By Iain Blair

When I first lived in Hollywood,  I was thrilled to find out that the A&M Records studio lot round the corner on La Brea had originally been Charlie Chaplin’s historic film studio. I’ve spent a lot of time there, as I was still in the music biz and was there for some historic shoots on the famous Chaplin stage, including Madonna’s first video and the classic Police videos, Every Breath and Synchronicity. So it felt that I’ve come full circle when I went back there last week. The lot is now the Jim Henson Company base, and they’ve done it up really well – there are even some great old photos of Chaplin breaking ground for the original studio – which had no roof!

Henson is also breaking its own ground with its new Henson Digital Puppetry Studio motion capture technology that the company is using on shows like Sid the Science Kid and movies like Forgetting Sarah Marshall. I got a great demo of what the technology can do, and it’s really impressive. Mocap’s future looks brighter and brighter, especially with high profile films like Jim Cameron’s Avatar on the way in ’09.

Share This

This entry was posted on Friday, October 17th, 2008 at 4:15 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.