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David Barrington Holt, Former Head of Jim Henson’s Creature Shop in L.A., Dies at 78

The designer, modelmaker and restorer of mechanical antiquities started his 23-year run with the company in his native England.

David Barrington Holt, who established and ran the first Creature Shop on the West Coast for The Jim Henson Company during his two-plus decades with the firm, has died. In L.A., Holt had creative oversight of shop operations including puppetry, animatronics, effects, performers, administrative matters and R&D, with developments in the field of real-time 3D CG animation. Even while devoting time to his psychotherapy education, he was commissioned by the London Science Museum to construct an operating model of a Thames flood barrier pier that remains on display to this day.

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