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I snuck this low-budget, Florida-shot horror/comedy/satire short film in between my stints on Blade 2. The people responsible were looking for someone hungry enough to do all the creature effects on the cheap, and at the time that was me.
The plot of My Body’s Revolting centres upon hack film producer Reed Kirkham. Reed is having a change of heart – he wants to ignore his usual ‘gut instinct’ for crass genre fare and return to the sincere projects of his idealistic youth. However, his guts take offence at this, to the point where they climb out of Reed’s body and hold him hostage, all in the name of exploitation cinema.
The entertaining end result somehow manages to make a plea for sensitive, from-the-heart filmmaking whilst simultaneously revelling in every raucous, gory outrage in the book. There’s a moral to the story, but essentially it’s a talking body parts movie and that - along with some very funny Photoshopped storyboards the Florida crowd sent me - was the element
that sold me on the project, I must admit.
So, how do you create body parts that can act for not very much money at all? It was clear to me that the most sensible approach was to realise the characters as glorified hand puppets. There was a safety net in the sense that MBR was a comedy: if any of the effects came across as a bit daffy and larger-than-life, that was O.K., the whole film was like that. (There were times on 2001: A Space Travesty where we didn’t so much fall back on this alibi as adopt it as the workshop motto: “So, you want to glue ViewMaster goggles onto a monkey mask, paint it green and pretend it’s an alien? Yeah, great idea!”)
However, I knew I could go some way towards giving the puppets a quality look just by paying attention at the sculpting stage. You can sculpt something well or you can sculpt something badly – the cost of the clay is the same…
THE LIVER MBR’s
main villain, and the character I spent the most time on. I began
by modelling him in water-based clay. He was scripted as this mean-spirited,
irascible personality, so I tried to convey as much of this through
the sculpture as I could. That way there was less pressure on the
limited capabilities of the puppets to carry the performance.
Incidentally,
my final sculpture bears only a passing resemblance to an actual human
liver, which is this weird, elaborate and unexpected-looking object
in real life. I streamlined everything for my version, and played
down the confusing elements. (This artistic licence also extended
to the final devil-red paint scheme of the Liver: given that he makes
his first appearance climbing out of a toilet bowl, I felt that the
audience might mistake him for a gigantic malignant turd if I made
him a more authentic brown colour. Not that a gigantic malignant turd
wouldn’t be a sight to see, of course – it just wasn’t the film we
were making. Hey, fingers crossed, maybe one day!)
Once
the sculpture was moulded in fibreglass and I’d fashioned what would
become the underskull beneath the Liver’s skin, I poured him up in
silicone rubber (Jacobson’s RTV C204, for the record). Although the
silicone duplicate came out beautifully - it's a material with a great
fleshy, translucent appearance - I’d underestimated the heaviness
of it all. This thing was like a lead weight. There were whole scenes
in the film where the Liver had to hurtle across the room at the central
character and grapple with him, so I made a supplementary lightweight
latex-and-polyfoam ‘stunt liver’ so we could achieve these moments
without the risk of smashing all the actor’s teeth out.
I
set the rubber skin to one side and set about installing the mechanics
into the Liver’s underskull to make his face move. I knew nothing
whatsoever about adding mechanised movement to a puppet's face, but
how hard could it be? I’m honour-bound to say an almighty thankyou
to Neill Gorton at this point, who was generous enough to let me blag
a corner of his Millennium FX facility for much of this job. Neill
could do this kind of crackpot rubber monster stuff in his sleep,
and made many bacon-saving suggestions about what cables and lines
would work best.
Once
the skin was back on the underskull, the brow mech turned out to be
disappointingly sluggish – silicone rubber is much stiffer and more
stubborn to move than, say, foam latex. But the eyes worked well and
the eye blink fluttered the eyelashes faster than a floozy chatting
up an octogenarian billionaire.
(Naturally,
this was also the mechanism that got broken first. I didn’t fly out
with the props I made for MBR – I just shipped them from London and let the Florida
guys take care of their on-set operation.
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was wary about sending the puppets too far ahead of the start date,
just because of the increased risk of them being manhandled and damaged
before shooting. It’s like Christmas: these things turn up in a great
big parcel, they look funny and can perform different tricks… peoples’
first instinct is to play with them!
Sure enough, a couple of days after shipping the Liver I got a call from MBR producer Tim Rush, saying that the blink function had been overworked and could I suggest how to fix it. Not a problem with the mechanism there in front of you, but to try and visualise and solve the problem over the phone...
The
other thing was, the time difference between the U.S. and the U.K.
meant that Tim invariably phoned at the end of my working day, when
I was down the pub. So, there’d be a very serious-sounding Tim on
one end of the line, and me on the other – half-cut on the beer, with
the sound of laughter and clinking pintglasses in the background!
I felt bad, but
With
the Liver’s skin positioned and superglued down over its underskull,
I painted the rubber with a concoction of oil paints, white spirit
and one-pack. (One-pack is the clear silicone more commonly used as
a sealant around baths and sinks. It acts as a binder between the
skin of the creature
Meanwhile,
I sculpted the Liver’s arms separately, moulded them in plaster, and
cast them in latex and polyfoam for durability. Two versions were
made – poseable arms with a wire armature inside, and floppy ‘Kermit’
arms to be manipulated at the elbows by rods or marionetted Thunderbirds-style
from above. The arms could then be swapped back and forth according
to the demands of each shot, attaching to the main body of the puppet
via the magic of plumbing fittings.
The
finishing touch was to artwork each arm to match the elaborately mottled
colour scheme I’d devised for them. I quickly came to regret when
it dawned on me I’d have to duplicate this paint job six times over.
THE LUNG This
puppet played a much more fleeting role in proceedings, and as such
I scheduled fewer hours to complete him – from clay original to finished
piece, it can’t have been much more than a week. The script described
a chain-smoking mute character, so I pictured him as this world-weary,
nicotine-stained, seen-it-all-before Keith Richards/Iggy Pop-style
presence; and like the Liver, he owed more to E.C. Comics than Gray’s
Anatomy.
The
final puppet was in latex, with a hand-operated mouth, bladders to
make him ‘breathe’ and tubing to allow him to wheeze out cigarette
smoke. By the way, idlers, slackers and layabouts will admire the
way I designed him with this heavy-lidded, squinting expression to
avoid having to mechanise the eyes.
As
you can probably deduce, from a technical standpoint he wasn’t much
beyond the flint axe and the pestle and mortar, but hopefully the
sculpture and
paint
job lent him a bare minimum of gruesome sophistication to carry him
through his brief onscreen appearance.
I
also made what I dubbed ‘roadkill’ versions of the puppets, to depict
their climactic and grisly demises. (Liver: crushed in the lid of
a photocopier, lung: ground to mincemeat in a paper shredder. I bet
you had no idea the office environment was such a dangerous place.)
I just took another pull of each out of the moulds, ripped into them
and dressed in ‘guts’ made from string dipped in a witches’ brew of
oil-colour, one-pack and white spirit.
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| THE INTESTINES These were required for a Re-Animator-influenced setpiece where the protagonist’s entrails coil out and tie him up. Yeah, only a non-speaking, walk-on role for these particular specimens of human anatomy. They were usually the things I ended up working on to kill time whilst the paint on the puppets was drying.
This was the process: I got bands of cotton wool, dipped them in plaster, wrapped them round a length of dowelling and sculpted them into nice globular, organic shapes. Once this arrangement had hardened, I painted on a couple of layers of flesh-tinted latex which dried and peeled off to give a lumpy, sausage-like rubber tube. I made a couple of dozen of these, glued them end to end, poured polyfoam into them to fill them out and completed the effect with acrylic, latex and wool veins.
The
intestines I made for MBR really
needed to call in the ‘comedy alibi’: the
end result was pretty nasty, very hokey. Like I say, hopefully the
audience will accept them as fun
hokey, rather than “dear God, the guy who made those must be some
kind of pitiable idiot” hokey. Not for me to say.
Well,
there you go. MBR proved
to be a fun little showcase for my work, and an valuable lesson in
turning out creature effects on minimal time, money and
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resources.
If rubber monster guys