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.

Spiked Zombie Head Mace!

It's finally done and I'm pretty damned happy with how it turned out.

I will at some point very soon be selling just one on ebay as part of the fundraiser. And I will be selling a limited number, probably 10, later in the summer on the website. Although if you're reading this and you just can't wait, feel free to email me about it. The price will be $150.00 CAD.

It takes a long time to create each piece, there's 10 in total. 8 spikes, the head and the staff. Right now I only have one mould for the spikes, so that's what makes it take a little long - I'll be creating about 3 moulds in for the future ones.

Each spike is embedded in a whole cut in the head, with a small amount of the foam removed, and where each part joins, it's given a coat with latex. That bonds them together really well - however I'm sure if you really want to destroy it you could - why you'd try, I don't really know.

It's about 45 inches long. The staff is 30 inches - and could be shortened for anyone who wants one, but wants a shorter staff.

A fibreglass rod is placed into the latex skinned mould as the polyfoam is expanding, so it's bonded with the staff really well. Enough of the rod is left extending from the staff and them the head is impaled in it, giving the whole piece some stability.

This specific finished piece only had one rod, so it's a little wobbly - however for the movie I think it just adds another level of campiness, so I'm happy with it. For any sold I'll use 2-3 rods to improve stability. Unless people like wobbly.

Painting took place over 2 days, about 3-4 hours in total I'd guess. I wasn't really keeping tracking. I  just used Monster Makers Latex Paint Base and some acrylic paints, works perfectly.

Also, I think for any retail versions, I'll allow for some customization, colours, spike placement, any damage to the head, blood splatter. I kept this one clean and free of damage since it's part of the movie and it will be getting bloody on it's own.

UPDATE: I'm selling one of these on ebay right now: http://www.ebay.ca/itm/111084065279?ssPageName=STRK:MESELX:IT&_trksid=p3984.m1555.l2649

Moonshine of the Damned, Production Journal #2

Finally got a finished craft of the script - at least this latest carnation of it. I had added another character to help further complicate things and it seems to have worked pretty well so far. While I won't go into details since I'm trying to keep a lot of things in the series as under wraps as possible, but I will say this new character is called the Zombie Eater. Just another level of oddness to the plot.

It runs about 71 pages, I had hoped to trim it back a bit to make it shorter and easier to shoot, but I've cut back as much as possible without gouging into the story, so this could easily be stretched to a full feature length movie if I wanted - but I'm not too concerned about it for now. 71 pages it is.

In other news, I'm working away on some minor props and designing some makeups. Still struggling with the budget, so I've been working on finding ways of cutting back and doing things a little less expensively. One of the things I'm looking at trying is  making my own plaster bandages - in order to do the life casts, I think I have 4, maybe 5 to do, I'll need plaster bandages for the support shells of the alignate mould - however, that stuff is really expensive when you need the amount I do.

Normally just a single face mould isn't too bad, $20 or $30 usually does it. But I'm doing a full head and shoulder mould of up to 5 people...that's going to suck up a lot of money. So I'm hoping the medical gauze and plaster of paris technique I've been looking into will do it. I budgeted the using regular plaster bandages would have run me round $300, not looking forward to spending that much money on something that I can't reuse. The alginate I have no choice, but I'm fine with that.

As far as the other props go, I've got my Zombie Heads all set to go, just need more latex and polyfoam to crank out more. And while this wasn't written into the script, I feel I need to do this to add a little more flavour to some shots, so I'm making a few body parts. I've got a hand, that's need as a stand-in first and foremost, but I'm going to throw in a mangled up version in there somewhere as well. I'm looking at possibly doing a foot and maybe even a whole leg if the budget happens.

At lot of these props are just background stuff, not plot crucial.

Here's the Zombie Heads, at least 4 of them. I'm planning on making a whole lot more and eventually jamming them on pikes. The original one, the upper right, was painted somewhat more natural flesh colour, but the others I went with a greenish tone that I really like. There's a cartoonish quality to them I really like.

Another prop I did this week, a fake rock. Pretty simple stuff, but it was in the script and while not totally necessary to have done it in foam, I like to do things safe - a foam rock is way safer to have the actors waving around than a real one. If you're interested in how it was made, I did a post on that earlier this week: http://bureau51.blogspot.ca/2013/04/making-fake-rock.html

Clay hand. I didn't sculpt this entirely, it's from a life cast, I did need to clean it up a bit since the clay didn't settle properly in the mould leaving some gaps and ridges here and there.

And, I did up a quick concept for the Spike Zombie Head Mace for the series, I'm hoping to get this made as soon as possible, just need more supplies.

I'm hoping to get to doing some prosthetics sculpted this week, I'm doing some of the hero zombie characters and mostly likely starting with the Pale Zombie character.