The Mind Creative March 2014
I first met Kong, or at least parts of the beast when I went on a
tour of the Creature Technology workshop in Footscray, Melbourne
in 2011. Designer and long standing UNIMA Australia member,
Philip Millar, generously gave me a tour of the workshop and I
found myself standing next to a giant fist which, even though it
was not yet connected to the rest of the body, or animated in all
its mighty glory, that one body part contained the potential for a
very powerful performance. The puppet creature King Kong is an
innovative technological feat of engineering, involving both digital
and tangible puppetry techniques to operate and animate the
character. In his article Puppets and Media Production, (2001, pg.
183), Steve Tillis foresees a future “in which tangible puppets and
media puppets coexist, each stimulating and challenging each
other’
The future of puppetry is well
and truly here. In this production
of King Kong the stage musical,
they have employed hybrid
technology to animate this huge
creature. There are three
puppeteers operating in real
time via remote control from a
voodoo booth at the back of the
auditorium as well as up to 10
puppeteers at one time on the
floor with their hands on various
body parts. The word “voodoo”
is used by Creature Technology
(CTC) to describe the purposebuilt joystick assemblies that
allow the 3 “voodoo” puppeteers
to remotely control the many
internal axes of movement that
Kong has. Kong is essentially a
huge marionette puppet with
Photo: James Morgan
visible strings weighing 1