, both Muppet veterans and outside talent, to create a realistic, unified world. At the end of this production, the majority of the staff left for other projects, as is common in the film business. Shortly after this, The Henson Company started crewing up for Labyrinth - and Henson expressed some regrets that many of the people who had worked on Dark Crystal were not available (since they were working on other jobs). As a result, he came up with the idea of opening a workshop that employed people on a long term basis, working on projects when they were available, and on research and development projects the rest of the time. Around this time "The Creature Shop" went from being an informal identifier to a formal one, used to denote the more aesthetically realistic, technically involved "creatures". Traditional puppetry techniques, while not entirely abandoned, were placed to the side in favor of radio-controlled advancements, animatronic technology, body suit performers, and fleshy latex faces capable of multiple eye, brow, jaw, and teeth movements.
Unlike the Muppet Workshop, which seldom accepted outside commissions, the Creature Shop was soon established as a special effects production house, utilized for both Henson films and series and outside, commissioned projects. The Creature Shop name first appeared in the credits of Dreamchild, for which the company's staff designed, built, and performed Lewis Carroll figures. The StoryTeller was the first television series to utilize the Creatures. Though primarily associated with realistic monsters and animals, the Creature Shop also occasionally built figures for Muppet productions, such as The Ghost of Faffner Hall or the Christmas ghosts in The Muppet Christmas Carol.
During this time, the controls became increasingly complicated - the earliest creatures were a mixture of cable operated and radio control - the latter originally based on modified Futaba sets, but later replaced by some custom transmitters ("Tranimats") based on JR hardware heavily modified by McGregor Industries, who were JR's UK distributors. These units had a large number of programmable mixes on them, allowing such things as mixing the eye up/down control into the eyelids for a more realistic appearance.
Around this time, the decision was made to investigate the possibility of using computer controls to aid this process - this culminated in the development of a unit called SYNN (a heavily contrived acronym for SYstem with No Name) - first used for controlling the dog in Storyteller. This was the first iteration of the Henson Performance Control System.
Full-bodied reptiles dominated the Creature Shop's slate in the early 1990s, creating the title characters in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Secret of the Ooze, and an array of prehistoric beings in Dinosaurs. For these projects, enhancements were made to the Henson Performance Control System, an advancement from the earlier radio controls, allowing puppeteers to create complex facial expressions as well as detailed body movements, such as in finger joints. The team, including Faz Fazakas and Brian Henson, received a special Scientific and Engineering Academy Award in 1992 for this advancement.
The London base of the Creature Shop closed in spring 2005. It has now become a luxury apartment block simply called The Henson.
The Creature Shop expanded in the early '90s to help absorb the workload brought on by Dinosaurs. The show required a full cast of animatronic characters built by the Creature Shop. The series was followed by other animatronic projects such as The Flintstones, The Neverending Story, The Adventures of Pinocchio, 101 Dalmatians, and
The Creature Shop also became increasingly involved in digital puppetry and computer animation, in such projects as Loch Ness and Lost in Space. Other assignments involved creating realistic animal characters, for use as either doubles for Dr. Dolittle and Cats & Dogs.
In 2000, the Shop moved to the Henson Company Lot on La Brea Avenue.
The Henson Digital Puppetry Studio has evolved to become a means of performing computer-generated characters in real time, used on such productions as Frances, Sid the Science Kid, and Wilson & Ditch: Digging America.
After selling the Muppets to the Walt Disney Company in 2004, the Jim Henson Company merged the operations of the Muppet Workshop into the duties of their Creature Shop. Though the workshop is no longer responsible for the creation of Muppet characters, they continue to build the soft puppets required for Jim Henson Company productions as well as Sesame Street.
The company's New York workshop, now a division of the Creature Shop, continues to operate and has since moved to Long Island City, Queens (near the Kaufman Astoria Studios, the shooting location of Sesame Street) where it is headed by Connie Peterson as Workshop Manager, and Jason Weber as Creative Supervisor. The new, sans-"Muppet" name has also been alternatively credited as Jim Henson's Puppet Workshop and Jim Henson's New York Puppet Workshop.
1."Inside Jim Henson's Creature Shop: Where Gadgets and Dreams Collide." Gizmodo. April 14, 2014
Meet the team behind Jim Henson's Creature Shop, a character and performance company that creates puppets and visual effects for film and television. Learn about their roles, credits, and innovations in the industry.
Learn about the services offered by the Creature Shop, the legendary studio that created characters for The Muppets, Fraggle Rock, Labyrinth, and more. From concept design to digital puppetry, the Creature Shop can bring your vision to life with puppets, animatronics, costumes, and rentals.
Jim Henson's Creature Shop™ provides digital visual effects, animatronic creatures, animation and soft puppets to the international film, television, online and advertising industries.
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Today is Five Nights at Freddy’s 10th Anniversary! Jim Henson’s Creature Shop fabricated the characters for the 2023 @fnafmovie based on the popular game franchise! 🐻🐰🐤🦊🧁
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