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Another couple of months down in the effects trenches at Pinewood’s Image FX (formerly Image Animation), this time contributing to a Leslie Nielsen spoof science fiction film. You can see some of the workshop crew here.
SLUG DUDE
First and foremost we needed aliens, and comedy ones at that. Slug Dude was based on a lightning sketch by Howard Swindell; I sculpted him, adding details like the mollusc-style frond. (The heavy skin texture was partly just a way of disguising the eyeholes in the neck – see?)
As Slug Dude was just a straightforward pullover mask, he was sculpted over a head-and-shoulders cast with additional wire, plaster and scrim supports for the eyes. Keith Wilson made the moulds, Andy Lee did the foams and Martha Fein painted up two versions, one male and one female. The female version got the full makeover treatment – false eyelashes, lip gloss, the whole bit.
FROGMAN This character was based on an unused design done years earlier by the
since AWOL Rich Allport. The producers of 2001 had seen it sitting in the art department drawer and taken a shine to it, and it was now my job to sculpt it up.
Ultimately he turned out to be identical in technique to Slug Dude, although he was originally conceived as a reasonably complex animatronic. The idea of all this extra work suddenly became very unappealing when the production ran into financial difficulties and the cheques stopped arriving.
By the way, the two nubs on top of his head were to accommodate another set of eyes on stalks. Eyes on stalks were definitely in vogue with the fashionable extraterrestrial that summer.
SQUID FACE
This was a two-day wonder, a quick throwaway effort to round out our cast of otherworldly supporting players. I designed and sculpted him.
The intention was to do him as a prosthetic makeup - you’ll see how he’s sculpted over a face cast and tapered away at the edges. Then the producers figured out the number of makeup people it’d take to glue this stuff on every morning, and decided that all the makeups should be pullover masks instead.
Dave Mundin did the honours, gluing the prosthetic over an existing mask and blending it in nice-style.
Alan Groves sculpted him, Keith Wilson moulded him, Andy Lee foamed him, Martha Fein painted his skin and Pete Hawkins mechanised the eyes.
By the way, yep, that’s right: some poor bastard really was expected to wear this Eiffel Tower-wannabe on his head. (If you wore this mask, the top of your head would be level with where the teeth are.) Everyone in the workshop thought this was hilarious --- as soon as they’d made damn sure it wasn’t going to be them.
BUTT UGLY ALIEN
The name says it all, really. This character was proposed as an extraterrestrial “last girl left at the dance” who makes unwelcome advances towards Leslie Nielsen. Mat O’Toole did the design sketch for her.
She was devised as an unusual variant on the old ‘man in a suit’ gag. A performer would be inside her to make her move, except he’d be sitting down in a kind of trolley, scooting her across the floor with his feet. Think of the Daleks or Fred Flintstone’s car and you’ll get the idea. Butt Ugly’s ample proportions and floor-length dress would comfortably cover anything we didn’t want the audience to see.
Her arms were poseable dummies – the performer’s real arms were actually up over his head, moving the eyes and making them blink via a trigger mechanism.
This setup seemed like a good place to start. I got a head-to-waist fibreglass bodycast out of one of the workshop moulds, cut the arms off and repositioned them straight up using P40 (the fibreglass paste used for repairing car bodies).
This was then mounted on a scaffold support and the vague contours were roughed in with chicken wire covered with plaster and scrim. Time to start sculpting…
No question, Butt Ugly was one of the most gruelling sculpts I’ve ever done. Not that it was the most anatomically exacting thing ever; it was just the huge
hulking size of the character. My pygmy-like proportions meant I had to stand on a stepladder to sculpt half of her. It was just a knackering quantity of clay to have to push about.
(I’d travelled down from the north for my two-month stint on this film; when I finally got back home, my then-girlfriend was shocked at how muscular and veiny my forearms had become. Scary stuff.)
Once Butt Ugly was done in clay the next step was to mould her in fibreglass. Keith Wilson was the wizard of this process, with me the dunce. At least we both got to wear pointy hats. Again, another big job, the final leg of which involved me lying on my back furiously trying to stick fibreglass matting onto Butt Ugly’s sizeable undercarriage quicker than gravity could peel it off.
The moulds went away to Andy Lee for the foam latex work, and I got the chance to paint her arms and eyeballs before the crew was disbanded. She was finished up by Dave Bonneywell, Lisa Crawley, and Richard St. Clair and Craig Narramore in the mechie shop.
I have to say, I was never happy with how Butt Ugly turned out. That’s the thing about working to a tight schedule: you get one chance to get things right.
If you’re on form, you immediately find the proper direction to go with something and it all comes out great. Other times, you head straight up a blind alley and find yourself totally stalled, just staring at your sculpt and shaking your head in dismay. Butt Ugly definitely fell into the second category!
Just to aggravate my embarrassment, when I returned to Image a couple of months later there she was, pride of place, in the workshop entrance display. It gets worse: some years later Image sold off a lot of their props to collectors, and somehow Butt Ugly found her way into the front window of the Planet Hollywood restaurant in Leicester Square, the heart of tourist London. What was that proverb about the bad penny again?
As an afterthought: the year 2001 has of course long since been and gone, and this film still hasn’t surfaced in this country to the best of my knowledge. Neglected gem or left-on-the-shelf woofer? I have no idea. Well, O.K., I can make an educated guess.
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Home
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Aye, aye. I found myself doing a lot of eyeball-painting duty on this
film, and our man here was no exception.
