(Hard rock music)

[Matt Winston] The mechanics

of this character are massive.

Everything about this project is a question mark.

This year the mechanical geniuses at Legacy Effects

have to mechanize two characters.

Not just Giant Creature, but Small Alien, his cockpit guy.

There are really two major facets

to the mechanical build for this character.

There's the heavy stuff, the mechanical skeleton

that needs to support everything,

and most of that is gonna be man-powered.

The other facet of mechanics is the animatronics.

The animatronics are the servo-actuated mechanical

functions that bring a lot of character to the creature.

Eye movement, nostril flare, jaw open and shut

and the moves of the fingers.

So Alan Scott has divvied up the jobs between a few guys.

First step we use broken jaw,

and we split the jaw to get the front of the jaw

to move fast by giving it a sub-jaw.

It's a little cheat where you move just the tip of the jaw

when it's speaking 'cause he needs to speak.

After that, sculptors will let us know

what size eye ball they're sculpting around

so then we can start making eye mechanisms.

They always give the heads to Kan 'cause

he's so good at it, but I wanna build one if I can.

I'd love to build that little alien at the top.

(video game music)

He's gonna have head up, down, side-to-side, jaw, upper,

lower lip to get kind of that sock puppet talking.

Jim said that it was my Sistine Chapel

and that I'm taking forever,

but I feel like I went pretty fast.

How do we power the hands?

We don't know that that's gonna work yet,

but we did a test for a finger, and we realized

that's not gonna work, so we gotta redesign the finger,

redesign the mechanism and see if we can even do it.

I'll have about a week to do this,

so there's zero margin for error.

It all works theoretically in the computer,

but to make it the most efficient possible,

so I'm gonna make all the parts all at once,

and then it's all gonna come together real fast at the end.

We have these super lightweight shells

and we put these servos in the joints here

and these servos, even though they look small,

they have 475 ounces of torque, which is more

than enough and they're very, very fast.

In my history of hand-making, this is definitely

the largest hand I've ever made.

Time is the one thing you cannot buy,

and that's the one thing I always wish,

whether it's this or a movie or a commercial,

I always wish I had more time.

In this shop, doing the heavy welding

and working on the heavy mechanical structure,

we have Peter Weir Clarke, Jim Kundig and Brian Namanny.

I had never done anything this big

that is manually operated.

Before, anything like this I've done

is hydraulics or pneumatics.

You know really the hardest part is figuring out

how to get this huge thing to move in a way

that is not gonna kill the puppeteer

as well as having the character have fluidity

and have kind of living movement

as opposed to looking like

there's somebody inside going, Awwww.

You know, bench-pressing it.

It's all about weight distribution and everything,

so it's how much steel and stuff we have

to put in there to make it safe.

So there wasn't a doubt that we couldn't do it,

it was just how big.

The neck mech is a couple different parallelograms

that are sort of working in concert to give the head

a kind of a smooth and relatively lifelike movement

while still being able to have kind of good leverage

for the puppeteer in terms of him moving

what's gonna be a huge head around.

[Female Voice] Arrived at the right time.

I've done a million projects and you always say

to yourself, I don't know how we're gonna get this done.

We're never gonna get this done.

And somehow on the last day, it's all sitting there

and it all works, and you just can't believe it.

That's just everybody working together making it happen.

(rock music)

We were given the task of building that head last Monday,

and we were pretty much done by Friday.

It's been about five days.

Not bad.

When a character starts to move,

that's when the magic happens.

That's when you get people rubbing their eyes

and pinching themselves.

It's the movement, and that's

what the mechanics are responsible for.

It was surreal because everything almost

moved in slow motion.

You just get to look around the crowd and it's smiles,

and people taking pictures and commenting

and it was, you know, wish Stan was there.

I mean, it was remarkable.

[Announcer] Check out the Wired Channel,

thescene.com for the entire Giant Creature series.