Ed Eyth Interview Part 11

Ed Eyth has had an extensive and diverse artistic career. He has a Bachelor of Science degree from Art Center College of Design in Los Angeles and prior to that majored in Visual Communication at the Art Institute of Pittsburgh. He has served as a production designer, a set and costume designer and a puppet designer for a variety of film and television productions. His film credits include Hook, The Rocketeer and Captain EO.

For nearly 10 years Eyth was Director of Creative Services for the Jim Henson Company. While at Henson, he designed characters for shows like Muppets Tonight, Mopatop's Shop and Animal Jam, as well as the video feature Kermit's Swamp Years. I asked him to share his thoughts on puppet design.



PJ: Describe how you developed the look for the adolescent Kermit in Kermit's Swamp Years.

EE: Shrunk his body, enlarged his head and eyes proportionally and added more polyester fill for a puffy "baby fat" kind of look. Seemed simple enough, but it actually got time-consuming and complicated.

If you shrink his body shape, it becomes a camera challenge, since it's easier for a performer's arm to show up in-frame if the body's too short. So if you stretch that body form to accommodate performance, he suddenly gets gangly and thin, losing the juvenile proportions.

A lot of bodies were sculpted. The first few just looked like a small adult Kermit. It took weeks of experimentation, drawing and sculpting to work it out.