Around the time Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace came out in 1999, I saw a TV special titled Thumb Wars, which was a parody of the original Star Wars trilogy (Episodes IV through VI). It was the brainchild of Steve Oedekirk, a comedic genius I first heard of in an earlier TV special, Steve Oedekirk.com (that was the actual title). I had looked him up on IM Db and on an actual website located at steve oedekirk dot com (and then spent several months cleaning some annoying viral widgets out of my computer, after I had willingly downloaded them of course. A true comedic genius.) My familiarity with Oedekirk made Thumb Wars all the more interesting. It even had its own short making-of segment. I have not gotten around to seeing all of the Thumb series (Thumbtanic, The God Thumb, etc.)
The main gimmick of Thumb Wars is having most of the characters be a thumb with a face on it. A big disembodied thumb that is anthromorphicized into a complete person (with hands that have thumbs of their own). Each thumb is a puppet thumb, and each thumb's face is an actor's face. More precisely, an actor's mouth, eyes, nose and ears.
It's basically Synchro-Vox, only taken a step further. The result is very similar but very different.
Each actor had to have yellow paint all over their face except for the skin surrounding the mouth and each of the other facial features, then had to sit with their head in some kind of brace to keep the head still, and do the face acting with just the face and yellow areas being filmed. Then the face film is taken apart and put back together to create a strange new face, which goes onto the thumb puppet.
I'm still fascinated by this thumb-face process. It is like facial capture, almost but not quite true facial capture. I saw something like it in Oedekirk's movie Kung Pow: Enter the Fist, only instead of a thumb it was a tongue. Just one man's tongue with a tiny weird face on it, but it's a weird man, and that movie is a whole different feat of technologic funniness.
Around the time Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace came out in 1999, I saw a TV special titled Thumb Wars, which was a parody of the original Star Wars trilogy (Episodes IV through VI). It was the brainchild of Steve Oedekirk, a comedic genius I first heard of in an earlier TV special, Steve Oedekirk.com (that was the actual title). I had looked him up on IM Db and on an actual website located at steve oedekirk dot com (and then spent several months cleaning some annoying viral widgets out of my computer, after I had willingly downloaded them of course. A true comedic genius.) My familiarity with Oedekirk made Thumb Wars all the more interesting. It even had its own short making-of segment. I have not gotten around to seeing all of the Thumb series (Thumbtanic, The God Thumb, etc.)
The main gimmick of Thumb Wars is having most of the characters be a thumb with a face on it. A big disembodied thumb that is anthromorphicized into a complete person (with hands that have thumbs of their own). Each thumb is a puppet thumb, and each thumb's face is an actor's face. More precisely, an actor's mouth, eyes, nose and ears.
It's basically Synchro-Vox, only taken a step further. The result is very similar but very different.
Each actor had to have yellow paint all over their face except for the skin surrounding the mouth and each of the other facial features, then had to sit with their head in some kind of brace to keep the head still, and do the face acting with just the face and yellow areas being filmed. Then the face film is taken apart and put back together to create a strange new face, which goes onto the thumb puppet.
I'm still fascinated by this thumb-face process. It is like facial capture, almost but not quite true facial capture. I saw something like it in Oedekirk's movie Kung Pow: Enter the Fist, only instead of a thumb it was a tongue. Just one man's tongue with a tiny weird face on it, but it's a weird man, and that movie is a whole different feat of technologic funniness.