Marvel at the animated alchemy behind Mackenzie Crook’s Small Prophets

It’s Nice That: How did the project come about and what did they tell you about the creatures initially?

Ainslie Henderson (AH): Mackenzie has this shed, down at the bottom of the garden where he does all of his writing. I went to visit him one day and on one of the shelves was a strange little paper creature with a tail and a crown. It was a very beautiful, weird little thing that stuck out. I asked about it and he told me that he’d read about these creatures in a book by Lawrence Durrell called Clea, and in this book, there’s a description of the alchemist Paracelsus who’d grown these creatures, these small humanoid homunculi in jars. They had the power to prophesise the future. He told me about the idea and immediately it sounded like something that would be good to make in stop motion, something that Will and I would love to do.

INT: Tell us about the creative approach to the characters – what did you and Mackenzie want the homunculi to look and behave like and why?

Will Anderson (WA): We did a test, in Mackenzie’s shed, maybe a year and a half before starting. He had written a scene and he wanted to do a teaser to try and sell the idea. He gave us a lot of room just to kind of play around with it, and we learned a lot about the environment (Michael’s shed in the show is very much like Mackenzie’s) and how to light the jars and composite the stop-motion into them effectively in doing that. I guess a lot of it was in that initial, more free sort of environment of just playing around with things.

Mackenzie was always very keen on it being stop motion. What me and Ainslie bring together is a mix of of skills and styles. Ainslie makes things that are very handmade, in stop motion, whereas I’m more on the digital, CGI side of things. It was a really clear, creative decision that the prophets shouldn’t feel CGI. There are adornments, capes that float in the water around the creatures that are made in CG, but ultimately they all had to be in tune with that definitive stop-motion, Ray Harryhausen feel. So that was the real challenge; the collaging of these different styles to make it look and feel like something that’s real and yet still magical within the shed at the end of the garden.

INT: What happened next – tell us about the references and techniques that influenced the final homunculi characters.

AH: After we did that initial test (and realised on reading Mackenzie’s scripts that while there are only three creatures, there were in fact seven full puppets – to show the prophets growing and changing over the series) we realised pretty quickly that the puppet build was a much bigger job than we could manage on our own, so we reached out to Mackinnon & Saunders in Manchester. They really are the best at that stuff, and all credit for how brilliant the creatures ultimately look belongs with them. One main designer there, Glen Southern, did some brilliant work in 3D sculpting and really brought Mackenzie’s initial sketches of the homunculi to life. I remember early on we all looked at seahorses and fungus.

Mackenzie was really sure he wanted all the clothes, the crown and the Queen’s sceptre to look like they had actually grown out of the creatures. In terms of their character and movement, I also recall Mackenzie had this this vision of when someone’s freezing cold, if they’ve fallen into a river, they’re left with wet clothes on and they don’t want to move, so there’s a kind of paralysed, slightly shivering, still feeling about them.

WA: When we were shooting, and comping the prophets into the jars, we had a big jar of kombucha in the studio, it was kind of rotten underneath, with stringy bits of kombucha that we took pictures of and fed into the atmosphere in the jars.

INT: How did you eventually make them come to life? Tell us about the process.

WA: We were on set shooting with Mackenzie in a shed that had been built in a studio, where we could control the lighting. The actors would act their scenes to empty jars, and we would take shots of jars, once with clear water, and again with inked up black water, so we could screen reflections easily in post production.

We’d also use a little red cube, in the frame of each shot, so that we could take those cubes away, back to our own studio, and use them to work out where the placement of the camera should be. And then we would shoot the stop motion puppet on a green screen. So we basically matched the camera. Ainslie would do all the stop-motion and I would be compositing and adding the CG elements and lighting effect and inks and, basically, collage them all together to get your final image. Lots of to-ing and fro-ing, but, you know, a real mix of real life and animation.

AH:There was quite a lot of chat about giving each of the homunculi their own character. I definitely wanted them to have their own distinctive movements. I knew I wanted the King to be really pompous, a bit jerky and kind of aggressive. I wanted the other end of the spectrum, the Seraph, to be really elegant and graceful. Then for the Queen to have a kind of uptight regality about her. I definitely had that in mind when I was animating each of them. I had some mad idea halfway through that we might even animate the Seraf backwards. And then reverse it. Thankfully, Will and Mackenzie talked me down from my madness.

WA: There’s always season two.

AH: I do have a bad habit of wanting to make things more difficult than they have to be sometimes. Get lost in the process and excited by possibilities.

WA: I try to make things more easy.

AH: Yeah yeah.