AN034 WHITE RHINOCEROS - Suit
TOYOTA TACOMA 'Rhino' commercial. Dave Merhar, director.
GATORADE POWER BARS 'Rhino' commercial. Erich Joiner, director.
also- BEAT 'Rhino' commercial. Tito Lara, director.

Building complex puppets within the greatly compressed schedules of commercials is a whole discipline unto itself. This original Toyota 'rhino tipping' job provided us with substantial challenges. We had three weeks in which to complete a full-sized, 12 foot long White Rhinoceros animatronic walkaround suit and a roughly one-fifth scale 30" long, matching mechanical White Rhinoceros that could run in full gallop, with all of its body mass, hip and shoulders, the knees and ankles of all four legs, running fully synchronized and totally convincingly. Within these tight deadlines every moment and every decision has to count. Success depends on having a thorough, well thought out approach, utilizing every time saving technique, device and scheduling strategy that can help.

Walkaround Suit- We were fortunate to locate an accurate, full-sized White Rhinoceros fibreglass taxidermy buck that had just then become available. These taxidermy forms can be very helpful in our business; not for molding and casting -lacking all the exterior skin detail and subtleties of real animals- but for accurate measurement and optimal placement of performers inside the suits. This particular form provided us with a variety of advantages. We opened up the Fiberglas form lengthwise, allowing us to quickly decide on the best position for each performer to stand inside and for quick and accurate construction of a lightweight, aluminum speedrail box frame to support the body and neck mechanism. Two backpack frames bolted to this box frame allow the performers to 'wear' the rhino suit and move it's huge mass as efficiently as possible, leaving their hands free for manipulation of inner controls.

The opened up taxidermy form also aided rapid and accurate fabrication of the soft foam 'muscle suit' body elements. 2' thick, open-cell, soft foam was placed into the open face forms, quickly cut to size, darted and formed to fit within the Rhino's body mass. Thin steel bands were riveted to the box frame in order to round it out and provide a light, flexible support for the preshaped soft foam forms, which were then glued together and fitted over the box frame and banding. Removable aluminum tube support stands in front of each leg area were built into the aluminum box frame, allowing the body forms to be worked on and measured against the taxidermy form at the Rhino's full standing height. These supports also came in handy on set for the performers to drop down from inside, giving them needed breaks from supporting the rhino suit.

Subtle detail refinements were added to this soft foam covering, like the rhino's ribs. Large 'rhino skin' texture sheets were sculpted in clay, molded in plaster, cast in slip latex and glued over the broad forms of the foam. Gaps between these sheets were patched and blended together using foam latex with a special curing agent added, so they could be cured with regular hair driers and textured as they dried. A tail was fabricated and attached to a mechanism to swing it back and forth as needed. Inside the rhino, in the mid-body, rib area, we attached aluminum rods on pivots, so they can be pushed in and out for a rhino 'breathing' effect.

The more intricate details of the rhino's head -the mouth and nostrils, eyes and surrounding areas and the ears- were all sculpted, molded, cast in foam latex, affixed to a fibreglass head form -cast from the taxidermy form- and mechanized for remote control: eye movement, eye blink, mouth open/close, nostril movement, and ear wiggle. Tubes were set into the nostrils, allowing fine powder to be blown through them for nostril snort. The inner mouth detail was sculpted, molded, and vacuum-formed in plastic to help with our overall strategy of saving weight wherever we could. The rhino's legs were built as free-standing soft foam leggings that the performers wear as hip waders. The performers climb into two holes under the rhino suit body that the legs mate up to and are firmly connected to with a system of quick release clips. Strapping themselves into their backpacks and raising the front and rear support posts up inside the body, the rhino is then ready to go. Video monitors inside feed or to a mini camera located in the Rhino chest and can also be patched into the production's live feed video system.

Performance- For the Toyota spot, the full size, walkaround suit was called on to be tipped over on its side. For this, large foam pads were buried in the ground, covered with a dirt colored tarp that was staked down and covered in a thin layer of local dirt. The brave puppeteers inside took the fall many times. Extra soft foam padding inside kept them from getting too beat up. The soft foam in the ground softened their fall and its compression also aided the impression of the rhino's weight and impact.
For the Power Bar shoot, the rhino's front legs were required to stand on the shoulders of a football player as he did pushups. For this effect we needed to reduce weight and keep the rhino's balance, so we rigged the front of the suit to work without a puppeteer and supported the rhino's weight on steel cables that ran from the box frame inside up to pulleys attached to a condor lift and back down to our crew for lifting.

Mechanical White Rhinoceros (AN033)- Originally, we had purchased a small rhinoceros model that we could refine and resculpt to save precious time otherwise spent starting from scratch. A few days into the schedule it was requested that we make this rhino larger. This left us with a much greater challenge- our worktime had been reduced to two and a half weeks, and our workload has been increased. We now had to sculpt the whole scale model rhino from scratch.

Rather than competing with computer effects, we're using computers to improve our work. The way computers helped us to work out the mechanical movement of our scale model rhino is pretty amazing -if we do say so ourselves. Footage of a good side view of a white Rhinoceros in full gallop was looped so it would repeat the movement over and over. This was imported into a computer in 'Lightwave'- a three-dimensional, computer animation program. Analyzing Rhinoceros skeleton references gave us exact placement of pivot points, and an animated overlay of an entire computer-simulated galloping rhino mechanism -chaindrive and gears included- was rendered in Lightwave, overlaying this looped real footage clip. This computer animated mechanism was printed out at the scale of our new, enlarged scale-model Rhinoceros; the parts were machined to match the blueprints, and the real running mechanism was assembled.

For the outer skin of our mechanical rhino- the model was sculpted in oil clay, molded, and a core was created inside the mold to carefully control the thicknesses of the skin so it would mate up to our mechanism. A very pliant, softened silicone rubber skin -to give the rhino a very organic sense of weight and movement- was cast. Intermediary vacuum-formed core pieces were mounted onto the mechanism to lightly support the rubber skin and to keep it from being chewed up in the mechanism's many moving gears and parts. The skin was then velcro-mounted over the mechanism and these springy,vacuum-formed core pieces; and our scale model rhino was off and running at full gallop. The head was mounted on a control rod and left loose of the body, so it can be puppeteered independently while the rhino is running. Colored powders are applied over the painted rubber skin, to reduce the natural oiliness of the rubber skin on shoot days.

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