I was lucky enough to take the skills and fitness acquired through several years work as an acrobat, juggler and magician, and re-apply them to a new and exciting field - animatronic puppets.
Animatronics were still being done the hard way (often several puppeteers would operate a single creature).
Technical advance means that a lot of this work can now be done by one (computer assisted) operator, or can even be done purely as cgi.
All the films I worked on were experimenting with what were state-of-the-art methods at the time.
To hear how I got into film work, go to Habidabad's Dark Crystal website (now in the Internet Archive) and read an extended interview, mainly about The Dark Crystal, but also touching on my later film work. You can also find other pages of material on this site: other online interviews focused on Jabba.