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To really sell the performance of a puppet, you need servos. The more servos you can fit into its tiny face, the more parts of the face can move and the more realistic its performance. So if you made a big enough puppet, you could pack enough servos into its face to win an Oscar, no?
Well actually this made Gizmo's performance worse...
Stick around as we explore all of the crazy practical effects that were used to bring Gremlins to life!
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Set at Christmas time, Gremlins 1 was actually filmed in L.A. during the summer! So if Billy looks convincingly sweaty in many scenes, it's not because of unreal acting skills, if not because of the 40 degree heatwave. Whilst wearing a sweater and thick duffel coat... All the snow was just white sand and for the close-up's they covered the sand with a sprinkling of ice-chips.
A tell-tale sign is that there's 'snow' everywhere but you don't see Billy or anyone else's breath.
The production team wanted to shoot Gremlins on real locations, but director Joe Dante feared that the Gremlin puppets would look too fake if filmed in the 'real world', so they shot the movie in an obvious backlot town with obviously stylized sets. A place that wasn't quite real, and because the Gremlins weren't quite real, they meshed together beautifully.
This was a balance that the team was constantly faced with. Especially after having divided the scenes into three sections. Scenes with just actors, scenes with actors and Gremlins and finally all of the Gremlin-only scenes. This seemed sensible at the time, but according to the director, after having been shooting Gremlin-only scenes for 2 and a half months he lost sight (Reel 9: 10:58) of whether they looked realistic or not. With nothing to anchor them to reality it was easy to see them as too fantastical. Perhaps this was when they decided stop-motion would be totally fine...
The production team quickly found that because the Gremlins would be doing loads of things like throwing plates and whatnot, they were going to need longer arms. Also they would need shorter legs, because in puppets, legs are really hard to add believable motion to. That's why, in most shots the Gremlins are only waist high and why Gizmo is always carried. So that's how they eventually settled on the perfect length ratio for the arms and legs.
One of the times they needed Gizmo to run on his own was in broad daylight... without dying...
For this shot they actually built a huge life-sized Gizmo big enough for a Little Person to fit in and run, much like an Ewok from Star Wars. However, this would imply making all of the props and sets used in the shot even bigger and they weren't convinced with the sudden realism brought to the obvious puppet Gizmo. He suddenly became too real compared to the rest of his scenes. In the end they just made another animatronic Gizmo with moving legs and shot it on a blue-screen. They filmed a plate of the sidewalk and added Gizmo to it digitally, with a clever piece of trash getting kicked aside to sell the integration.
The different Mogwais (or "Devils" in Chinese) required a different amount of operators to control according to what expressions were needed. But almost every one had tonnes of wires coming out of him, to control all of his movements. A small team of up to 8 puppeteers would have to hide off shot, controlling the small mogwai. He also had stick-on expressions that could just be changed out according to his mood.
You can only fit so-many servo motors inside a small puppet's head, so for close-up scene's of Gizmo's face, they had to build a much bigger puppet, (SOURCE: Photo 2) that they could fit loads more servos into. Of course all of the props around him had to also be oversized. To match his scale. (...)
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