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Cute alert! These friendly beanheads were just a couple of
the characters created by Image FX for this children’s TV
programme.
One
of the interesting things about working from job to job is
that you sometimes get asked to create stuff that’d never
occur to you in a million years if left to your own devices.
The
Snow Children definitely fell into this category - they were
conceived as snowmen dressed in Eskimo gear! They ended up
having big black eyes and white fur too, so maybe there was
a touch of seal pup thrown in for good measure. (Snowman/
Eskimo/ seal pup mutants – admit it, it’s different.)
Anyway,
they made a refreshing change of pace from the usual gurning
monsters. The production company had already commissioned
drawings and maquettes of the characters; all we had to do
was turn them into overhead masks that the performers could
wear.
The masks were sculpted quickly in water-based clay over the
usual generic head-and-shoulders cast. Easy! We cranked out
about a dozen in total.
The
final sculpts were so determinedly cute that there
was something kind of unsettling about them when you saw them
all lined up in a row. You’d walk into the room and there’d
be all these chubby little faces beaming back at you… it was
like Children Of The Damned or something.
Once
the clay sculptures were finished, they were moulded in silicone
and cast in fibreglass ready to be furred. The jaws were hinged
so that the characters’ mouths flapped in time-honoured Captain
Scarlet style.
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