Director, Mark Gustafson: The Dogfish is an ancient creature. So part of our task was to sort of see that history living in its surface, all the scars and the welts, all that deep texture.
Co-Production Designer, Guy Davis: The silhouette was based on old maps of sea serpents. So I used that as a basis, and then of course, would bring that to Guillermo and he would have input of different details to make it fully formed.
Puppet Production Manager, Jennifer Hammontree: The underbelly of the Dogfish is quite beautiful. It’s a repetition of a pine cone motif.
And another one of my favorite Dogfish secrets is one of our costumes is a master weaver. So in the Dogfish fins, we have all of these woven ribbons that she made cast into the silicone to give this bone-like cartilage appearance.
Narrator: Around the Dogfish puppet, you can see the kinds of the reference materials that the designers and puppet makers used.
Look Development Artist, Caitlin Pashalek: Look development, which is my favorite part of film, because it’s all blue sky and concept art and experimentation. We kind of knew broadly what world we were in because we’re working from the artwork. But also just from a ton of reference. It’s fairly naturalistic, it’s organic, it’s charming and handmade. It’s not overly stylized.
Jennifer Hammontree: It’s not a perfect, beautiful world. It’s kind of a dirty world and it has some unsightliness to it. And Rob DeSue said "it’s perfectly imperfect." And that became our design touchstone. And every time we would get bogged down in some detail, we’d say, “Well, you know, is it perfectly imperfect?” Great.