Severed Zombie Ear Necklace

I finally got around to getting these things finished up and I'm pretty happy with how they turned out given how simple they are.

I'd posted a while back about having the idea do my own version of these, and having seen a few other folks do them, I thought I could do a little better - I know that sounds a little arrogant, stuff like this is hard work no matter what, so all due respect to them. The reason I say that is because I decided to mould mine from real ears, not a one sided sculpt like most of the others I was seeing out. This makes them a little harder to make though, but does offer some random defects which I think make them turn out a little nicer - and ensures that each set is pretty unique.

They're cast in latex and all individually hand painted and strung together on a leather cord, although in the new year I'm planning a limited set of silicone ears which look and feel a little more realistic.

Fresh from the moulds.

Closeup of one of the ears.

They sell for $25, shipping is only $5 worldwide - unless something comes up and I can't ship them as planned, but it shouldn't be an issue. You can email me at themonkeyrodeo @ gmail.com if you're interested.

The Monkey Rodeo Computer Animated Web Series

I've been thinking about this for some time now. I used to do a lot of computer animation, I sort of gave it up as I moved into doing prosthetics and props. What finally really inspired me to tackle this was playing the first episode of The Walking Dead video game - the style was perfect.

Normally when I do CG stuff it's all really hi-res, high poly count stuff and that's great for visual effects and computer generated characters and whatnot, but was just too much effort and work for a whole web series - the sheer amount of modelling and detail work was just too overwhelming to even bother thinking of it for more than a couple seconds.

So when I saw The Walking Dead stylized low(ish) poly stuff I realized it'd be perfect. A couple days ago I started playing around - just testing stuff out for the moment, I'm not diving right in too deep just yet. The first character I started with was Karl Wenham, seemed reasonable since I always wanted to do more with him but hate shaving my face and all to do the makeup. This way I just have to do the voice - which is sort of a muddled English/New Zealand sounding accent.

This is pretty early on - Karl isn't bald, still have yet to really work out how I want hair to look in all this.

I've been debating as well about doing some very rudimentary facial capture stuff for the faces. I've been going through a few tutorials and as soon as I suss out whether it's too much work or not, I'll decide on if I'll do it. Lots of stuff to still think about. For instance, the whole story, but how many characters, locations and all the sets I'll have to build, so it won't be happening any time soon, but it will be happening - how epic or huge it might but, I don't know yet, but it'll be fun designing so really over the top characters too hard to prosthetic work at the moment.

I'll probably post about it every so often as I make some major milestones during pre-production.