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“I am a 15-year-old from Arkansas who really wants to make monsters for the movies. However, my careers advisor isn’t very encouraging. What should I do?”
My reply to this kind of question? Your careers advisor is right. Making big rubber gonks is no way for a grown adult to earn a living. Save yourself a career’s worth of heartache and frustration and get a job in a supermarket instead.
Well, O.K., I’m joking. But occasionally you find yourself caught up in one of those nightmare assignments that sours you temporarily against the wonderful world of creature effects. A project so punishing, unrewarding and unforgiving that you just want to shake your fists at the heavens and wail, “for pity’s sake - MAKE IT STOP.”
The sad thing is, the job started out as a fun little endeavour featuring that speciality of the house: the crazy rubber monster. The screenplay for this Hallmark science fiction series centred upon troublesome Martians who invade Victorian England to kidnap the unwary. (Who’d’ve thought it - after all these years, Mars still needs women.) Millennium FX was handling the special makeup and creature effects for the programme, with me put forward for animatronic Martian duty.
Neill Gorton had put together some approved sketches and Photoshopped elements of what the invaders might look like, so my first step was to spend a couple of days elaborating on these to produce a six-inch plastiline mini-Martian. By the way, before you say it - yes, he does look very much like something out of the Alien series. If you’re going to invite comparisons you might as well chuck down the welcome mat and stick the kettle on.
Once everyone was satisfied with this initial model, the proportions of my maquette were scaled up to build the armature that I would sculpt the Martian proper over. The script described an eight-foot creature, but the effect was going to be shot at half-scale so I only had to make him four feet tall.
For practical reasons this bigger sculpture had to be posed in a neutral stance, which presented a funny contrast with the miniature version. The maquette depicts an extraterrestrial fighting fury; the full-sized creation looks more like Mr. Martian waiting for his bus on a wet Tuesday afternoon.
I moulded the whole thing in eight parts and produced the cores (the fibreglass understructures beneath the creature’s outer rubber layer). From here, everyone on the crew grabbed a different piece and ran with it.
I duplicated the alien’s eyes and head-cowl in transparent vac-form plastic; Steve Scotton put Vinamold ‘guts’ behind the eyes for that effectively disgusting H.R. Giger touch; and Neil Morrill made a great silicone rubber brain that could expand and contract. There’s always room in our hearts for one more throbbing Martian brain.
Neill Gorton manufactured all the foam latex skins and did the animatronics: the jaw was able to split open and ‘roar’, and the head could roll and turn. The crowning glory was the killer eye mech that Neill came up with: he mounted swivelling lasers in the Martian’s head with crystals in front of the beams to diffract weird iris-shaped patterns over the surface of the creature’s eyeballs. With the lights out and the lasers ‘looking round’, it was one of the creepiest effects ever. It would’ve been a screen first… er, if it’d made it to the screen, that is.
The arms were puppeteered with rods and the body could be moved from below via a gimbal mount. Sadly, these two elements never really worked too well. The gimbal rig prevented the Martian from turning at his shoulders - reducing his “death strike” to a somewhat effeminate flap of the wrist! - and the mechanism proved to be very unwieldy and clunky-looking. A great favourite in the workshop was putting it through its paces and then accompanying it with Dalek voices: “ I, AM, A, RO-BOT…”
Reservations aside, so far so good. Things only started to go awry with the intervention of THE CLAW…
To explain, a couple of sequences had to show the Martian’s arm enveloping its victims. The effect was planned as a full-sized animatronic prop. Neil M. had sculpted and moulded the arm, but as these scenes were supposed to be amongst the last to be shot, it’d kind of gone on the back burner.
Suddenly, a message came through from production: someone had botched up their timetabling and the arm had to make a brief appearance much earlier in the shooting schedule… er, like, tomorrow.
Obviously, the full-service mechanical arm was out of the question, but we thought we could come up with something good enough to quickly swipe through frame. So, me and Neil stayed back late to crack out an arm in polyfoam, and then we painted it the discussed ‘bruised flesh’ tones the next morning. Despite the lack of preparation and materials, it turned out decent enough.
However… no sooner had we sent it on set than it came boomeranging back with a note attached: “it’s the wrong colour, it’s supposed to be blue.” ?!?!?! (The art department guys had even included the Dulux housepaint colour reference as a handy guide… thanks.) “Oh, and one more thing: we want it to have claws.” ?!?!?! x2.
None of this had even been mentioned to us before. So, we had to knuckle down for another all-nighter. There was no time to do the job right, so we just had to go at it Blue Peter-style. Me and Steve sculpted claw shapes that were quickly vac-formed, filled with biscuit foam and painted black to cover a multitude of sins. Neil blended them onto the arm with surgical glove rubber, blobbed-on polyfoam ‘warts’ and a bucketload of blue paint.
The end result was a larger-than-life tribute to the happy naivety of 1950s monster movies… or more honestly, a load of old tat cobbled together out of minimal resources on an impossible schedule. Anyway, it had to suffice. Word got back from production that they were fine about it, but I’m sure they were just being polite. (By the way, the arm returned to us caked in brown ‘Mars dust’ with the claw painted white. You make sense of it.)
This unhappy little diversion had now thrown the agenda for the Martian completely off track. It’s one of the ironies of the rubber monster game that the part of the creature that actually gets seen on screen – its skin – is always the element that ends up being rushed when the schedule starts to bite. It was no different here, although Steve and Neil did a sterling job of
painting up the alien given the time constraints. At last we got everything licked into shape and made the drive out to Ealing Studios for our Martian’s big moment in front of the camera.
Just
when we were thinking that we’d finally got ahead of the game, we
walked on set… and found that a bluescreen backing had been
set up to allow the digital guys to composite in an extended Martian
landscape. In case you're unfamiliar with the process, bluescreen
(and greenscreen) work involves photographing something in front of
a large panel of vivid, evenly-lit flat colour. This footage is fed
into the computer, which erases that one particular colour and puts
a different background in its place. It's a very useful way of making
scenes shot in the confines of the studio look like they were actually
filmed on location. Here's an example from the film 300 that
I found on the Internet:
Confusion reigned, at which point someone from the art department stepped up and said, no, no, no, they’d asked for the Martian to be red all along – this in spite of the infamous ‘Dulux memo’ offering direct evidence to the contrary. Old Indian proverb say: member of production trying to cover his arse speak with forked tongue. Anyway, the solution of all solutions was to dust the creature from head to toe with red powder paint. “For that professional touch”.
The next misapprehension that arose was, whilst we thought we were only spending a day at the studio, production seemed to think that they had us at their disposal for a full week. They were also labouring under the impression that this extra time gave them licence to conduct endless tests, revisions and general tinkering.
I’ve normally got no problem with changing things at producers’ behest – after all, they’re buying the car, they can choose the colour of the seats. But when you’re throwing away work that took weeks to perfect and having to replace it with stuff you’ve conjured up on the spot, you start to think, “hmm, maybe this isn’t the way to do business…”
Anyway, this process of bastardisation seemed to go on forever. After the claw and powder paint fiascos, they then wanted the transparent head-cowl removing, and… ugh, don’t get me started.
The biggest travesty of the lot was the fact that they rejected Mr. Gorton’s spooky laser-eye effect in favour of - wait for it - Christmas tree fairy lights. Ching, ching, ching, ching, ching, ching, ching… hark! Is that the sound of Santa’s sleigh approaching? Just embarrassing.
The other unresolved issue was: if we were supposed to be in the studio every day, where were we going to find the time to complete the full-size mechanical arm effect? You guessed it… we’d head back to the workshop, toil through the night, kip down on the floor and then be up and straight into work again.
A 1.00 a.m. finish was regarded as a lucky break; my personal record on this job was 6.30 a.m. and then up again at 9.00 a.m., and I didn’t see home for a week. Brings new meaning to the phrase, “abducted by aliens”. Meanwhile, small children up and down the land were crying because wicked Uncle Tom hadn’t had time to buy their Christmas presents yet…
The final indignity? There were no showering facilities at Millennium, so we were all walking around with powder paint perma-tans by this point. After a few days of this we were looking bad and smelling worse… if the local theatre company had been hiring street urchin extras for Oliver! we’d’ve been signed up on the spot.
Anyway, by hook or by crook, fair means or foul, we finally got everything done. The final programme and series proved to be a roundly ignored bit of throwaway schedule filler (had you heard of it before today?), so we didn't even have the consolation of saying, "buuuuut... it was worth it". Never again. Until the next time…
EPILOGUE – FEBRUARY 2001 New Year came around and there were still a couple of shots of the Martian not in the can, so an extra day of filming was scheduled for him. Neill G. took this opportunity to completely overhaul the artworking on the creature (with the luxury of time on this occasion) in the hope of convincing production to reshoot all the powder paint stuff as well. They agreed - don’t you love happy endings?
Check out the final incarnation of the Martian below. Thanks to Neill for the pics.
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| Me and muh pal…
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