| Home
l Gallery
l Behind The Scenes
l F.A.Q.s
|
||||
| |
||||
|
The ad in question followed a kind of Power Rangers theme. A fanged alien menace arrives on Earth through a dimension gate, hell-bent on enslaving mankind. Our pre-teen heroes banish the peril by harnessing the almighty power of cod flakes in crispy breadcrumb. There’ll be some advertising executive sunning himself in the Bahamas on the strength of that idea.
Anyway, it was our responsibility to supply the monster - a good old-fashioned man-in-a-suit job topped off with an animatronic head - and then babysit it onset in Hamburg. A great, fun assignment, the single “but” being: we had a slim two-and-a-bit weeks to build the entire thing. With just me and Anthony Parker on the full-time sculpting and moulding crew. Stop laughing, you at the back.
So, basically, I was sculpt-o-zombie for a fortnight: I’d get up, go to work, sculpt for twelve hours straight, go home, sleep, get up, go to work… that was the sum total of my life for two weeks.
Working
from a design sketch by Neill Gorton, Anthony sculpted our monster’s
head, neck, hands and shoulder armour, whilst I tackled his torso,
legs, feet and tail. Ant was also going to be inside the suit,
The completed sculpts were moulded in fibreglass and then duplicated in foam latex by Ian Morse. As most of these pieces were going to be skin-tight when worn and therefore a squeeze to get into, they were backed up with lycra to allow them to be pulled on without ripping.
Everyone
in the workshop with a spare moment pitched in to help seam and clean
up the foams; meanwhile, Neill set about mechanising the creature’s
underskull, incorporating remote-controlled servo motors to
All that remained now was to paint the suit… with 24 hours left before we were due at the airport.
Me and Ant started out with the best of intentions, indulging in delicately graduated airbrush work to begin with. However, as our efforts stretched on into the night (and through ‘til the morning…) we soon lapsed into slapping on colour with 2” laminating brushes, just to get the job done! Morse painted up the monster’s teeth, spikes and tongue as separate items made out of fastcast resin, slush latex or polyfoam.
By 6 a.m., all conversation in the workshop had dried up – the only sound was the occasional dry, pathetic croak of hollow-eyed crewmembers fighting a losing battle to co-ordinate hand and brain.
(By the way, the primary-colours paint scheme was the producers’ choice, not ours. To my mind, the suit’s scaly surface was crying out for a more realistic, Jurassic Park/Gremlins-style paint job, and I felt this flat, toylike, child-friendly look constituted a bit of a missed opportunity. Then again, given the time crunch, I suppose it was a lucky thing that the clients were happy to go with something simple.)
Fortunately we managed to arrive at something approaching completion before coma set in. Ant, Morse and me were unshackled from our workstools, our monster was crated up and we were put on the plane to Germany. By the following morning we were at Hamburg’s Schimmelmannstraße studios, ready to suit Ant up.
This
was the routine: Ant would climb into the main body of the creature
through the shoulder and neck area (like a pair of dungarees). The
shoulder
Lastly, the head worked on a ‘reverse hood’ principle. Attached to the rest of the suit at the collarbone, it could simply be pulled back over Ant’s own head and then fastened down above the shoulderblades. Within half an hour we were all done and ready to go on set.
Up until now we’d only seen our creature in the unforgiving light of the workshop fluorescents. However, once on stage we found ourselves blessed with a fine director of photography, who made our work look less John Carl Buechler and more Stan Winston by the minute. He kicked in enough crosslight to bring out our monster’s form and texture beautifully, whilst incorporating enough smoke and shadows to hide the suit’s shortcomings (like the dirty great holes that opened up under the arms after two takes).
Stir in Ant giving it the monster attitude, Morse Mexican-waving the brows and me narrowing the eyes, and the overall effect (for a two-weeker) was miraculously decent. In fact, it was an effort to conceal our surprise at how much we got away with. It was like serving up dog dirt on a plate and having people mistake it for a delicious treat from the finest Swiss chocolatiers. Eat up.
I’ve never been inside a creature suit myself, and frankly, unless someone writes a script featuring The Terrifying Stiff-Legged Pygmy Monster, I’m probably never likely to be. But you can imagine what this kind of costume must be like – heavy, hot under the lights, and an effort to move around in.
So naturally, you’re sweating; meanwhile, you’re encased in a giant foam sponge. It doesn’t take long for things to get pretty damp and unpleasant in there. Luckily, between takes, every glamorous fraülein assistant on set seemed to swarm round Ant to mop his brow and plump his seat-cushion, so I don’t suppose he suffered too much.
With all the, er, beauty shots completed by early afternoon, all that remained was a borderline stunt shot of our monster being blasted by an energy beam. We’d actually practised this already in the workshop.
The idea is that the performer wears a body harness with a rope attached to the back. He jumps up, then someone gives the rope a persuasive tug whilst he’s airborne. There it is: a simple, relatively safe approximation of someone being thrown back by concentrated fish finger power.
However, from the start the three of us had misgivings about the Germans’ awareness of the safety issues. I think it was the inch-thick school gym mats they’d initially put down to break Ant’s fall that sowed the first seeds of doubt. As a precaution, we hassled production to let us rehearse and safety-test the jump without the suit and the added danger of the animatronic head flopping around.
The first assistant director (1st A.D.) kept trying to railroad us out of this, telling us, “no time, no time”. Finally we prevailed and got Ant out of the suit and into the harness. We get back on set where a little guy comes bustling in and attaches the rope, starts issuing instructions to the German crew, etc. We assumed at the time that this gentleman was the safety officer. Hindsight suggests “hmmm,...perhaps not”.
Ant gave me his video camera to film the test for a laugh, and soon everything seemed ready to give it a go. The signal was given, Ant leapt up, and… what we didn’t realise at this point was that a whole gang of burly German lads had been stationed at the other end of the harness rope. Ant’s waif-like physique + big German blokes pulling for all their worth = ...?
Sure enough, no sooner have Ant’s feet left the ground than he’s whipping back through the air in reckless, stuff-the-sound-barrier fashion! My reaction as I watched through the video camera eyepiece went from, “Hey, that looks great!” to “Er, he’s not stopping…”. Ant not only missed the crashmats, he missed the entire set, and cannoned away down the back!
Before we did the stunt, we’d seen some of the crew lifting out floor grilles at the rear of the stage and thought, “Ah, they’re making that area safe in case Ant overshoots”. As we raced over to see where Ant had ended up, we realised that yeah, they’d lifted out the grilles… and then left a gaping six-foot hole with exposed wooden beams and live strip lighting!
Ant was in a pile at the bottom of this amidst a carpet of broken glass, with his ankle gashed wide open. We hauled him out and the first-aiders patched him up until the ambulance arrived. Despite the stupid circumstances, Ant took it all in great humour and there were no repercussions of the John Landis/ Twilight Zone ilk. On a more sobering note, if a similar thing had happened with Ant inside the suit (as it might’ve done if we’d less tenacious about getting rehearsal time), he could easily have bled to death before we’d got him out of the damn thing. (For all that, the video footage I’d shot still prompted more apologetic laughter than anything else when passed amongst the crew!)
Meanwhile, back on set, there was still this last shot to get. It soon became clear that the only person correctly proportioned to wear the suit in lieu of Ant was… the 1st A.D. So, he had to climb into this foetid, sweat-soaked thing and perform the final bit of action himself. Oops.
|
||||
|
|
|
|||
Home
l Gallery
l Behind The Scenes
l F.A.Q.s
|
||||
A
change of scene (working for Gorton & Painter / Millennium FX),
but the same old rubber monster uproar. This month: the stark terror
of a German-produced fish fingers ad.
Despite the tight deadline, we actually ended up taking remarkably
few shortcuts on this one. No Doctor Who ‘upholstery foam and binbag’
monsters for us… every part of our beast originated as a fully-realised
clay sculpture. 
so we sculpted over a bodycast he’d had done for his role as The Elephant
Man in the Johnny Depp film From Hell. Take a second look
at that face:
waggle the brows and eyelids. A skullcap was made for Ant to wear
and the monster’s underskull was mounted slightly above and forward
of this, giving Ant a “tonsils’ eye view” out of the head. A chin
strap arrangement translated Ant’s own mouth movements to the monster’s
toothy maw.
armour was then snap-fastened over this to conceal the opening. The
hands and feet were pulled on, attached and blended using Prosaide
medical adhesive and acrylic paint.
Anyway, an unscheduled visit to the local hospital followed. This
place reminded me of the old Hammer films, all wood panelling and
cabinets full of mysterious jars and medical instruments. The porter
even had the Igor-style, popping hard-boiled-egg eyeball, no joke.The
mittel-European accents and rainstorm lashing against the windows
outside only added to the Gothic atmosphere. C-c-creepy. Ant got out
alive though - three stitches and a few precautionary injections but
otherwise fine!