Jean Claude the gumming zombie!

The first teaser trailer is out. With a mere 2 days of shooting under our belts what did you expect? Lighten up, it's a teaser.

If you;re interested, you can learn more here or here. Of course, I'll be sharing some nuggets here as well. Like these pictures.


The sculpture of jean claude's makeup, an elderly man who is unknowingly zombified while enjoying his day. A quick sculpture done in monster makers clay. Sadly, it doesn't seem they will be making it anymore. I've grown to love it, soft when you want it soft, hard when you need it hard. I wish I would have grabbed more.

Day two of shooting. Jean claude is ready for his scenes.


Nummy nummy. I monitor the monitor as our pathetic French zombie is fed people food by mother.


Here's a few shots of some of the real behind the scenes stuff that went into making jc come alive...or would that be come undead?

A freshly demolded casting of jc's makeup. Cast in monster makers foam, with some GM flow enhancer added in to help out. The foam's somewhere in the 6 1/2-7 volume in a small sunbeam bowl, so very soft. Most of it is under 1/4" thick, but the jowls, chin, nose, and front of the neck is thicker, at the thickest it's about 1/2" A couple of drops of blue pigment added. It's a comedy, he's a zombie. Deal with it.

The mold for the makeup. Originally I had intended to run a cowl for him as well. I didn't set out to do a silicone mold for this, it just happened that I had to. The mold itself is brushed on dragon skin from smooth-on and is fairly thin. The support shell is ultracal 30. I ran into a few undercuts that I hadn't corrected due to the initial cowl idea...time demanded I get it done and run. Running the foam latex in the silicone hasn't proven to be too difficult. Baking in an old holding oven that requires constant attention to prevent the temperature running away is a bit of a pain. Every 10-15 minutes I have to manually adjust the temperature, for about 6 1/2 hours. No steaming yet, and the oven temperature is being held at about 150 degrees. The only other thing I have to be careful about is watching the edges, the silicone still wants to give just a little bit, so pushing that lifecast in well is critical for good blending edges.

I was a bit nervous about the foam, so the silicone could have ran some gelatin appliances if needed with ease. I'd also be willing to bet I could still get a nice silicone appliance out of this mold. I've run some compatibility tests with dragon skin and after the doom and gloom and dire warnings people have given me about platinum silicone and sulfur I was worried, but experimentation shows it to be very possible with a little cleaning before hand.

jc's "teeth." Don Bumgarner whipped them up for me quickly as he's my go-to for anything dental. I stained them a little bit, but would have liked to do them much darker.

I've got some props to build, and other things to work on. As I get the OK I'll be sure to post more on this.

James and the Giant Peach.

About a year ago I had made 3 masks of the farmers from The Fantastic Mr. Fox for Signstage on tour. This year the play will be James and the Giant Peach and I got an email asking for more masks. Excellent. They wanted 6 masks initially, the rhino was added along the way along with a giant "spanking hand." One of the aunts will chase James with the giant hand, about 4 times the size of a normal hand during the play.

Shown here are some of the things that went into making the heads and working out the final designs.

The maquettes of the grasshopper, spider, and worm. Thrown together quickly to show where I was headed with the sketches I had done. They've got some lines carved in that approximated what I saw as the pattern pieces for the foam masks.

The shark and rhino.

The cloudmen. You can click on any of the above for a larger view.

The final masks were created in sheet foam. RIT dye was used to color the foam and some airbrushing of details. Hard hat suspensions were used and will allow adjustment for the actors. You can view them in the sample puppet gallery on my website.

Once again the job was a fun time, and a welcomed change from the usual things I get involved with. No zombies. No extremely dangerous chemicals. Just a bit of contact cement fumes and scalding water with the dye.

Sorry there aren't any horror stories of things gone wrong. The worst thing that I ran into on this was sticking a T pin into my knuckle, painful at first, but it faded quickly.

Been a while

So to catch up...Merry Christmas, happy new year and all that.

Busy working on some foam heads for a play. Similar to the last batch, actually, for the same people. It's been almost a year now since I made any. Now that I think about it, those were the reason I started this blog, specifically to thank the few people and blogs who pointed me in the right direction. Well, the thanks still hold up. I wish I had gotten a little more practice at this kind of thing over the past year, but I haven't. In fact, besides those and the little bit of foam work I did for Near West recently I haven't touched any sheet foam this year.

I'm not sure what I can or can't say right now, so I won't say much. There are 7 characters in progress, just under a week until they're needed to leave on the tour. Cutting it close again, not that there's anything really new about that. I'll have some pictures of them when they're all done and I get an OK to post them.

Beyond these heads lurks some zombie work. Due to a few things here and there it will be a big rush to turn a young man old and then to zombify him through a few phases for a short film. I'll get yet another tiny part in this as well, and I can say I'm not a homeless person. Always good to stay away from typecasting.

More in the near future, and I hope to keep this blog updated a bit more frequently.