We live in a day and age where most unusual creatures on film are computer generated, but for Paul W.S. Anderson's live-action
Mortal Kombat, special effects wizards had to create a practical solution for Goro, the four-armed half-human, half-dragon. To bring the Goro to life a stunt-man, Tom Woodruff, was put into the suit and he controlled the lower portion. While the upper portion was controlled by puppeteers with a telemetry device, which was a hi-tech casing that allowed the puppet to mimic the movement of the puppeteers. Overall, it took six puppeteers and four technicians to breathe life into Goro.
"Since it was already based on the character from the video game we already had certain design elements that we had to incorporate into our creature but we also went a little bit further. We wanted to make it slightly more realistic and not quite as comic book inspired as the artwork we had seen up till then. We did certain things to it like the color of it's skin we changed, the look of it's eyes is different, and we removed some horns and bones that had been protruding from his forehead. We also tried to keep a realistic musculature to him given that he has four arms.
We also chose mostly for sake of time to build the creature as a man in a suit with the upper arms, head, face and neck being completely mechanically articulated. All of those actions were operated by puppeteers who were feeding their information into a computer making this the first motion control creature we got into. There was a lot of technology that was developed for this character in a very short period of time.
Ultimately the suit weighed in at about 125 pounds which I had to carry on my shoulders. We built a metal brace that went down my spine to my hips which displaced some of the weight but even with that it was still very heavy, confining and hot. My head was in the chest of the creature and he had no body armor or any kind of costume that would help us hide any type of air slits or even eye holes. We ended up building a fiberglass helmet that I wore and inside that helmet I had a small video screen so I could see what was going on. I also had a microphone and speaker so that I could communicate by radio with Alec who was always with the director. We also had tubes running up inside that we could plug into under the loin cloth so that in-between shots I could get fresh air and water I needed in order to be able to stay in this suit for hours at a time.
Instead of having a hole bank of puppeteers which is the way that puppets had normally been operated when you have moving arms and appendages we built a telemetry suit. This was basically an aluminum frame that had potentiometers so that a single puppeteer could slip this suit on and operate the movement of the arms, hands and fingers all by himself with the aid of a computer." - Tom Woodruff
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