Jim Henson's Creature Shop to work on Star Wars prequel

[Super Scooter]

Jim Henson's Creature Shop has been signed on by Lucasfilm to create the Wookie costumes for Star Wars Episode III, as well as another alien that will be played by Bruce Spence from the Mad Max series, the Train Man on the Matrix Revolutions, and played the Mouth of Sauron cut from Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (it will be available on the Director's Cut edition of the DVD when it is released). The Creature Shop most recently worked on the films The Brotherhood of the Wolves and Cats & Dogs.

I have no idea where my brother heard this information (a Star Wars forum, I believe), and can't find any information on it on www.creatureshop.com . Does anyone know if this is official?

 

[movielad]

Dave Elsey (of the Farscape creature shop) has been working as the creative supervisor on Star Wars: Episode III. See http://us.imdb.com/name/nm0255642/ for confirmation at the IMDB. They don't list JHCS as a company involved with this film, so I would suspect that he's working as a freelancer on this one.

Regards,

Martyn

 

[Super Scooter]

Okay.

The thing was, Hasbro went to the Creature Shop for designs for their action figure line.

 

[Fozzie Bear]

Well, since I went to the trouble to get the following information, I'll go ahead and get the info posted from QuigonTim at suspiciousmindtrick.com, a Memphis based Star Wars Fan Club:

Lin-
ILM is doing all of their own costume work as far as the wookiees and alien creatures are concerned. If any of Henson's folks are involved, then I've yet to hear about it. From everything I've seen so far between the official site, Hyperspace, and SW Insider, it's all Lucas's people that are doing the costumes and creatures.
-Tim

With the cutbacks at Henson, however, I wouldn't be a bit surprised if they picked up a few folks over the years from JHC.

 

[Buck-Beaver]

Just to help clear things up, Dave Elsey and most of his "Farscape" team in Austraila did work on last summer's Episode III shoot, but they did not do the work under the banner of the Creature Shop. They would have been working under ILM, or another branch of Lucasfilm but it was basically the "Farscape" team doing most of the practical (non digital) Creature FX work. I think things wound down on the final season of Farscape just as Episode III was preparing to shoot so Lucas' people took advantage of the fact there was a solid group of creature FX people available.

Unless I'm mistaken, Dave Elsey was a freelancer who had his own company prior to being brought in to head up the Farscape creature shop, so it's not surprising he's doing more freelance gigs now that the show is over. Most of the artists with the Creature Shop work on a project-to-project basis and aren't regular employees. The full-time Creature Shop staff is pretty small (just a couple of people) unless the shop is "crewed up" for a job.

I'm not sure if Elsey is working on this spring's reshoots for Episode III or not.

 

[Fozzie Bear]

Thanks, Buck! That clears some things up for sure.