For someone with Lyle Conway's background, Little Shop of Horrors was a dream come true - and a nightmare. Enlisted by director Frank Oz to design and create a believable plant character that could hold its own in a multimillion dollar musical comedy, Conway and a crew of forty animatronics specialists rose to the challenge by producing six fully-articulated versions of Audrey II ranging in size from four-and-a-half inches to twelve-and-a-half feet - and then taught the largest three how to speak and sing.

Article by Jody Duncan

For Industrial Light & Magic, The Golden Child was business as usual - winged demons, slithering snake women, even dancing Pepsi cans. But merging these fantasy elements into a gritty urban street comedy starring Eddie Murphy was a major stylistic challenge. Rising to the occasion was a team of software engineers and puppet animators who managed to blur the line between real and unreal by employing a prototype field motion control system to convincingly incorporate stop-motion figures into hand-held action scenes.

Article by Paul Mandell