A groundbreaking blend of full-scale animatronic performance and miniature puppetry brings characters to life like never before.
Sharp FX is proud to announce our work as the creators of all the hero characters in ABC Kids’ brand-new action-comedy series Knee High Spies, premiering Monday 10 November at 5.55 pm on ABC Kids and ABC iview.
Our Melbourne-based special effects studio sculpted, fabricated, and finished every major character in the series — including Jeremy Buttons, Deena, Squash, Moss, Silver Paw, Glitch, and Pransky.
Built in Two Scales — Oversized and Miniature
For Knee High Spies, Sharp FX achieved something never before attempted anywhere in the world, the creation of each character in two completely different physical scales.
Every spy and villain was built both as a life-sized animatronic performance suit and as a miniature toy version that perfectly matched the larger design in proportion, colour, and detail. This meant crafting two full sets of the same characters — one for live-action performance and another for the toy-scale world — so the production could fluidly swap between full-size animatronic action and miniature toy moments within the same scene.
To ensure seamless continuity between scales, the Sharp FX team hand-crafted tiny costumes, props, and accessories to precisely replicate the oversized suits. From Jeremy’s miniature jacket and watch to Deena’s denim vest and motorcycle helmet, every texture, fabric, and feature was meticulously reproduced.
This dual-scale build demanded extraordinary precision and problem-solving, engineering lightweight animatronic faces for the larger suits while sculpting miniature versions that retained the same expressive charm.
A Groundbreaking Production for Preschool Action Comedy
Produced by Werner Film Productions and created by Tim Bain (Kangaroo Beach), Knee High Spies combines live action, puppetry, and advanced animatronics under the direction of Emmy Award-winner Jack Jameson (Sesame Street).
Behind the scenes, Sharp FX constructed a complete suite of high-performance character builds that united disciplines rarely seen together, walk-around suits, expressive animatronic heads, hand puppets, remote-controlled robot units, and miniature replicas.
Engineering for Performance
Because the characters needed to perform fast-paced, action-heavy sequences, every component was designed to be lightweight, flexible, and extremely durable. These were not traditional mascot builds, they were more akin to creature suits, custom-fitted to each performer and equipped with internal cooling systems.
The heads housed multiple servos for expressive movement yet were engineered to be as lightweight as possible, supported by an internal structure that reduced strain on the actor while still allowing full flexibility and performance range.
Built Entirely in Australia
Developed and fabricated entirely at Sharp FX’s Melbourne workshop, the Knee High Spies characters represent a new benchmark in Australian creature and character fabrication.
The combination of oversized animatronic suits and miniature puppet-scale versions for the same cast of characters has never been achieved at this level in Australia or anywhere in the world, making it a true industry first.
Watch Knee High Spies on ABC Kids and iview
Knee High Spies premieres Monday 10 November at 5.55 pm on ABC Kids and ABC iview.
Sharp FX is honoured to have brought the Knee High Spies characters off the page and onto the screen, from mischievous Silver Paw to the heroic toy spies, setting a new standard for innovation and craftsmanship in children’s entertainment.
