Demon Gladiator

I really enjoyed the show Spartacus, it was just so over the top. At one point I had seen some promo photos of the character Saxa before she joined the show and was pretty much instantly struck at how awesome that would look for a Demon photo shoot. The costume was simple enough so I figured why not?

I didn't end up copy the character and her costume exactly, I put my own ideas in there, but overall it's pretty decent.

We were lucky to have done the shoot in just the right weather and at just the right time of day for the shots to turn out. Almost instantly each shot was fantastic looking.

And fortunately the beach wasn't too busy, I'm not a fan of people lurking and watching, I find it really distracting. That happened a bit towards the end of the shoot, but people really seemed to like it since several asked to take their own pictures - that hasn't happened too often before.

And normally I only get a handful of really, really decent shots. I used to only having around 6, 10 at max, to finish up. I could only narrow this shoot down to 22 or so, they were all just so great looking - and easy to finish, so I just did them all up.

Both myself and the model, who has done well over a dozen shoots, felt this was our best shoot together. And I think it might be the best one I've ever done, there's just something about how it all came together that I'm just really happy with.

About a day after the shoot I came up with another badass female TV character to do a Demon shoot of, hopefully in the coming spring we'll be doing Lagertha from Vikings.

And here's one last, totally out of character shot. The waves were a little stronger than we'd thought, about 2 seconds after this was taken I believe her bracers fell off and were rolling around in the waves - she caught them though.

CoralWraith Demon

Did this shoot the other day with a new Limited run prosthetic, the CoralWraith Demon.

CoralWraith Demons are the most unusual of all the Demonic species. They are roughly only 5000 years old, also making them the youngest species as well.

It's believed that around 5000 years ago, a small tribe of Baalmoor set out from the coast of Peru in search of a new home, a storm capsized their boat, crashing them upon a coral reef. In a near unbelievable coincidence, contained within the coral happened to be an ancient species of fungus - similar to the modern day "zombie ant fungus", a fungus controls the brains of its host. While normally these fungus are unable to effect any control over larger creatures, infecting only small aquatic insects, due to the unusual brain chemistry of the Baalmoor, the Demons became infected with the ancient fungal spores.

Only a couple dozen Baalmoor allegedly survived the wreck and washed ashore some time later, the fungus having partially bonded with the brains of the Demons. Their facial structure erupted in a boney mass, making them indistinguishable as once having been Baalmoor. And since the tribe lived quite isolated, this new deviation from their species became a totally new one. Keeping many of the same traits as the Baalmoor, the CoralWraith live considerably longer and even much harsher climates.

The prosthetic itself has limited vision, which adds to it's kind of creepy appearance.

The CoralWraith prosthetic is part of the Limited Run line, it includes 8 resin spikes as well. While it was sculpted on a form suited for an adult male, because the chin is removed from the rest of the face, it fit quite well on a female face as well.

CoralWraith Prosthetic - $55 (CAD) plus shipping to anywhere in the world, email themonkeyrodeo @ gmail.com to order. There is a limited quantity available, as of July 23rd, 2015, so depending on when you're reading this, it might not be available anymore.

Kaeliss Demon

I took a quick trip to Nova Scotia to pick up some supplies and planned to do a series of photo shoots along the way. It turned out to be a little more difficult than planned and I only ended up doing one shoot, but I got to location scout the other planned ones for later dates. Otherwise it ended up being a decently fun shoot to do, it's been awhile since I wandered around Halifax.

Grünhaut Demon

A while ago I decided to create a blank cowl piece for a series of shoots. I had done fully sculpted cowl pieces before and quickly realized their limitations - if you have the money and time it's not a problem, but when it's really just a hobby all those massive moulds and time sculpting several different large pieces just isn't a wise idea.

So I made the simplest thing I could think of, it's actually not even really a cowl, it doesn't cover the neck - which unless there's a major reason to do, it just limits the model's movements. This just covers the head and ears, down the back of the neck a bit and doesn't limit movement.

The idea is that I can add to it instead of creating a whole new piece, so with a different brow or full face piece, the addition of a few horns or something else - I get a whole new, fairly dramatic makeup for a fraction of the effort. And I'll see by the end of all the shoots just how well it works and might offer up a few of these for sale, keeping in mind, they're not perfect, but they're decently effective and easy to use if you have some skill with makeup and hate working with real bald caps.

This makeup was actually intended for a bit of a publicity thing, but it never happened for some reason so I went ahead with the shoot for myself anyway. The makeup took a little longer than expected, but I wasn't rushing and kind of took my time working it out.

I was particularly impressed by the body paint I used for this, first time using Graftobian's ProPaint and I really liked it. I don't say that because I'm being sponsored by them or anything - because I actually will also say I don't like their airbrush makeup - but the ProPaint stuff is awesome. While overall it's probably pretty similar to other body paints (I've only used a handful of other brands) one thing I really liked is it was unscented. Some are overwhelmingly scented and some are just really oddly scented, this stuff...nothing. I appreciate that and I think most people being covered in it appreciate it too.

The main reason I like it being unscented is that sometimes you wonder what the scent is covering up. There's no reason to make body paint smell like something "pleasant" unless you're covering up something unpleasant. It kind of feel like they've nothing to hide and leaving it unscented proves that.

I mention it because sometimes to cut corners when I'm turning altering someone's natural skin colour so dramatically, I'll just photoshop it later. This time around, I actually was very quickly able to colour her hands to match. And with a barrier spay, there was no transference of the colour at all onto her clothes - although the palms of her hands wore a little because of the heat we were working in.

I threw in this last picture because the model, Katie-Rose, had brought this weird doily looking poncho she'd found - and of course had to buy - she threw it on after the shoot and surprisingly it's not as god awful as it seemed. Still seems weird though, but I almost want to come up with a shoot now specifically using that piece.

Dwarf photo shoot.

I had worked on this shoot for some time and while I was pretty happy with how the pictures came out, the conditions were a little distracting - the heat and the insects - that I failed to notice a few
wardrobe malfunctions that didn't ruin the pictures, but annoyed me a little to see.

The idea behind the shoot was to do a Hobbit inspired Dwarf, not to replicate anything specific from the movies, but to create my own version.

Most people probably won't see what I'm talking about, so I won't mention what went wrong so it doesn't ruin the pictures for anyone.

I also made a pair of short swords I intended to feature in some of the shots a little more prominently, again because of the conditions, we rushed a little and didn't bother. We plan on revisiting this shoot in the fall when it's cooler and no insects to see what else we can get out of the shoot. I'll probably do the beard up a little better as well.

Overall, I'm happy with the shots, it worked as well as I'd planned and I look forward to doing a little more with this makeup and costume.

Now normally I only create Demon characters, but in the mythology behind my characters, Dwarves actually are of Demonic origins (as are all typical fantasy creatures), they are a cross breeding of an ancient breed of Earth Troll and Neanderthal Man. This created a short humanoid being, explains the englarged nose, ears, (and sometimes prominent brow) and excessive body hair across both genders.Also the stereotypical  aspects of living underground and mining, but very strong traits in Earth Trolls.

Buddha Cthulhu

Not really sure if I should call it a Cthulhu Buddha or a Buddha Cthulhu. Either way it's a little awesome.

I just have three for right now, I need to  redo the mould and then they'll be up for a limited online retail run of 50 at $35 each. 3 inches tall, cast in resin with a faux brass look and given a hard gloss coating to protect the finish. I might adjust the faux brass look with a base coat of brown rather than black. I tried a patina on it and wasn't really happy with it, it lightened it up too much.

 The three I have are currently for sale, I'll be posting them on Etsy, but you don't have to go through that site if you don't want to. Shipping is as low as $15 in Canada, 9 days or $18 for 3 days on average. $13 to the US, 6-10 days, other options are available though. And overseas $21, 6-10 days - on average.

https://www.etsy.com/listing/234557008/buddha-cthulhu?ref=shop_home_active_1

Moonshine of the Damned Update

So here's an update on where things are with the movie - why it's taking so long and all that crap.

As of today, all of the dialog has been recorded and synced up in editing. That's another hurdle finally overcome and the one that's been taking the longest. I've only two scenes left to add some zombie noises into and then it's just the sound effects and soundtrack.

It's taking forever to finish this movie. I said that shortly after wrapping in the fall of 2013, if we don't get the dubbing done in the next month - it's going to take forever...and it did and still is.

It's because of this movie I gave up filmmaking as a hobby, not because the actual shoot itself was terrible, in fact when it worked it worked great. I loved working with the actors, even the few times where scheduling was a bit of a pain in the ass, it was still a decent experience. It's all the crap that came before and after those parts.

I've stated all this before, but I'm stating it here as I'm going to link this to the Indiegogo site for an update as well. We were 3 months late in shooting in 2012, we were waiting on a grant that was massively delayed, as a result we had slightly less than 2 months to shoot a feature movie, called Undead in the Water at that point - and I had to get all the FX done and prepped as well (since that was what the grant was for). We shot for a month doing the scenes that had little FX, only to have two lead actors have to drop out which meant all that footage was useless.

In the rush to get somewhere near completion things just went south so badly between scheduling, weather and some uncooperative extras I had to scrap it. It sucked, but at the same time it was good. It was because of the time I had to spend on this I missed out on attending HalCon that year and business suffered a little because of it. This is another reason I'm quitting filmmaking, it's an expensive hobby with no return and takes too much time away from my business which is my only source of income.

BSo now we were guaranteed to be a year behind schedule. I rewrote the whole thing - twice actually, the original second version (called Moonshine of the Damned now). This version require new and different FX, meaning a portion of the grant money was wasted in the initial attempt, I had to raise a little more and luckily it all worked out. There were more scheduling issues which forced a 2nd, shortened version of Moonshine of the Damned - which was fortunate since there was no way I could have raised enough to do that version.

We shot the shortened version of Moonshine of the Damned over the course of the summer of 2013. It went pretty smoothly from what I recall, there were no last minute actor drop outs - although there were some recasting issues. We had an incredible bunch of zombie extras this time around making it much easier as well.

However, when we finished we were all a little exhausted. I was busy with work as well during the last couple months of the shoot and it was hard to finish up a final edit, which was of course needed before we could even think of starting on the tedious process of redubbing every single line of dialog in the movie. I don't shoot for sound, so it was all scrapped and redone - not the greatest method of doing it, but this is low budget crap folks, we do what we have to.

Being out in the country and not having a portable recording studio - because, let's face it, if I could afford a portable recording, I could have afforded to have the sound capture live during shooting - it was hard to get folks out here for dubbing. The edit wasn't finished until late November I believe, although there was a decent rough cut for viewing earlier, it wasn't good enough to start syncing up any vocals.

Then of course winter hit - and no one wants to come all the way out here in the winter and I don't really blame them. Eventually when spring came along in 2014 I was able to start getting some dubbing finally done - but for a lot of people involved, nearly 90% of whom have jobs and families, summer is a busy time of year, so this dragged out until pretty much until January of 2015. Combined also with the fact I had my busiest year ever, working nearly 20 hours a day, every day from August to the end of October - which wouldn't have been able to do if I was still trying to make movies.

That's it up to today, more or less.

Now it's on the the sound effects. For those who haven't really given it much thought, let this sink in a bit before asking how long it will take, I have to add every single footstep every time they're needed, every little creak, fart, whoosh and whatever. It's going to take a bit longer than five minutes, I can tell you that. Why wait until now to do it? I like to have the dialog in place and work the sound effects around it afterwards, doing it the other way around just creates more work since I would have to then readjust all the sound effects a second time had I done them first.

And then we're onto the soundtrack. I have several different artists lined up to hopefully speed up the process. My friend Scott Parsons will create a main theme and some variations, this will set the general tone of the soundtrack which the other artists will follow, having been assigned various scenes to work with.

All in all, it's been a hellishly long process. Not one that I particularly enjoyed but will definitely be glad to see over and done with. And the movie itself is actually a pretty decent, campy, stupid movie.

And, as a side note - the whole movie was nearly lost as the harddrive it was stored on nearly crashed on me. Luckily I was able to back it up and everything's safe and still slowly moving forwards.

When will it be done? When it's fucking done - that's all I can say anymore. It's a question I'm tired of, although I understand the asking, I just don't know. Hopefully soon and definitely this year.