beijing

The terracotta warrior and the girl

This giant marionette performance was presented at the Beijing Olympics last year by the pharmaceutical company Johnson & Johnson.  It derives directly from Royal de Luxe’s giant puppets, but the story is about a Chinese girl and a butterfly awakening one of the terracotta warriors.  If you dig down in Johnson & Johnson’s site, you can see the trailer, the story board and some cool photos of how the puppets were made.  The tie to the theme of  J&J caring seems somewhat tenuous to me, but never mind!

The companies Poetic Kinetics and AiRealistic who were commissioned to design and develop the puppets and rig, both have interesting galleries of the process. And Bankai has a Flickr photoset.