If i build it will they come? Episode Four

Aside from creature heads & prosthetics I've never made a full body suit for someone to wear & do quite a lot of acting in. If I was doing this for a film or client with a budget then the chances are they would already have someone to go inside the thing - and about 5 or more other people working on it including sculptors, fabricators, mould makers, technicians, painters etc etc. I have none of these luxuries at my disposal. In the "real" world we would have a bodycast of the person wearing the thing. That way you can be pretty certain that it will fit the person properly.

As of yet theres no one to go in it so I was given a mannequin to work on. Not ideal. Have you ever really properly looked at a mannequin? They're weird. It would provide the basic shape to get started.

Enter Paul Lewis - Prop Maker & general worrier. Paul was brought onboard by Joey & Robin to help me out with the technical side of things. He has experience.......but not alot. Not to worry though. I met up with Paul one night to discuss possibilities of how this thing would actually work. Let's just say I left the meeting slightly more nervous than I had been before it.

Basically in the real world special fx people have a kind of unwritten rule/motto of "Thats impossible!! Lets get on it & do it!". Paul's motto would be along the lines of "Thats impossible! I'm going home". Not really what we look for but hey!...fuck it, he can watch & hopefully learn & get some confidence sorted.

Anyway I digress. It was decided that I would handle the art side of stuff & Paul would chip in & help with moulding & casting & all the fiddly bits that I'd need a hand with. On top of this he also had a workspace for us to do all the smelly chemically things in & access to mannequins. I would have never have guessed that asking for an average sized male mannequin would lead to hours of discussion between Joey, Robin & Paul as they debated the finer points of "what is average?". Believe me when I say that these guys have a knack for taking the simplest thing & turning it into an epic of biblical proportions. (A bit like my blogs really.......) Most of it pointless, as was the case this time as it turned out that he only had two to choose from & we couldnt have them yet anyway. Plus there was nowhere to do it all. I presented my plan that went a bit like this - "RIGHT!! I'll go home & sculpt the helmet. By the time I've done that you'll have had time to get all the materials for moulding it & Pauls workspace will be available to mould it & cast one out. Also by then we'll have a mannequin to work on & I can sculpt the body at Pauls - cos theres no way I'm going to do a life sized clay sculpture of an armoured warrior in my bedroom, it'd fuck my room right up & we'd never get it out of the house! - using the helmet as a scale reference ok?" Good. Let it begin.

I went to town on the helmet sculpt. I got nicely carried away with detail & complexity as Joey had asked for it to be full of detail. The basic shape of it was the same as the maquette I had done but it was far more complex looking with lots of little vents & things. It does look really cool but I wasnt really sure about it as there was something about the simplicity of the maquette that I thought made it better. This new helmet was nifty looking but deviated a little too much from the overall design. As a piece on it's own it was fine but when put with the rest of the armour it would look odd. It took me about 3 days to sculpt & I could have probably spent another day or so making it really flash & tighter but there was only a small window of moulding time so I had to do it now or risk waiting around for a week or so. Joey & Robin loved it though so I prepared it for moulding & took it over to Pauls workspace.

I'll keep it simple. We had decided to do a one piece silicone mould with a fibreglass jacket. Get that? Simply put, silicone was to be poured over the sculpture which when dry would provide us with a flexible mould to cast out several helmets with "ease". It is given a fibreglass "jacket" to keep the silicone in shape. Without it you'd just have a flappy bit of rubber. When your casting material has been put in the mould & is set you remove the jacket which then allows you to get the helmet out of the flexible silicone. Thats pretty much it. Well it's not but theres no way I'm going to sit here for the rest of my life talking about mould making. All I will say is that it's usually a good idea to have enough materials to do the job. I had asked Robin the Producer if he had got hold of everything we needed. "Yep it's all at Paul's". "Everything?". "Errrrrrrrrr........yep I think so.....errrrrrr yeah everything's there". Hmmm - he didn't sound too sure but I'd gone through it with him enough times now for him to know what I needed. Still I couldnt stop myself from wondering - was everything I needed really there waiting for me? Was it fuck. And on top of that music for the day was to be provided by the local radio station.

Long story short - there was nowhere near enough silicone to do the job. Unfortunatly this was only made clear to me once i had already used the silicone we had & asked for the new tub. Which didnt exsist. We did the best we could & ended up with something vaguely resembling a mould. But not the masterwork of moulding prowess I had envisioned. Not that it would ever have been that anyway - mould making is a dark art that people spend their lives perfecting & experimenting with to produce moulds that are art in their own right. For the rest of us & me especially, it's a battle with patience & frustration that unfortunatly we have to be good at. Oh well, not to worry. The God's were smiling on us later on in the day though & we managed to get a couple of casts out. Cool - a cool looking sci-fi helmet to wear......if only it didnt rip your ears off when you tried to take it off again! I had miscalculated the size by a fraction of a milimetre. Just enough to cause traumatic ear injury if not handled in the special way that we had figured out in a race against mild suffocation & inhalation of the noxious fumes of the still fresh helmet. It could be sorted out though, it would just require some tweaking that Paul was more than happy to do. Once again Joey & Robin were pleased so the day had turned out well in a sore ears kind of way. Ok, so now I could start thinking about the body.

Enter the quadroplegic mannequin. "It's got no arms or legs" i observed rather obviously. And he looked a wee bit small to me - regardless of the absense of limbs. I expressed concern over the smallness of the mannequin but Joey was certain that this was the correct size for his armour. Paul's full bodied mannequin was still unavailable for now so this would have to do. Fine, i'd just sculpt the torso & groin armour. It was then that Paul told me i couldnt use the workspace for reasons long forgotten so I had to take it home. Trouble is I probably want this thing made more than they do so I quickly gave into the idea of turning my bedroom into a f**king pottery of sorts. F**kers.

Next time:

• I keep forgetting that there's a mannequin in my room & shit myself everytime I go in there.

Take it easy, Michael