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[LIGHTING]

[DESIGNING AND LIGHTING MUPPETS]

MUPPET TREASURE ISLAND is director of photography John Fenner's second feature film with the Muppets and his own particular problems have not changed. "The big difficulty with lighting Muppets is that they are all different textures and they are all different colors, so they reflect light differently and they don't sweat," he explains. "For example, we have lots of scenes in this film where it is very hot and everybody is very sweaty. To create an atmosphere of heat one would normally change the flesh tone, but with Muppets you can't do that. The human actors are fine, they sweat, you make their hair a bit wet, sweat them up and warm the lights. With muppets you have to make the background atmosphere so strong that it becomes an illusion!"

Designer Val Strazovec, who has worked on many Muppet projects, recalls his first: "When I first started working with them I didn't really think that I was designing for Muppets. I was just designing a concept for 250 characters who happened to have 250 puppeteers underneath!

"I still do that, except that this is much more complicated. I think about them as special characters who have their own world that I am trying to imagine, and I walk a kind of line between reality and fantasy. You have to be very careful not to slip, because on one side you are in reality, which won't work, and on the other you are in fantasy, which does not work either, especially with live actors. It is the ultimate challenge for a designer!"

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There are more humans in TREASURE ISLAND than there have been before, with dancing and singing to contend with. "The main difference between designing for Muppets and for ordinary films," explains Strazovec, "is the scale. The other is having to accommodate puppeteers underneath, so you have to elevate every set. It is much easier designing just for Muppets, because the floors can just come out -- but the humans have to walk somewhere!"

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John Fenner had a few tricks up his sleeve to give the production depth and size. "I used smoke to give distance. Some of the sets were literally 18 inches from the sky so various levels of smoke and varying diffusions on the camera created as much distance from the foreground as possible."

Miss Piggy and Kermit had very preferential treatment from Fenner but for very different reasons. "I don't want to be unkind to Piggy, but she is a very difficult lady to shoot! She needs half the amount of light of any other character because her base colour is very bright and reflective and she is flocked. This means that any other character around her had to take a little less than they require. I didn't see this as a problem, because most of the time she is stealing the frame anyway! Kermit is fine, except for those eyes, which reflect cross light and back light and can easily remind you where the light is coming from!"

"We thought going into CHRISTMAS CAROL, it would be nice to create a world that looked like it was created for humans and Muppets to populate together, so that neither looked out of place," says Brian Henson. "In THE MUPPET SHOW it was a Muppet world and the humans walked into it and they were out of place. In the first three Muppet movies, it was a human world and the Muppets were out of place. So we decided to make a world where you believe they both co-habit and that these humans grew up and lived there all their lives. That was particularly important in CHRISTMAS CAROL but it has worked even better with TREASURE ISLAND"

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