I always tell people that, if they come in here with a drawing of a car, we could build that car. It is a very diverse group that we work with: artists, technicians, and, of course, we use all the available or cutting-edge technologies out there in the world to realize whatever it is that we are required to make.

Manaugh: What kind of design briefs come to you? Also, when a client comes to you, typically how detailed or amorphous is their request?

Elizalde: Sometimes it is very vague. But, typically, what happens is we're approached with a script for a project. Our job is to go through the script and create a breakdown and, ultimately, a budget based on those breakdowns. We take whatever we think we should build for that script and we make suggestions as to how each thing should look--what should move, what the design should be, and so on.

Other times, we'll be working with a director who's very involved and who maybe even has some technical knowledge of what we do--especially someone like Guillermo del Toro. He's completely savvy about what we do because he used to own a creature shop of his own, so working with someone like him is much more collaborative; he comes to us with a much more clear idea of what he wants to see in his films. Lots of times, he'll even show us an illustration he's done. He's the first one to say, "I'm not an artist!" But he really is. He's quite gifted.

So he'll bring us his illustrations and say, you know, "You tell me if it's going to be a puppet, an animatronic puppet, or a creature suit that an actor can wear." And that's where our knowhow comes in. That's how it evolves.

There are also times--with the robot show, for example--where they know exactly what they need but they don't know how to achieve it. In those cases, they come to us to do that for them.

Twilley: Can you talk us through one of the projects you've worked on where you had to create your vision based solely on what's in the script, rather than more collaborative work with the director? What's that process like?

Elizalde: Well, I'd actually say that ninety percent of our work is that way. For most of the projects we work on, we do, in fact, just get a script and the director says, "Show me what this looks like." But we love that challenge. It's really fun for us to get into the artistic side of developing what the appearance of something will end up looking like.

We had a lot of fun working with a director named Tommy Wirkola, for example, who directed Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters. He was the director of Dead Snow, a really strange Norwegian film that involved this group of young kids who go off to a cabin where they're hunted down by a hoard of horrifying zombie Nazi monsters. It's really grisly.