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Another
gig at Image FX, working on a couple of fizzy water commercials
produced by a Parisian agency. Jean-Jacques Annaud (The
Bear, The Name Of The Rose) was directing, so there was
a prestige factor there.
One
of the ads had an Ancient Egyptian theme and required a living
statue of Bastet, the cat god. Bastet was going to be mostly
just costume and body paint, but the pieces for the head and
feet would have to be sculpted. That’s where I came in.
The
Bastet head ended up being a two-for-the-price-of-one job.
The production company had sent over reference material for
the sculpt – the trouble was, Bastet looked different in each
one! Some hieroglyphics had the character looking like your
classic cat, others showed a kind of gnomish character… we
nicknamed one picture Yoda. Hmmm.
We thought the best approach would be along the lines of the
mummified cat sarcophagi in the British Museum. I set to work,
chucking a regal bearing and all the Egyptian trimmings into
the character over the course of a week.
Because
of the way the schedule was worked out, Jean-Jacques Annaud
couldn’t make it over to the Pinewood workshop until quite
close to the shooting date. We were hoping he’d drop by, give
blanket approval to everything and that’d be that.
Er….
no. Turns out Bastet is actually meant to be a cat goddess–
what’s more, Jean-Jacques had imagined her as something of
a sex kitten to boot. Clearly my somewhat pop-eyed, square-jawed
creation wasn’t going to cut it. As Jean-Jacques rightly pointed
out, “I wouldn’t want to sleep with this cat”!
So,
I’d spent a week sculpting this thing wrong and now
had a day and a half to sculpt it right.
Ooyah. Picture me in the workshop, at night, on my own, my
sculpting fingers an adrenalised blur: "MUST... GET...
JOB... DONE..."
Pinewood
is a veritable treasure trove of bizarro relics from past
films. There’s forever a bit of Alien turning up
here, a spot of Audrey II turning up there. There’s a big
box of Greystoke monkey arses that’s been kicking
around for years. Many an eleventh-hour project has benefited
from a sprinkling of monkey arse texture.
To
get to the point – do you remember a dodgy '80s SF film called
Lifeforce that Tobe Hooper directed? More specifically,
do you
remember Mathilda May, the slinky soul-sucking temptress who
spent the whole picture wandering around in the nude?
Well,
Mathilda’s bodycast is still in active service after
all these years. In fact, she’s kind of been adopted as the
workshop ‘generic female bodyform’, and was to be the starting
point for my cat-feet
sculpture. I got a fibreglass copy of her out of the mould,
chopped off her legs, nailed them to the bench and began to
sculpt over them. Mathilda, it was a pleasure.
The
Pinewood mouldmaking elves took fibreglass impressions of
the
finished sculpts and Andy Lee used these to create the foams.
I seamed and painted these to round things
off. The odd (kinda striking) colour scheme was requested
by the digital department, so that they could replace the
green with a computer-generated gold ‘sparkle’. Looking back
now, I have no idea how that shiny dark green colour would
help them or how they could ever make the effect look good,
but there it is.
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