Tim Rose doesn’t have a long list of credits on IMDb. But when his session came up at 12:15pm this past Saturday at Grand Rapids Comic-Con, the two-room gallery in which he appeared was at capacity. [1,2]
It seemed that everyone in attendance knew him as the primary actor inside the Admiral Ackbar Star Wars character. He makes that association himself as well, notably having named his personal home on the web, “Admiral Ackbar: The Official Tim Rose Website.” In that franchise, he’s also been responsible for Sy Snootles and Salacious B Crumb. [3,4,5,6,7]
If Saline Journal readers don’t recognize his face, or, for that matter, his voice, that’s understandable. It’s also just fine with Mr Rose himself. When he first got into acting, he told the crowd, he loved performing, loved being out front, loved bringing nuance to the craft. But any applause at the end unnerved him; it made him feel a fraud, inadequate and undeserving.
“So I became a puppeteer,” he beamed. “I let the puppets take the bows.”
Thus, it takes a bit of digging on IMDb to more fully appreciate the work of Tim Rose. More than credits as “Actor,” see “Special Effects” and “Miscellaneous Crew.” He brought Howard T Duck to life, for example. And he got his start working for the late Jim Henson — through a second interview that took place long enough after his abysmal first for it to have been forgotten. [8,9]
“The Henson Company was known for making puppets do things they’d never done before. ‘Oh! You can make a puppet take his hat off? Can you make it ride a bike?’
“It can take six people to work some of these puppets,” Mr Rose explained. “They could have thirty, fifty strings. At first, you’d do it by the numbers so that everyone was on their marks. ‘When the hand goes up, that’s when the eyebrow raises.’ But then you’d develop a relationship and that’s when you could do more; each person could make adjustments as we went along, and everyone else knew how to follow. That’s when the puppet came alive.
“It happens when someone is inside a [character] suit as well. It’s all very close quarters, because you can make a puppet any size, larger or smaller, but people always come in ‘people’ size.”
- Question from the audience: “What’s the most important thing in working together like that?”
- Answer: “Personal hygiene.”
Although never deviating much from a consistently jovial feel, a clear sense of earnestness cast discussion of puppetry versus use of modern computer technologies to deliver ostensibly the same result. Tim Rose believes that this has made those responsible for productions both lazy and less creative.
“Jim Henson used to endlessly re-run scenes, looking for ‘magic moments.’ You have to remember, unlike digital, film stock was very expensive. So directors would rehearse and rehearse before running the camera. But Jim would do both. He was looking for what he called a ‘magic moment,’ when the interactions between the players took the scene beyond the script because of that interaction.”
Such opportunities are lost when CGI is produced elsewhere, by a different team. Scripts must be more rigidly followed to ensure that they will match those visuals, either yet to come or already completed.
Moreover, Tim Rose argued that new approaches have not yet proven as effective. It’s clearly not a matter of his being a luddite or fearing change. Indeed, at many points throughout his Grand Rapids Comic-Con presentation, he talked about his ongoing passion for coming up with ways to do more, better. He himself was an early adopter of animatronics. The resolution of this debate, however, was simply a matter of observation. He pointed to the first Jurassic Park versus the most recent Jurassic World movie. [10,11,12]
“Puppets still give far more realistic performances in movies than computer graphics, don’t you think?” he asked rhetorically.
References
- “Tim Rose” IMDb.
- Grand Rapids Comic-Con (home page).
- “Admiral Ackbar” Star Wars.
- “Star Wars: 15 Things You Didn’t Know About Admiral Ackbar” Mike McGranaghan (September 29, 2017) Screen Rant.
- Admiral Ackbar: The Official Tim Rose Website (home page).
- “Sy Snootles” Star Wars.
- “Salacious B Crumb” Star Wars.
- “Howard the Duck (1986)” IMDb.
- “Jim Henson: Founder (1936-1990)” The Jim Henson Company.
- “Audio-Animatronics” Disney Video.
- “Jurassic Park (1993)” IMDb.
- “Jurassic World (2018)” IMDb.
