A quick-ish rant

I've gotten a fair amount of emails since I've started up the business, which of course is awesome. However, there's a general trend I'm not particularly fond of. So, at the risk of offending people, here's a quick FAQ, followed by a rant.

Hey, I saw your stuff - online, newspaper article, whatever - it's really cool. Blah, blah, blah, blah...

Uh...It's nice you like it, that's great really...but did you want something?

Can I watch?

Pardon me? Watch what?

I want to see EVERYTHING! I want to know EVERYTHING you know! I want to see the whole process of how you make this stuff!

Calm down there, Captain. Again, I do sincerely appreciate the interest, but I don't run a peep show and if I did, you can sure as hell bet that it'd be more then 25 cents a gawk.

You should be nicer to your customers!

 Perhaps you don't understand something - a customer buys something, so far you're just the equivilant of a guy standing in line at Burger King screaming about wanting to see the deep fat fryer who doesn't even want to buy fries.

I want to buy something then.

Awesome, please do.  

Do you do custom work?

All depends on what you want and the time line and how much money you're willing the spend.

I want a - insert something I would never make.

That's not really something I do.

Can you have it done in 23 minutes and can you do it for free?

Did something horrible happen to your skull as a child and it developed into something much worse as an adult?

I don't understand anything about what you do, so I've no clue how to ask you about anything or what it might cost.

Okay, that's a serious question. It's a lot of information to absorb and there's a lot of variables, so many that I've posted an FAQ on my website answering hopefully a lot of these type of questions. I'm going to keep updating as I'm fully aware that there's more questions that I'm not even thinking of.



WARNING, for those sensitive to negative sounding words, you may want to look away now.

Seriously though, as far as those questions are concerned, I'm amused at the ratio of random "wow your stuff is awesome" emails vs the number of "I want to buy something" emails. I get that people think it's kinda cool, that's freaking awesome that they do - but I'm trying to run a business, not an free information booth.

As I have stated several times before. I do appreciate the interest and the compliments, I take none of it for granted and it really is nice to hear. It's what comes after that irks me.

I don't give tours. I run this business from my home. I am a private person and don't care to have people lingering about in my home watching me do something that quite honestly is about as exciting as watching the invisible man do nothing.

I totally understand that some folks do find it interesting and wonder how's it done, it's simple: I make a mould of a generic face, I sculpt something on it, I make another mould of that. I clean the mould and the sculpt is destroyed. I make foam latex and fill in the mould, the two halves are put together the foam fills the negative space and it's baked. Out comes a prosthetic. There, now you know.

I'm not interested teaching you how it's done - that'd be stupid of me.

I'm not interested in doing a presentation/talk/lecture/demo for you, or your friends, or your work, or your school. In short, you or other people no matter where you are. I'm not a public speaker, I don't particularly enjoy it. I enjoy my work and the privacy in which I'm able to do it. I would hope that the average person would be able to respect that and not immediately assume that I've all the time in the world to meet their every little curious whim while going out of my way and ignoring my only source of income.

If you have a genuine question, I'm more then willing to answer or help you out as best I can. But have a point, these random compliments feel like you're fishing for something. A simple, "Hey, saw your stuff, looks pretty cool" is great. I don't want to discourage people or insult them for just giving me a compliment, but when the compliment feels like there's a hook attached, it's slightly rude and awkward.

Don't inundate me with question after question all in one email, it's overwhelming and just comes off feeling desperate, like your emails are rationed or something. Calm down, we'll get to all your questions eventually. Is this how you have a conversation? "Hi, how are you? What's going on? Where were you last Tuesday? Do you like dinosaurs? Have you ever worn a hat? What do you think of the colour mauve? Is that even a colour?" Take some time, a deep breath and it'll all work out folks.

Again, I really don't want to discourage folks from emailing me about what I'm doing. I don't mind answering any minor questions, I understand the curiosity. Just take a moment to realize that I'm trying to run a business, I'm trying to scrape out a living somehow off this - if you're not part of, and have no intention on being part of, the business+customer=$$$ equation, I've no incentive to really go overboard to do something for you.

Hope not too many folks were offended reading this and if you were, chances are I was directly referring to you. You should try to fix that.

The Legend of Goblin Hollow

Anyone on PEI has probably heard of the Legend of Goblin Hollow, or more commonly just The Annie Beaton Story. I won't go into too much detail, there are better sources for the story if you just Google it yourself. The basics of it are: a woman, Annie Beaton was brutally raped and murdered in the community of Orwell in the 1800s (I think) and the murder was never solved. There's way more to it then that, but I did qualify it as "the basics".

So the point of all that is  that I was more or less hired to do a little bit of makeup by the Historic Village of Orwell, I'm not sure what else to call it, I assume that's technically who did the hiring besides the guy in charged. They do a walking tour/retelling of the Annie Beaton story at a Halloween, this was their 2nd year. The feedback from the first year was that it wasn't scary enough, there was some debate between the guy in charge, Tom, and the historian, Boyd about how the "scary" should be done.

Boyd was of the mind that it would be a little disrespectful to just do a bunch of spookhouse stuff while telling the story - I agree with him. But Tom wanted to do a little more - so that's where the makeup came in. It wasn't much, pretty subtle overall. I can't say I'm wholly thrilled with what I did, it's alright for sure, but I kinda wished I'd gone a little more overboard.

Anyway, here's some pictures:

Another scene for Grayson & Gortch done. 3 left.

Got another scene done. Should've had only 3 scenes left, but I had to chop up the last scene in order to make it work, so there's still 3 scenes left. Had a god shoot though, despite getting off to a late start. But everyone knew their lines so that made things happen pretty fast. Thanks to everyone involved. Draper Bulger, Derek Martin, Tim Gormley, Corin McFadden, John MacDonald and Patrick Poirier. And now for some pictures.

Tim, Draper and John

Draper and John

John, Tim and Draper

John

Patrick and John

John and Patrick

Tim and Draper

Patrick

John

Corin, Me, Tim and Derek

Tim and Derek

Corin, Tim and Derek

I normally plan things out pretty well, but I decided to just make it up as we went last night. Turned out well enough, although I haven't edited the footage yet - but I got more then enough so I reckon it'll be good.
And now some stills - these haven't been processed yet, they're straight from the camera, it'll look much different in the movie.

 I added this picture because it wasn't until I was going over the footage last night I noticed who was sitting on the right side of the shot. Luckily I can easily remove him.

And that's all for now. I'm thinking about making a huge change to one scene, had some issues with our location so  I'm debating about rethinking it. Specifically the Vampire Raid Scene, the location is under renovations so unless I can find something else I think I'll try a different idea - no clue what that idea is yet though.

Updating the website again

 Like most things you create on your own, after a fashion you start to want to change it. I'm redesigning the website again, only the 2nd time really though. There's going to be way more on there in the future and I realized it needs to be streamlined even more so I don't have dozens of pages to update when I make even the smallest changes.

I think that'll be happening this week if I can come up with something. Won't be too different, just quicker to navigate I think.

Not much else new to report other then a newspaper article. It's a decent write up, the online version isn't half as impressive as the one in the actual paper though. I hadn't seen it until after I ran into a couple folks who had and they made it seem like it was rather a big deal - I didn't expect much, but when I finally saw it, it was a whole damned page with about 5 or 6 pictures. Not too bad.

That's it for now, hopefully you'll see some changes to the site soon.

New Prosthetics Online!

 Four new pieces online this week finally.

The Dust Troll

Vampire Forehead - Large

Vampire Forehead - Small

Vampire Nose

Figured I could use a weird looking nose prosthetic.

That's all for now, waiting on more supplies before I can do any more. Got about 5 or so new designs to work on over the month of November. And I hope to get a photo shoot or two done with some of these ones.

You can see them in the shop here:

Zombie Photo Shoot

Got another photo shoot done today. It was a pretty good day to sneak off to a cemetery for a zombie picnic, I was a little worried we might cause some problems should we use a very public graveyard and have some visitors stumble upon us, so we use a really old one, or at least we stuck to the older section of it. It's a pretty secluded place, so no worries at all.

The makeup turned out really good, never did a zombie makeup before and I was pretty impressed myself how it turned out. The model is Julie Laforest, and here's some pictures:

Zombie Mughshot

Here's the prosthetic used in the shoot:

The "Zombie Mouth" prosthetic is for sale on The Monkey Rodeo website for $25 (CAD), or you can place an order just by emailing me at foxhenderson@themonkeyrodeo.com, just let me know how many you want, your address and how you want to pay (US and International via PayPal and Canada via PayPal or Email Interact).