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In 1992, Ian Mackinnon and Peter Saunders founded a company that has since been responsible for some of the finest stop-motion puppets in the world.

Ian and Peter met in the 80’s whilst working at one of Europe’s largest animation companies Cosgrove Hall Films .  Peter had previously worked as a puppet maker on Jim Henson’s live action movie “The Dark Crystal ”.  Subsequently he learned to adapt and miniaturise animatronic techniques which enabled him to create highly sophisticated stop-motion puppets.  Peter was then joined at Cosgrove Hall by a young talent named Ian Mackinnon arriving fresh from working with Gerry Anderson .  The partnership was born and whilst at the studios the pair began to push forward the art of puppet making on productions such as “The Wind in the Willows”, “Noddy”,  the British Academy Award winning “The Reluctant Dragon” and the Emmy Award winning “The Fool of the World”.

The success of the duo’s creative developments brought them to set up Mackinnon & Saunders at the start of the nineties.  In 1993, alongside puppet making, Ian produced “The Sandman ” with colleagues Colin Batty and Paul Berry.  This beautifully dark short film gained great success on the International Festival circuit culminating in a nomination for an Academy Award . Their first contact with Tim Burton followed in 1995, when he commissioned the company to design and construct all the Martian character models for the movie “Mars Attacks!”.  Then in 1998 the team had their first collaboration with character designer Carlos Grangel on another Oscar® nominated production “The PeriwigMaker”.

Short films aside, the quality and range of their stop-motion puppet production was recognised in a major retrospective exhibition of their work in 2000 which was shown across Europe and Japan to great acclaim.

Over the years Mackinnon & Saunders’ state-of-the-art workshops in the North of England have been the “birthplace” of some of the best known characters in the world of children’s television including “Bob the Builder”, “Engie Benjy” and “Koala Bros”.

With over 60 different television programmes, 70 commercials and various feature length movies to their creditm their client list includes Warner Bros., HIT Entertainment, Nickelodeon, Cosgrove Hall Films, Gerry Anderson, BBC, Will Vinton Studios, Aardman, Loose Moose, Barry Purves and Disney.    (And Sylvester Stallone now owns the caricature puppet of himself which was created for JWT New York’s Lipton Brisk Tea commercials!)

The company won two Mobius Advertising Awards for commercials the company produces for Procter & Gamble, Inc’s innovative “Puffs ” tissues campaign.  They created  two extraordinary Harryhausen-inspired puppets for the 2005 comedy feature film “League of Gentlemen’s Apocalypse ” (based on the hit BBC TV show) and of course they reaffirmed their relationship with Tim Burton on “Corpse Bride ”.

Traditionally in stop-motion features, facial expressions have been animated by use of replacement heads or simple limited mechanics, but it was here that “Corpse Bride” broke new ground.  The team at Mackinnon & Saunders developed sophisticated geared mechanics to articulate the puppets’ heads, enabling the animators to create a whole range of facial expression with an hitherto unheard of subtlety.

Tim Burton said of their contribution to Corpse Bride “They do such beautiful work.  They really raised it to a new level for this film.  These puppets are so real, they are so sensitive and textural, you really do believe they are alive”.

The next chapter in the Mackinnon & Saunders story finds the company producing their own successful  TV series “Frankenstein’s Cat ” and developing other entertainment projects for film and television.