Neill Gorton's Prosthetics Course: Week 4

This week we got straight into our final projects: working towards a portfolio piece over a four-week period. On top of this I’d still really like to finish my sculpture that began as copying a lifecast, paint and apply a foam latex piece that I’ve finished the mold for, as well as do another encapsulated silicone piece. But these have been placed on the back burner until I have moments of down time. Which may or may not happen... Here’s hoping I scrounge enough time because I really need the balance of a good anatomical bust sculpt in my portfolio.

 Coming into this week I had done some concept sketches as well as a storyboard for a 20-30 second film piece for my creature: a warthog office worker. A sort of surreal were-creature or were-boar. Overall I wanted something that would be a big fun character sculpt with lots of interesting shapes and textures to sculpt. I’d considered an old age make-up but was warned off doing one as the amount of time available usually means people have trouble pulling them off effectively and the guys at Millennium say nothing is worse in a portfolio than a bad ageing make-up! So yes it’s still Holy Grail of special make-up effects even for professionals. I still intend to do one and feel like I’m in a much better position to have a better go at it than before. Mostly because I think I’ll be a much stronger sculptor and special make-up effects artist coming out of the course after the instruction by Dave. It’s just been so great having a good sculptor to prod me and my work and he’s already made me become a so much better sculptor in such a short time! Big thanks and kudos to the bloke.

So final piece going to be a pull over warthog mask that I’ve planned on having a movable mouth as well as some other movement function in the creature. Due to the production timeframe I also made the decision to sculpt it as a ‘generic’ piece rather than go through the process of lifecasting someone, then going through and cleaning up the cast, molding that before producing a fibreglass version to sculpt onto. Basically, even if I was fast it’d be at least another 3 days to do this and place a lot of time pressure on the other end of the project and reduce my sculpting time. So I opted to use an existing fiberglass positive. Everyone meet Spencer:

Spencer was apparently a champion boxer and kick-boxer. He’s a big boy but he has a bit of a sloping forehead that I had to fill in a bit with some body filler. I also decided to chop off the ears for ease of sculpting and molding. I’ll have to leave a bit of room in the skull cap that I’ll fabricate later. After a bit of clean up work, I mounted an armature out of his mouth and covered that with plaster bandages to support the weight of clay on it. He looked a lot like a duck man:

For a big character like this I chose WED clay, as it’s much faster for me to work with than any of the oil based clays. I then started quickly sculpting and creating the basic shape of a warthog. I’d got a fair bit done and looking at the shape it wasn’t absolutely terrible, but after wacking the clay on I was concerned about the angle of his snout. I had my suspicions confirmed when Neill was walking through the studio and I saw him do a double take and come over to look at my sculpture. After a quick con-flab with Neill, the long and short of it was that I just wouldn’t be able to get good movement out of the jaw. And I needed to bring the angle of the snout up to be closer to the actor’s eye line.

Looking at this again I think the position of my armature wasn’t right in the first place. This was a really good time for this to happen, rather than me keep going. So I ripped off the front half of my sculpt and put in a new armature and started sculpting again. By the end of the day Spencer’s nose was back in position.

Walking home that night I was mulling the look of the thing over and I still wasn’t 100% on the position of the snout. So come day three I walked in; lay Spencer on his back and smashed his nose upward with the flat of my hand which moved it up another 2-3 centimetres. I then began sculpting in some of his fat rolls around the neck and working on the tusks. Dave came over and said I could really cut the amount of clay I had on my sculpt as it was looking ‘mahoosive’ (i.e. Fucking B-I-G); after that I started calling him ‘Spencer Mahoosive’. I also decided to move the ears as I learned from this sculpt the higher up the ears the friendlier the looking the animal! Neill suggested that I could also put a bit of weight in the tips and get some more free movement out of the design. With part animatronic puppets like this one, the more ‘free’ movement you can get out of the inherent qualities of the design the better. This week I had to finish sculpting of the tusks to as high a standard as possible and mold them in silicone, so as to reproduce them in hard plastic (called: Easyflow, Fastcast, or Easycast depending on whereabouts in the world you are located) so I could work out the socket points around the mouth and indeed the actual sculpting of the mouth area

So by the end of Week 4 the form was mostly done and I had also made some progress on the texture of the sculpt. Week 5 will be all about micro-detailing the texture of the sculpture and molding the beast! Here are some shots of Spencer at the end of the first week of final project