Moonshine of the Damned, Production Journal #6

First day of shooting was postponed. Not off to a great start, but I'm no so much worried about shooting this year, I think it'll be fine if we're all a little patient. There's only 10 days needed. If we can't find 10 days over the course of the summer, than something is horribly wrong.

Lots of pictures this time around, so let's get to it.

First up, the sculpt of the leg bone prop. I was thinking, since I have a medical skeleton leg bone, that I would just do a quick alginate mould and fill it with clay to get this, but that was just a lot of wasted time and material. As well, a real femur has too much of a curve to it to accommodate the support rod, so I quickly whipped this bad boy up.

I've said before how much I really don't like doing 2 part moulds, creating that dividing wall is just so tedious and normally difficult to get just right. Have made so many of them lately though, I realized while I was doing this one that I really felt like I was finally getting the hang of it. Turned out great.

Started sculpting a couple of the custom "hero zombie" pieces needed for the movie. I wanted to make sure this time around that the FX were was detailed as I could make them. And that meant creating a single unique piece for each of the "hero zombies". This here is for the "Half Zombie" and while you can't tell here, this is our homage to the "Bicycle Girl" from The Walking Dead. It was a really quick sculpt, about half an hour.

"Piss Zombie". One of the few things to survive from the original draft, but this time he's getting a little special treatment to mess him up a little more. The actor has a beard so I wanted to make sure since I only had so much room to do a piece, that it would be very dramatic. I like it.

All the zombie pieces I'm making for the movie are just short run moulds, and since I'll only be needed one good piece from them, I will be creating as many as possible until the moulds give out and added them as a limited run for sale on the website. I'll be adding as them as they're used in the movie to have a good applied shot of them.

Return of the Zombie Frog. While I was more or less happy with how the original turned out, he was made of silicone which I find difficult to paint dramatically. Since he's only onscreen for a couple seconds I really wanted to make sure it was obvious and really stood out, so I remade him, exaggerated the silhouette a little more and he'll be made of latex. He looks very chocolatey here, I'm thinking maybe Chocolate Zombie Frogs in the future?

The finished leg bone. Latex skinned and polyfoam filled with a support rod - as usual. It turned out awesome. Really happy with this piece and how simple yet how great of a prop it is. I've been meaning to make on for over a year now and give how simple it was I'm not sure what I was waiting for.

For those interested. This will be added for sale to the website very soon, once I get this one painted and get some good pictures. They'll be $30. Feel free to get in touch now if you want to pre-order one.

Note: it's not medically accurate, if you'll recall the bit I was mentioning on the sculpt version of this piece up above. It does look pretty decent though.

The Spiked Zombie Head Mace - still really happy with this prop, can't wait to see it on screen.

A quick detail shot of the staff. The head is so distracting you don't really notice just how much work I put into the staff and how well the paint job came out.

So that's it for pictures. I've got a few more things on the go this week to prep for the coming shoots this weekend - if the weather and schedules hold out for us. It'll be nice to get back into it finally.

Holy crap, your arm fell off!

One of the simpler FX for the BZK! web series is a severed arm. I've never actually done this before, but I know the basic principles. This shouldn't be really taken as a proper "how to" sort of thing, but that's your choice.

I wanted a cheaply made fake arm for an actor to run around with, it had to be durable and take a beating while still being light and cheap. So silicone was out, although it would look pretty realistic. I thought about urethane rubber but I don't have enough experience so I finally settled on a latex, foam filled arm. This was the cheapest method I could think of.

The supplies were simple, some alginate - I think about 4 lbs was used. Monster Makers Clay, which can be melted to a liquid. Water based clay for making a 2 part UltraCal 30 mould. And finally some latex from Monster Makers and I tried using their expanding polyfoam to fill the arm with.

First, I had the actor come by, Tim Wartman, and I made a very makeshift frame for the alginate. Here's where I made my first sort of mistake. While this worked, I think the alginate I chose and the frame were all wrong. This alginate was filled with fibres for more vertical surfaces and the frame should have just been a tube - didn't have access to better frame building materials, so we had to do this.

While there's nothing really wrong with the alginate I went with, I do think it was the cause of some of the air pockets and lumps in the mould. Here I poured in the first batch of melted clay. My next mistake.

It took some time to fill it all up and let it harden again.

Here's the final clay arm. It wasn't so awesome looking.

You can see here the ridges that each batch of melted clay created. It probably would've worked better had I done one large batch, but I just didn't have the means to do that at this time.

Here's it is after I resculpted most of the surface details. I got tired of it after several hours and thought, "it's going to look cheesy anyway, why am I wasting all this time?" So I cut corners and called it done.

Forgot to get a picture of it with just the clay wall before the first coat of UltraCal, but here it is after that first coat.

And here it is with the first half of the mould done and ready for the 2nd. I kinda suck and 2 part mould making, especially something this big. I've done some decent ones in the past, but I was sort of in a hurry.

And here's what's left of the alginate mould by the way.

So, there's nothing really to see at this point, it's too hard taking pictures while I'm working. So with the 2nd half of the mould done I cleaned it all out - and I was surprised how easy demoulding and cleaning was. I was really expecting a bit of a fight here and it pretty much just popped apart.

With the final mould done I filled it with tinted latex - which is impossible to show since it's inside the mould and I can't take a picture while I'm filling it. I let that dwell in the mould for a bit - for anyone wondering what the hell that means, for latex for form a good skin you need to just let it sit in the mould while the UltraCal does its magic and sucks the moisture from the latex forming a skin.

Then you dump the excess latex out and let it cure. I left it in the sun for most of the day and overnight and thought that would do it. Unfortunately there's just no way to check, so you have to hope for the best.

The next step was to just assume the latex had cured and fill it with expanding foam. I've used Smooth-On's Flex FoamIt but thought I'd try Monster Makers foam - I had no idea it began to work so fast and here's what happened within what seemed like 15 seconds.

Luckily I had some Smooth-On foam and went with that. Filled it up and let it sit, demoulded it only to find the latex hadn't cured in spots so the foam crept though and nearly ruined the mould, I think I got it cleaned out well enough and I'm trying a 2nd now.

Here's the first arm from the mould - it's far from perfect, but for our purposes it actually is kind of perfect. There's some major surface defects, pock marks and the like. One of the fingers looks a little crushed too - however, for the scene I need it for first, the arm's been used to fend off a horde of zombies so having it look a little battle weary is just fine.

 It's not painted at this point, that'll come tomorrow for a shoot the day after. It's pretty lightweight and totally safe to smack someone with, you'll feel it but it doesn't really hurt at all. Can't wait to shoot with it.

If you're reading this and thinking "Wow, that's just fascinating and awesome. I only wish there was a way I could help out, like donate money to this web series or something" than I highly recommend you follow this link: http://igg.me/p/110014?a=53757