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April, May, June and July 2001 saw me over in Prague, operating rubber monsters for this continuation of the Wesley Snipes brutality-fest.
All the creature work for the picture was created in Hollywood by Steve Johnson’s XFX company. Steve brought over a skeleton crew to Europe, but needed extra people on-set to assist with the prosthetics and the many animatronic rigs. The solution was to fly in effects guys from London, because we speak English and have at least seen this kind of thing before.
I’m not really able to do my usual show-and-tell routine this time, because (a) I didn’t make any of the effects stuff in the film, and (b) didn’t take any photos of it because of that. (I'm told there's an exhaustive supplement on the Blade II DVD for all the behind-the-scenes effects footage you could ever want to see.) So, instead, here’s a few observations about the filmmaking experience in general.
Shooting
a film is neither exciting nor glamorous. Listen, I don’t want to shatter anyone’s illusions here. I grew up thinking, “whoa, if I ever get to be on a horror movie set, that’d be fantastic!” But the honest truth is that the filmmaking day moves about as fast as a sloth with a bad leg crawling through a river of treacle. Against the current.
Think of all the different elements that have to be in place before you’re ready to roll: set construction, lighting, camera, costumes, props, makeup… that’s a lot of waiting around whilst a lot of people tweak things! I usually
reach the point on set when I start looking forward to needing the toilet, just because it’ll give me something to do for five minutes.
The amazing thing is, all the millions in labour, expertise and resources that are thrown at a film eventually boil down to… a mere couple of hours of entertainment, which more often than not meet with an indifferent shrug from the viewing public anyway! Martians must be looking down on the whole enterprise from space and thinking, “these people are insane”. On the other hand, it’s an enterprise that can make its backers a lot of money – so, of course, it instantly comes back round to making perfect sense again.
As for the glamour angle, here’s a story for you. Prague was a popular destination for filmmakers that summer. All the established studio complexes were busy, so Blade II set up production in a converted industrial plant. Our base was the puppet truck, which was parked up beside a knee-deep cooling tank. This had a resident: a dead cat, who’d been keeping all too cool for several weeks. So working on a major international picture in Prague might sound glamorous, but the honest truth of the matter was long days in a lorry full of rubber gonks next to a pool with a dead cat in it.
Forget learning to sculpt and draw, kids - get a job pushing levers for a big Hollywood effects house. I’m deadly serious. Day-to-day, I got paid the most out of all the film jobs I ever did, for the least amount of actual work and creativity.
Computer graphics effects artists have it easy. Because? A computer-generated model only ever has to look good onscreen. Corners can be cut left and right, if it looks acceptable in those handful of frames in which it appears, it’s done its job just fine. I worked on a games project where we had access to Maya files of some of Industrial Light & Magic's character models, and they were much less polished than you might expect - texture stretching due to bad UVing and so on. But these characters spent their screen time running around in the middle distance, so you'd never notice anyway.
In contrast, rubber stuff not only has to read well on camera, it also has to withstand the scrutiny of someone standing there, in person, their nose an inch away. Because there's always some producer walking by on set who wants to see what he's paying for, and it better not look rubbish. See the difference?
Steve’s people were asked to make a fake head of Ron Perlman’s character. For all you see of that head in the film, they could’ve taken a tailor’s dummy, drawn a handlebar moustache on it and then climbed into their company hammocks for the rest of the afternoon. But of course, nobody wants to go up in front their peers with a tailor’s dummy like some kind of charlatan… so it ended up being this three-week, silicone, hair-punched, airbrushed work of art. So in the world of rubber there’s all this work that has to be done, despite the fact that you know no-one who watches the film is going to see it.
Screen credits are a law unto themselves. I was mooching around the Blade II set for nigh on three months, but don’t bother looking for my name in the crawl at the end of the film. The same goes for would-be blockbuster Event Horizon. On the other hand, I worked on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World for about three weeks and wasn’t even in the same country when the main build and shoot kicked off, and I get a namecheck on that one emblazoned in large print for the visually impaired. Don’t look for logic, there isn’t any.
Prague is a nice place to visit. The bars are open all night, the girls are pretty and the beer is cheaper than water. You should go sometime!
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