Babes And Blood on Long Island…!
Not. Safe. For Work–I warned you.
Okay, so in-between actually editing our film “Lifeform,” we’ve been putting together two shoots, for additional scenes. Now, the reason for this, I could say, is to add an additional layer of narrative in order to make the film more complex and add more dramatic depth, but the truth is, I just wanted to add more crazy, blood-curdling monster-lovin’ mayhem! Also more beautiful women. Hey, Shakespeare wrote for the groundlings folks, don’t kid yourselves. There’s more stabbings in his work than the average episode of CSI. You know you love it…I just deliver the goods, okay? So, no mea culpas coming from this part of the neighborhood. But I digress…
Yes, in order to add a denser layer of narrative complexity, we went ahead and sculpted a scalping wound for our aforementioned beautiful actresses’ to wear. You can see a few shots of the piece after it was created and we were in the process of adding hair to the gelatin piece–oh yeah, I cast it out of gelatin, the same stuff Bill Cosby used to sell on TV. The great thing about this stuff is that it’s cheap, it looks good on camera and you can re-melt it in your microwave to use it again. We all had Jello Puddin’ Pops after the shoot!
Here’s the effect on the very talented Tatyana Kot–she’s the new screen queen on the block. Our shadowy beast tracks her down and for some reason feels the need to rip her dress off and then pull her scalp off. Hey, it happened in Macbeth didn’t it? Or was it The Merchant of Venice, I can’t remember… All kidding aside, the scene worked like a charm. Tatyana was a consummate professional and Miranda Kahn, who played the creature did a great job. Both are wonderful actresses! The end effect is absolutely chilli
ng.
The next weekend, we shot more mayhem, this time with Tatyana and Jacklyn Sokol in an earlier portion of the scene, as drunken debutantes on their way home, before the assault. Both women were great and…Jackie got to wear a similar headpiece as well–the beast apparently hates blondes. Who can blame it? Thanks to makeup artist Meraly Lopez and Christine Russo for painting and applying the pieces. Also, thanks to Josh Barbour, for helping me crew the shoot!
We also shot scream queen Christina Wood and Tom Rowen’s sequence. They play a pair of lovers caught in the beast’s crosshairs–just like in Hamlet when…aw forget it…
Medical MisAdventures
So Sunday we had a crazy day shooting in Voorhees, NJ at a plastic surgeon’s office. We braved a two hour drive through the pouring rain, Burger King breakfast food and hospital booties (the ones you pull on your feet,okay?) in order to shoot some complicated hospital scenes. 
Also, there was a life signs monitor that Virginia Logan was attached to that keep beeping and telling us she was no longer respiring. I think it was a malfunction because as of today she was still walking around and making lascivious comments! 
Anyway, we made most of our day and then we nearly hydroplaned on a sharp turn into two other cars that had already spun off the road. 
Somehow I was able to channel my mad driving skills and turned into two skids, all the while holding one cup of coffee, thereby avoiding the upset-looking Hindu woman we were skidding towards. 
The gods of filmmaking were with us on the that day, I can tell you! All in all, adventures like this are the thing I like least about filmmaking. Still, it does build nerves of steel, if one survives the ordeal. Indie filmmaking is rarely pretty, rarely glamorous and always an adventure….
She’s Got Legs…?
When we began planning the effects for our new film, Lifeform, we decided we’d try to do as many practical effects as possible–meaning makeup effects, as opposed to computer graphics. There are two reasons for this. First, CG is prohibitively expensive if you can’t do it yourself. Second, computer effects don’t always look as convincing as actually having a creature on set. The problem is, where do you find a creature? Short of journeying to Oz, Ringworld, Narnia, or your nearest recombinant geneticist’s lab, you have to make it. And, because low budget filmmaking means by definition you only have enough money to make your film with a Fisher Price camera and some stick figures, you have to figure out how to make said creature….you guessed it…yourself.
Well, we pretty much knew from the start that we couldn’t afford a full creature suit and quite frankly, such suits can sometimes look pretty “Octaman”-like (look it up, though Rick Baker doesn’t want you to). So the decision was made to show parts of the creature instead. We’d show the legs, some claws, maybe the eyes, but not the whole thing in one shot if we could avoid it. Hey it’s Hitchcockian, keep the mystery, keep people guessing. I think one of the problems with films today is that because they can show anything–say fifty thousand glowing, multi-headed pygmies performing a synchronized swimming routine–they should show it. This is probably why we have the bad films we have today.
When we went to design our creature’s legs, we started out with a few sketches. Here’s one of them. Now, we already knew we couldn’t afford to animate these legs on one of the Victoria Secret’s model, but we could make prop creature legs, ala the ol’ fake Bigfoot footprints gag, have a PA walk them across the screen and walla, instant creature.
From there, we began the build. First, we created a wire armature that we fastened to a board by means of screws and an upright PVC pole and began to sculpt on the armature in wet clay. This is the stuff that you always have to keep moist or it cracks and falls apart. But if it’s too moist, the clay won’t hold the details. 
Also, your rags start smelling like mold after awhile and you begin to hallucinate. I remember visiting the Temple of Mu with Bob Marley and JFK, but that’s another story….
After we’d sculpted the leg, we had Anthony Jones, an excellent moldmaker and makeup guy, cast the sucker. Anthony has a lot of experience in this kind of mold-making so we knew he’d be the guy to tackle the leg. He did an excellent job. It’s a huge two piece mold made of Ultracal and it’s taking up half of the bedroom at the moment, serving as an obstacle to both human and cat traffic alike. (Cat inserted for scale.)
Following that, Anthony cast two legs himself. The final creation has a latex skin and foam interior and also takes up a heck of a lotta room in your typical square footage-challenged NYC apartment. (But hey, what about all the museums and shows one can take in anytime one wants? That makes it all worth it! Oh wait, we’re making a movie, those $200 tickets for Spiderman will have to wait!)
We ran into a major problem because we only cast one leg, I think it was the right one. There’s an inner toe, like a dinosaur’s, in the design, which meant we ended up with two right legs. I wanted a left leg, so I had to sculpt, cast and pour an opposing left toe. Then I had to cut off the right toe and patch that, as well as graft the left toe to the proper spot. It actually turned out very well. You really can’t tell it’s a patch job. (Note to self: next time design a leg with no inner toe.)
Following this, we painted both legs with PAX paint, which is acrylic paint mixed with prosaide. They look great and should prove to be very spooky in the right light. When we go to use them in the film, we’ll stick PVC pipes in the offscreen ends and have a PA walk them past the lens.
Great, we’re done, instant monster!
If only. Things got much more complicated later….
strangewerksfilms
IN THE WERKS 