Making armor for my demon army

I had a fairly productive couple days in regards to creating the demon armor. I think I mentioned I’d taken a trip to Halifax to visit Tandy Leather (as far as I know the only place in the maritimes you can really get decent leather) and get some first hand advice on what I should do.

My experience with leather work is minimal, so obviously the designs pretty much reflect that. Plus it's supposed to be demon armor, not formal evening wear. I just needed some advice on what I needed, hence the visit to someone who knows. I got to talk to Brian, the manager, and I ended up with 65 sq. feet of leather, for about $170 or so.

Once I got home I started into it. And within about an hour or so I managed to have the first piece, one of the bracers, completed. I won’t say, “oh, the process is incredibly easy, blind, fingerless monkies could do this stuff”, but if you have a head for this sort of thing – it’s not too hard to get started making something this simple.

It took about 5 or so hours in total to do all 4 sets of these. The longest part of the process is preparing the leather and dyeing it, otherwise it's a decently fast procedure. These aren't anything fancy, as I mentioned, but it should look pretty good once the entire costume is put together...at least I hope, but then again at the worst it can look is a little campy and that's still not too bad.

Finally got some shooting done.

Overall it was painless. There was only about 12 shots to take, nothing terribly exciting - at least not by itself or without post work. We still have to do the fight that ensues after this part of the scene, should happen in about a month I think.

In any case, here's some pictures:

This is a still camera version of the opening shot.

An "action" shot from the footage.

And this has nothing to do with anything.

Ooh, scary demon blood.

Took awhile to get these shots and I'm pretty happy overall with the way things came out. Couldn't have asked for a nicer day to shoot either. It was about +10 out, no wind. I think I got a bit of a sunburn actually.

I wish there was more to show - but the shots taken out of context aren't that interesting. But don't worry, there'll be more stuff soon.

Warhammer Time!

Get it? War-HAMMER Time? Yeah, it's lame, but it's the best I could come up with on one cup of coffee so get over it.

Anyway, the new warhammer prop is finally done. It was pretty pricey and more or less an experiement to see if I could do it in the first place. I'll be posting a step by step on how I made it in a little bit, just so you can see how relatively easy it was.

Also, I'll be heading to Halifax on Friday to snag some leather supplies to create the 4 sets of demon armor for the reshoot at Fort Amherst. It's been a very long time since I've done even the slightest bit of leatherwork, I have a pretty good idea of how to work with it after creating the armor for The Beast for the opening sequence. So I'm pretty confident it'll all turn out.

There's also the possibility I'll be looking at designing and putting up a Monkey Rodeo website over the next month or so, all depends on how much I recall about creating websites. Any out there feel like they have some invaluable imput on this, let me know.

And I'm hoping to FINALLY start shooting for the opening flashback sequence tomorrow - the weather seems to be against me every time I try to schedule a shoot lately. This has already been cancelled and rescheduled 3 or 4 times. The weather has pretty much turned so let's hope for the best tomorrow.

I think that's it for the time being, check back tomorrow afternoon if you just can't wait to see how the morning went.