Co-Production Designer, Guy Davis: Death was an early concept that I worked on with Guillermo. She became almost like a sphynx. And that was all through lots of iterations.
Puppet Creative Supervisor, Georgina Hayns: These inanimate objects, which start out as a line drawing of a character, they then go into an inanimate sculpture of a character, which is the maquette. That’s the first time we see all these characters in three- dimension.
Senior Sculptor & Fabricator, Toby Froud: But then we have to plan out what it needs to do within its story. We all know what a human looks like and also how they move to some degree. But a creature, it could actually move in many different ways—especially Death. It has the back legs of a lion and the front legs of a bird with human hands, the tail of a snake, as well as a mane and massive horns and wings.
We actually built several different types of wings because we have to consider how many feathers have to move when the wings perform. So we did a lot of tests for that.
Georgina Hayns: They were the challenge because they have eyes all over them. The backs of her wings, we wanted to have as a fur texture, so we actually got fur fabric, which we painted silicone into and then sculpted with scissors to look like the sculpted fur on her hip area. And it worked amazingly!