The pouncing mountain lion taking shape in a Southern California animatronics factory will soon be roaring on the banks of the Calico River Rapids ride as part of an attraction renovation designed to tie together the backstories of the Ghost Town area at Knott’s Berry Farm.

“The mountain lion is based on the same tooling that we used for one that’s in the log ride,” said Garner Holt Productions director of creative design Bill Butler.

The Redlands-based animatronics factory has been working with the Buena Park theme park since the 1990s to add life-like animated figures to attractions like the 1960 Calico Mine Ride and the 1969 Timber Mountain Log Ride.

The new Calico River Rapids debuting this summer introduces more than 20 animatronic figures to the former BigFoot Rapids in a effort to add a more robust backstory to the 32-year-old attraction.

An animatronic rattlesnake awaits a paint job at Garner Holt Productions in Redlands. (Photo by Sean Teegarden)

An artist at Garner Holt Productions works on the face of an animatronic mountain lion. (Photo by Sean Teegarden)

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An animatronic woodpecker takes shape at Garner Holt Productions. (Photo by Sean Teegarden)

An animatronics artist at work at Garner Holt Productions. (Photo by Sean Teegarden)

Garner Holt Productions director of creative design Bill Butler works on an animatronic creature bound for Knott’s Berry Farm’s Calico River Rapids ride. (Photo by Sean Teegarden)



“When this attraction opened the theming on it was fairly light,” Butler said of the 1987 white water rapids ride. “The experience was the visceral thrill itself. Now we’re adding some layers of story to it, of place and certainly of character.”

The new Calico River Rapids backstory connects the water ride to the classic Ghost Town mine train and log ride attractions. Garner Holt Productions added 50 animatronic characters to the Knott’s log ride in 2013 and 60 animated characters to the mine train in 2014.

Butler recently led a reporter on a tour of the cavernous imagination factory where the animatronic figures are being created, built and assembled for the new Knott’s attraction.

The world’s largest animatronic company relocated from San Bernardino to a 120,000-square-foot warehouse space twice as big as its former location. Garner Holt Productions creates complex animatronic figures for many of the largest theme park companies around the globe, including Disney and Universal.

Garner Holt Productions faced two difficult hurdles with the Calico River Rapids project: Weather and water. Many of the animatronic figures the company creates end up in indoor dark rides. An outdoor water ride presented a complicated challenge.

“It’s a thousand times trickier to build something that is going to be outside all the time,” said Butler, who helps develop the backstory, characters and set designs for new attractions.

As a result, Garner Holt Productions built more robust characters for Calico River Rapids with stainless steel internal mechanisms that won’t rust.

The faces of the new outdoor characters on the Knott’s log ride turned green after installation due to an issue with the pigmentation of the skin and ultraviolet light exposure, Butler said. Garner Holt Productions fixed the problem.

The second big obstacle: The spinning rafts on the white water rapids ride move fast and in an unpredictable manner. That meant Garner Holt Productions had to create simpler sight gags for the animatronic figures that could be viewed from multiple angles.

“The challenge is when you’re creating a gag, you can’t have something that’s too complex,” Butler said. “You’ve got to be able to see exactly what’s happening instantaneously.”

The team took advantage of a pair of 270-degree turns in the man-made river to stage the most complex scenes with settlers cabins and multiple animatronic figures. The idea: Even if riders have their backs to the action at the beginning of the turn they can catch the scene around the bend.

The new backstory for the refreshed Knott’s attraction tells the tale of the Potts and Colter expedition through California that settled on the banks of the Calico River and helped found the nearby Ghost Town. The story is based on real explorers John Potts and John Colter who were part of the Lewis & Clark Expedition.

The animatronics factory tour started in the design office where three cats — Casper, Floyd and Penny — hold court along with the creative team.

For the Knott’s attraction, the sculptural design of each animatronic figure begins on the computer screen.

The most detailed models are hand-carved in clay.

Computer-rendered models use a 3D printing rapid prototype process for smaller sculpts less than 18 inches tall or wide. Three-dimensional printing is an additive process that builds from nothing to make a real-world sculpture.

Large sculpts use a more elaborate technique employing a Kuka milling robot arm that uses a reductive sculpting process. The Kuka arm carves a foam cube like a robotic sculptor chiseling at marble to reveal a sculpted figure. Clay is often added on top of the Kuka-milled parts to achieve more detail in the figures like fur or wrinkles.

“We’ll use the Kuka milling robot for larger characters and the 3D printing rapid prototype process for things that are smaller that have more finite details to them that we don’t want to do a lot of hand work,” Butler said.

During the tour, Butler showed off sculpted foxes and prairie dogs created with the 3D process that were destined for the banks of the Knott’s water ride. The cute creatures, some without rear legs, were coated in UV-cured resin to withstand the outdoor elements.

In the warehouse, a blunderbuss sculpted from pale yellow foam had just been carved using the robotic Kuka process. Several smaller ornate pieces that had yet to be attached to the gun sat on a nearby table.

The antique gun with a flared muzzle looked like something Gaston might wield in “Beauty and the Beast.” The weapon appears in a trapper’s cabin scene on one of the 270-degree peninsulas in the Knott’s water ride.

The next step for the blunderbuss: A coat of grey primer and a light sanding before heading to the molding process.

“Once we have a 3D printed object, we can take that into our tooling department and make a mold out of it,” Butler said. “That’s like a negative image of whatever it is that we’ve sculpted. Then we lay it out in fiberglass, resin or silicone to make a positive version while we retain all of the detail that was originally sculpted into it.”

The mountain lion had reached the molding process during the animatronics factory tour.

A thick coat of liquid wax was being brushed onto the mountain lion in order to keep the clay sculpture from sticking to the negative image mold.

Next up: The molds will be filled with fiberglass to create an exterior shell for the animatronic mountain lion figure.

At the same time, the mechanical department was designing the armature skeletal frame that will go inside the fiberglass shell and bring the animated figure to life.

The final step: The armature and shells are pieced together and the animatronic figure is tested for range of motion.

Once completed and installed, the roaring mountain lion will swat at Calico River Rapids riders as they pass in rafts amid a churning torrent of water.

When the animatronic animals take their places along the banks of the Calico River Rapids ride they will be missing one key element: Fur. A furry animatronic like the ones seen in indoor dark rides at theme parks wouldn’t last very long outdoors in the elements.

“That’s an art form in and of itself,” Butler said. “Making something that’s hard scape look like it’s soft if you were to go up and touch it.”

The Calico River Rapids water ride opens this summer at Knott’s Berry Farm.