I. Puppet charachers
In the past, Pili's television series puppets were 3' 3" in height, but this was later changed to two and a half feet. The puppets used in the movie were even smaller, approximately 2 feet high. At the same time, to make sure the puppets in The Legend of the Sacred Stone were as life-like as possible, improvements were made from head to toe. Not only were changes made in the puppets costume, accessories, and shoes, major improvements were made in the puppets heads and faces as well to make them more realistic. Real human hair was used for the puppets' hair. Also, since each puppet has a different size head, the hair had to be done by hand, a process even more expensive than for actual people. In order to make the hair show up vividly on screen and make the puppets martial arts movements look as dramatic as possible, the hair was put through a special conditioning process. Further, each puppet had different stunts for fighting and speaking scenes so as to avoid wear and tear.

II. Special Design

Apart from the improvements mentioned above, the biggest changes were in the characters joints. Each puppet's arm, hand and leg joints were bendable. Even the fingers joints could be manipulated to the point that the puppets could appear to be playing ancient Chinese stringed instruments! After the improvements were made, characters could dramatically and realistically swing their arms around as well as perform complicated kung fu foot movements. The movie's main female character, Jian Ru-bing, is able to realistically play the harp in one scene and kneel before her father in another due to these new modifications.

The fighting scenes in Chinese puppet theater, whether on the big or small screen are very similar to fight scenes involving real kung fu stars. The only major difference is in the facial expressions of the characters. Traditionally, Chinese puppet theater uses carved wood for the characters' heads, and this is an important aspect of the art, but in this film, the director Chris Huang decided to experiment and see if it was possible to make some of the characters change their expressions in order to increase the realism. He decided to try this with the film's major villain, Mr. Boneskin. If you look carefully during the movie, you can see that his head is made of a special foam rubber. This allows his face to twitch when he is deep in thought or enraged. Unfortunately, this kind of head has a major drawback in that it can melt at fairly low temperatures, making it difficult to store. If his face did, in fact, melt, it could have become more monstrous that the creators originally intended.

Naturally, this is only a small step forward, Pili hopes that more improvements can be made in the future.

III. Character Props

1. "The Sacred Stone" a.k.a. The Heaven's Stone

The Heaven Stone is the Sacred Stone referred to in the film's title. This stone enables its holder to make any wish, but that wish comes with a horrible price. The stone appears as green, yellow or blue at different points throughout the movie. When the bearer makes a wish, it is yellow. While usually it is blue and when it's used to be a key, it is green.

2. Magnetic Key

The Magnetic key can only function when its two parts are placed together. The strange hieroglyphs or runes that appear on top of the key can only be understood when the two parts are reunited. When it is placed into the appropriate slot, the characters begin to glow indicating that the code is correct. The characters on the key are a special combination of Chinese and Tibetan characters giving it a mysterious Asian feel. The key was made of a special stone and the characters were carved to resemble a technical blueprint design. In the movie, the magnetic key is first acquired by the demons that use it incorrectly and are so, unable to acquire the Heaven Stone.

3. Weapons

Zhou Ming-hsin designed all of the characters' weapons in the film, except for Ao Hsiao Hong-chen's sword designed by the theatrical supervisor, Ding Jen-ching. The weapons were designed with each character's personality in mind so that the weapon would seem to become one with the character. The weapon also had to match the character's costume's color and style.

IV. Set Design

The film's sets can be divided into studio sets and outdoor, on location sets. For the studio sets, a 36,000 square feet warehouse space was purchased. The first step in construction was the digging of a trench 5' wide and 5' deep. This was to provide a space for puppeteers to operate the puppets on the sets. The trench was used both for land and water shots.

Studio sets included the "Porcelain Fairyland", "Ming-jian Villa", "6 Schools Reincarnation Cave" and many others. The construction of these sets took 10 months from initial design to completion. The process was slowed due to 2 or 3 months of heavy rain during which time construction had to be temporarily halted.

The sets for this movie can be divided into futuristic and old-style sets. The futuristic sets included the demon headquarters and the secret location of the Heaven's Stone. The old-style sets included the "Porcelain Fairyland", "Ming-jian Villa", "Leng Hsiang Water Pavilion", "6 Schools Reincarnation Cave", "Heaven's Spine Peak", "Hao Ji Residence" and others. The biggest difference between the set design for "Legend of the Sacred Stone" and that of most movies is the scale. The set must match the size of the puppets. It goes without saying that making everything the right size is and an exact and arduous process

The difference between Chinese Puppet Theater and most movies is that there is more freedom to explore ideas on a large scale in Puppet Theater. Each character's residence could be tailored to that character's personality such as the Leng Hsiang Water Pavilion or the Ming-Jian Villa. This helps the characters blend in seamlessly with the sets.

When the futuristic sets were being constructed, the designers went through great pains to avoid imitating traditional western "sci-fi" sets. To give a more Eastern feel, the set designers added Chinese elements to the sets such as the stone pillars in the demon head quarters and Chinese design of the fans in Hell Valley.

V. Character voices

Most movies record their sound at the same time it is filmed or add it later in post-production. Animated movies do not have the voices added until the entire movie has been drawn. In The Legend of the Sacred Stone this process was actually reversed.

When filming this Chinese puppet theater movie, all of the characters dialogue is first recorded and then the theme and background music is added according to the script. In the past, all of Pili's television series were filmed after the voices had already been taped. The director, cameramen and puppeteers had to listen to the dialogue to know the emotion of the characters and the story as well as how the characters would act. Even if the filmmakers first studied the script, they needed to hear the dialogue to capture the drama of the story. This movie was also filmed in this manner. The sound was carefully recorded and then the movie was filmed to match the soundtrack. After that the sound director reviewed the whole film to make sure everything matched properly and enriched the quality of the voiceovers, music and sound effects.