Craig Crane
From Muppet Wiki
Craig Crane is a British puppeteer who worked on The Muppet Christmas Carol and other projects. In recent years, Crane has vocally criticized the Jim Henson Company's sale of the Muppets to Disney, and shifted his energies to computer animation.
Craig is currently working in Soho for a leading post production facility, working on projects such as Harry Potter, Stardust and 10,000bc as an animator.
Craig was first interested in working for the Jim Henson Company from a very early age. Inspired by the creative spirit of Jim and Frank, he pursued a career at Hensons.
Although his puppeteering career started in 1990, it wasnt until after working on Xmas Carol in 92 that he was offered the chance to be trained by Kevin Clash at the London Workshop.
With only a handful of performers chosen to do the workshop, Kevin was able to dedicate a lot of his time to individual performers.
From there, Craig took his puppeteering abilities to Nickelodeon UK in 1994, where he not only performed puppet characters, but was also the first person to perform a CGI character in realtime on live TV. Beating the Henson performance animation system to the post in the process.
Balancing the realtime characters with the puppet characters proved relativley easy, allowing Craig to perform not only on shows like Rainbow, Rainbow days, Spitting Image and Noels House Party, but also perform diverse CG charaters for films such as [The Adventures of Pinnochio].
However, throughout all this time, he felt that the true Golden Age of televison and film puppeteering had long since past and he was just riding its last firtive murmours... He felt that the quality of work wasnt the same as it had been with shows such as Fraggle Rock and Story Teller. He was increasingly aware the the industry had become very diluted due to the sudden expansion of Cable and Satalite companies. The "bargain bucket" nature of Kids TV in the UK soon became a major source of disdain for Craig, where story telling had to take a back seat so that Phone-ins and text based competitions could take over.
Craigs introduction to the realms of CG animation started to develop, to the point where in 2003 he decided to forego the puppets and concentrate on digital character creation and animation.
