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[The shooting title for this was Entering Blue Zone, which explains many of the references later on.]
A low-key film drama about a couple coming to terms with the birth of their desperately ill, premature baby might not strike you as the feel-good hit of the summer. However, my bank manager would disagree, because this one kept the work coming and the tills ringing for a good few months. Sickly kiddies? Bring it on.
Our job at Millennium FX was to provide all the babies for the project. We could’ve taken the easy route and used real infants and then poked them with sticks to make them act. However, we’re nice guys, so we settled on creating full-function animatronic stand-ins instead. We even had one that could pee up the glass lid of its incubator. My parents are so proud.
The backbone of our brief was to provide the three stages in the development of the central baby, going from severely premature to roughly newborn size. Me, fellow Martian expeditions veteran Neil Morrill and mechy guy Gustav Hoegen formed the hardcore trio of full-time crew.
There was no time to waste, so me and Neil armed ourselves with a rainforest’s worth of printed-out reference photos and set to work with the plastiline modelling clay. Our plan was for me to sculpt Babies 1 and 3, whilst Mr. Morrill tackled Baby 2.
How did this work out? Separately the end products looked fine, but the difference in sculpting styles was a touch too obvious when you lined them all up together. The clients were concerned that this would undermine the premise that it was meant to be the same baby. So, to give the work the ‘family resemblance’ of coming from a common hand, Plan B was basically to get me to sculpt or resculpt everything in the film! It was kind of brutal, but I suppose it was the simplest way to get that thread of consistency running through the three stages.
Normally the next step would be to take a completed sculpture and make a fibreglass mould of it. You’d do this in two sections, front and back, with a clay wall built along the centre line of the figure to separate the two halves. However, this process carried the risk of mauling the unusually small and delicate plastiline models, so we added an extra step. The sculpts were coated in a thick layer of brushed-on silicone rubber instead, and these rubber moulds were used to manufacture fastcast plastic duplicates of the originals that were robust enough to withstand the “clay wall” technique. The single question in all this: how do you get a rigid plastic figure out of a rigid fibreglass mould? I’m probably not giving away too many of our magicians’ secrets if I tell you a hammer and chisel played a big part.
The fact that we could lay our hands on silicone impressions of the babies also meant it was easy to produce modified ‘crying head’ sculptures required for insert shots. We could just pour molten plastiline into the moulds, let it cool, peel off the rubber and resculpt.
With the moulds made, it was time to start pouring up what would become the babies’ skins. We used Evergreen 10 polyurethane rubber for this rather than the usual silicone. Evergreen is a three-part mix that you leave in the mould overnight to set and then heat-cure in the oven for extra strength. Like any unfamiliar material it has its share of eccentricities to discover, and there was trouble with discolouration, blistering and all sorts of weird phenomena at first. In one instance we opened the oven door to find the damned stuff coiling out of the mould like silly string. But we’re trained professionals, and we weeded out these problems via trial and error. Sit a bunch of monkeys in front of a keyboard and they’ll type a line of Shakespeare eventually.
Why use Evergreen 10? For one thing, you can make it softer and more stretchy than silicone rubber. Any seams on your castings can be easily melted away with a soldering iron. It also paints up beautifully with Pantone artists’ ink diluted with alcohol. The inks bleed into the rubber to give a softened, airbrushed effect for a fraction of the effort. (Over time, the colours bleed in a little too much, and all but vanish. A cruel twist of the knife if you finish a piece and stick it in a box to go on set in three weeks’ time! Another trick the material has up its sleeve is that it attacks latex… too bad we made our puppets’ ‘lungs’ out of exactly that. “O.K., now make the baby breathe!” “Er, believe me, I’m trying…”)
Once the babies’ rubber skins had successfully cleaned up and painted, Neill Gorton punched a decent head of hair into the scalp of each, one strand at a time. The hair came from a dog’s tail that we stole out of the bins behind a local Chinese restaurant. Part or all of that last sentence is lies and/or obnoxiously racist - I’ll leave it up to you to decide how much.
Whilst the babies’ outward appearance was being taken care of, Gustav was devising the animatronics to go on the inside. The babies were to be seen almost exclusively in a lying-flat, face-up position, so the most direct and reliable way to operate them remotely was to run cables out of their backs and down through the prop incubator that housed them. The mechanisms Gustav built to make the puppets kick, squirm and grimace were cooler than Shaolin Dolomite. Performance-wise the little buggers didn’t have much to do except twitch and look wretched, but if last minute script rewrites had required them to rise from the grave as speed-freak ninja assassins we’d’ve been halfway ready. Even the controllers the G-Man came up with resembled something off the Starship Enterprise. There’s not a lot more to puppeteering a well-designed animatronic beyond moving a few joysticks, so it always helps if you can make it look like you’re doing something tremendously technical and impressive.
By now the deadline was approaching and we were caught in the usual cycle of doing late shifts and then kipping down in the workshop. We were several weeks into this when I got a call: “Oh Tom, the EPK crew are coming by today to film an interview with you guys!” (The Electronic Press Kit is the videotaped making-of material that finds its way into TV promotional pieces, DVD supplements, etc.) So, if this footage ever surfaces and you see us with our bloodshot eyes, thousand-yard stares and Robinson Crusoe beards, don’t worry, we’re not recovering crack addicts or anything… we just haven’t had a sensible amount of sleep for a very long time.
At last everything reached some kind of conclusion, the skins were glued over the mechanics, and everything was boxed up to go on location. Next stop Manchester, for the shoot… where we stepped onto a set that was rapidly beginning to feel like a dry-docked version of The Good Ship Bounty! This isn’t the place to get into the ugly details, so let’s just say the director’s limited track record meant she had a lot to prove… and she was damned slow about proving it, to the crew’s universal dismay.
Luckily, us animatronics guys could duck and cover inside the refuge of the effects-o-kennel. A.k.a. the bunco booth, this was the fake cabinet built alongside the babies’ incubator to hide us from view as we moved the puppets. We could spend several hours a day there, and the graffiti that turned up on its walls during idle moments proved to be a good barometer of the mood on set. Click here to view a sample…
It finally became clear that all our expensive effects stuff was never going to be shot properly unless a second unit was set up with someone else at the helm. Producer Stewart MacKinnon stepped in, and not only did an excellent job but proved himself to be a thorough gentleman into the bargain. So it all turned out for the best – doesn’t that make you want to smile?
[By the way, it’s happened before and it’ll happen again: a film’s cast and crew find themselves having to pull together to steer a rudderless production home – then the asleep-at-the-wheel director ends up copping the majority of any critical acclaim for the final film. As our French auteur theorist friends would say, “C’est la vie”.]
One final story to illustrate how cracked things can get on set. Late in the day, we were asked if we could improvise a beanbag version of the third-stage baby so that the actors could be seen carrying it in long shot. This had never been planned or budgeted for, but we did have an unused Baby 3 skin, and we thought the plan might save the production time if it meant we weren’t having to unplumb the animatronic baby from its incubator for every other setup. So, we needed to find something that would fill up that skin.
We were in a real one-horse-town part of Manchester, so the nearby convenience store was our only port of call. Dried lentils would’ve work a treat… none in stock. Dried peas or rice?... no luck. Look over to the picture on the right to see where this is heading. So, we ended up with this horrible floppy creation that crunched when you picked it up and bled cat litter crumbs from its eyes! One of the actresses confessed to us afterwards that she found the thing a little disturbing to work opposite, and can you blame her? You can see the eventual fate of the Kitty Litter Kid by visiting this page here…
Well, there it is, another tale from the trenches. Along the way we may have contracted dysentery, run out of ammo and had our wives elope with American servicemen, but we made it back alive. A ten-gun salute to Morsey, Little Steve, Sam, Mike, Jim, Sarah, Katie, Becca, Col and the rest of the allied forces that helped to drive the Common Enemy back to No Man’s Land to look for her career. Can I stop with these war metaphors now?
A quick disclaimer: the above article expresses my personal opinions as a freelance artist and does not necessarily reflect the views of Millennium FX Ltd. Thankyou!
Bear witness to the ‘official’ This Little Life FX photo spread here. |
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Neil and Gustav: grown men playing with dolls. And getting paid for it. |
Clint Howard: the early years |
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Stage 3 ‘newborn’ baby sculpt. Check out Total Recall’s Kuato in the background – our idea of a joke during these cabin fever-stricken days |
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Old Yeller and Old White: Millennium FX/Blue Zone mascots! |
Haunted on holiday: three weeks and a thousand miles later |
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