Neill Gorton's Prosthetics Course: Weeks 6-7

The last two weeks of Neill Gorton's prosthetics and animatronics course went by in a bit of a blur and a frenzy of activity. My advice for potential students: work hard, plan your schedule well and don't think of four weeks as a long time.  The last bit will fly by! After finishing the course I've only just got around to writing a blog entry. The other thing that occurred in the last two weeks was that I was too busy to take as many pics. A couple of days I actually forgot to take any at all. At the start of week 6 I finished probably the most complex mold I have made to date. After molding Spencer Mahoosive I then had to lay clay into the master mold and create a new positive. It was a three part fibreglass mold with a new core (positive) created specifically so as to create a thin foam latex skin.

I then bored a hole in the positive and mounted a large injection tube and then drilled out bleeders

After doing this I then poured silicone into this injection tube and created a new silicone core mold. This is a quick and dirty way of molding the core so as to create a silicone mold which can then be used to fabricate thin fibreglass components that sit under the foam latex skin of the creature. It's apparently called 'dirty coring'. I then used this mold to create thin fibreglass components and the old positive of Spencer to make a fibreglass skull cap to mount the components to

This mold then was taken up to the Millennium FX foam lab and James Greenwood helped me run the foam for my creature skin. I also got advice from the Millennium FX mechanic Adrian about creating the animatronic movements for Spencer Mahoosive. Because of the time frame for doing any mechanics it had to be done relatively simply with push-pull cabling rather than doing anything more complex. I designed this project as a learning experience and working in foam latex technician and with a mechanic was two of the things that I thought I would learn the most from as I've already worked with silicone before. That and improving my sculpting and learning how to paint foam latex. By the end of week 6 the first foam was pulled out of the mold. Meanwhile I set about sculpting Spencer's trotters and started pulling apart a computer keyboard (this will become apparently later).

By Friday of week 6 I had the trotters half molded in a plaster mold of Herculite. Then that weekend Alana arrived from Australia. We had been apart for 6 weeks and I was thinking that she would spend the week mostly recovering from jet lag, but instead she came into the studio with me and helped me finish the project. Specifically Alana finished the trotter mold and poured, seamed and painted the trotters, she also fabricated teeth and finished the work on the prop warthog keyboard. Without this last minute help I doubt I would have got a complete creature effect.

This brings me to an important point! Animatronic creatures like Spencer would usually be worked on by a team of people over four weeks rather than just one person. Due to this there were a number of things I still didn't get to do, even though this project represented a significant learning and personal achievement for me. And even though I tried to claw back those two days I was behind schedule they followed me throughout the project. The final hero skin had to be seamed (the mold seam cut away and filled with a mix of prosaide and cabosil - time consuming but worth doing well).  After this the whole skin had to be sealed with a coat of Aqua Fix (or prosaide) before painting. I only moved into painting on Thursday and was still painting, hair punching and playing with mechanics on Friday morning of the last day before shooting him.

Next I'll do one final blog post with the images shot of Spencer and hopefully the short video we made. Then it may be on to either bigger things or maybe a beach holiday!