This isn’t your daddy’s Captain Scarlet. All images © Indestructible Production Co.

With almost 60 years in the film and television business, legendary British creative producer Gerry Anderson is known for pioneering his own niche of broadcasting history: the marionette television series. From the ‘60s space classic Thunderbirds to Stingray, Fireball and Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons, children on both sides of the Atlantic have grown up in awe of his singular brand of puppetry that came to be known as Supermarionation. As the producer of 17 television series, most featuring puppets, Anderson has evolved with the business and the technology, expanding his own interests and pursuits into the digital realm. Transitioning his projects to stop-motion, anime and now motion-capture filmmaking, Anderson’s newest hit is the modern day revamp of his previous program, Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons. Created with state of the art CGI artistry, 3D rendering and MoCap technology, The New Captain Scarlet is a visual treat for the digitally savvy kids of the new millennium. Starting its second season on Sept. 3 on U.K. television with 13 brand new episodes, The New Captain Scarlet is allowing Anderson to again create groundbreaking work that is setting the standard for the creation of CGI television.

From his office at Pinewoood Studios in Buckinghamshire, England, Anderson says the creation of The New Captain Scarlet was a long time coming in his long career. “We made… Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons around 1965-66… I didn’t really want to make puppets, but having been a technician in the business for some time, I formed my own production company. It really went nowhere and we were on the point of closing down for lack of money, but someone came along and said, ‘Would you make a television series?’ I was told they were going to be made with puppets and from there I very quickly became typecast,” he admits with a sigh. “Over the years, despite the fact that I wanted to make live-action shows, I found myself making puppet shows. So some time ago, I switched to directing commercials for a couple of years. It was the very early years of CGI and it set me thinking, maybe one day CGI would be good enough to convert some of my puppet films to the equivalent of live action, but, with CGI, make the characters exactly the same and recognizable as they were in the puppet shows.

“Time, of course, rolls by and CGI got better and better. I had seen a few CGI TV shows, but I didn’t find them particularly good and for a while I didn’t want to follow in their footsteps. But things got better and better and some feature films with CGI came out and really fired my imagination and I thought maybe the time had come where I could make a CGI television series. In 2004, I got the re-make rights from Granada [which merged with Carlton] and commenced production [of The New Captain Scarlet] at Pinewood studios. We built our own CGI studio within Pinewood and use motion-capture.”

Utilizing motion-capture technology blended with animation, similar to the technique used in The Polar Express, The New Captain Scarlet takes the puppet look of the characters from the original series and upgrades them with a high-tech 3D appearance, including realistic facial expressions and nifty uniforms with textures, and gives them a whole world of futuristic ships, cars and environments old-time puppets could never dream to rival. On putting the sophisticated elements together for the series, Anderson explains, “We started production and I won’t say it was easy to begin with, because the quality we were aiming for hadn’t been attempted, to the best of my knowledge, anywhere in the world. We had a budget of 23 million pounds (approximately $40 million U.S. dollars), which is a great deal of dollars. We started hiring an existing motion-capture outfit and they did very well, but the fact was that we were in their hands waiting for the data to be processed. The data wasn’t processed in the time element we needed, so it started to affect our schedule.”