Silicone Hand

I went back and forth on whether or not this was going to work at nearly every stage of doing it.

A little background, in case you've no idea what's going on here. The killer in the movie is a deformed person, resurrected from the grave through evil voodoo. Pretty simple. to create his look I was going to originally go with the old foam latex standby. I eventually, and very recently, decided to try my hand at creating it with silicone instead.

The main reason was to make it look better and cut down on the lengthy makeup application time. Time which we won't have while shooting.

The makeup, or whatever you want to call it, was going to consist of several small pieces for the head and a glove. It's now just a glove and a mask, a full head mask rather then the small pieces - which will look so much better.

Now, I've no idea how these silicone pieces are made. I saw some images, very vague images here and there and eventually felt confident enough to give it a try. I figured the glove would be easiest way to start.

Here's the original sculpt. It was done over an UltraCal cast of the actor's hand. I wish now I'd had made it much longer to go all the way down past his wrist, but this was meant to be a foam latex prosthetic at first.

I'm not that great yet at making 2 sides molds like this.

I used a material called Shell Shock to create the 1st part of the mold, backing it with another material called Plasti-Paste. I also learned the hard way that I didn't seal the clay properly and clearing it all from the Shell Shock mold was an absolute nightmare.

After many, many hours of scraping and cleaning I got all the clay from the mold. A lesson well learned, I now know how to properly seal it. You can't see here, but the Shell Shock was really thick and cured really fast so there were a lot of air bubbles in the mold. Not that I'm worried. It's a zombie hand, it's not supposed to look pretty.

And here it is all ready to go. I made up way  more silicone then I actually needed. Kind of a pain in the ass, but ah well, again - lesson learned. I've still to figure out how I'm supposed to gauge this sort of thing.

It was a bugger to pull from 2nd half of the mold off too. At this point I really noticed how thin some parts of the sculpt were. I thought I'd corrected it but I didn't do a good enough just. I can still reinforce it a bit though, it'll just be messy - as if this wasn't messy enough.

And here it is, about 10 minute out of the mold. You can see how a long sleeve on the glove would've been nicer, but again - lesson learned.

A quick test on camera about 10 minutes after pulling it from the mold.

And this is the only glimpse you'll see of the character of Randall Meincke, the deformed voodoo zombie killer until you see the movie. I have 2 weeks before we shoot and about 2 months worth of work to things ready for it - at least this here was some major encouragement that I made the right choice instead of makeup.