Cave Monster

I've been working on a cave monster puppet for a short project I'll be shooting next week so I thought I'd post my progress. This charming guy is still in the works but he's almost ready for his close-up.

First, I sculpted him in a slow air drying modeling clay. I'm keeping it up in my apartment because it reminds me of one of Catherine O'Hara's sculptures in Beetlejuice.



Then I cast him in latex, painted him, and added some teeth and eye accessories. You can see part of the cave texture I've been working on behind the latex puppet. It's a giant nest of chicken wire, paper maché, plaster and dribbling, watery paint riddles.







I'll be working on some details next and then I hope to get some thick oozy cave monster goo on him for my shoot. More to come...

Death Becomes Her Mansion

Speaking of mansions... here are some images of a model that was used for one of the Death Becomes Her mansions from an old Cinefex.

The Art of the Haunted Mansion

I just ordered a copy of the Art of the Haunted Mansion, which has some great concept art, wardrobe, makeup and visual effects images from the bomber movie. (Which, in its defense, had some great visuals... and the ride had so much potential...)

Only a handfull of these books were ever printed and distributed, I think, to those affiliated with the project. So I thought I'd post some of my favorite images from the book. My scanner is pretty primitive and small and a lot of these images are quite big (the book is large) so don't make any composition judgments... Overall, I love the tone of these pictures. I just wish they carried through the entire movie. There are plenty more images that I'd like to post some day, including the great changing portraits that were redesigned just for the movie. In Jason Surrell's text, he notes that Rob Minkoff keyed "haunted elegance" to describe the look of the film: "a prase that perfectly captured the unique blend of Gothic horror, romance, fantasy and refinement that he was seeking... The result [of the reimagined house] was an architectural marvel and a masterpiece of interior design, the central character in Rob Minkoff's 'haunted fairy tale.'"




I love the ghostly detail of the body in the lake in the bottom of the black and white illustration.



This image is much larger, but I was mostly interested in the twisting Underwold that warps from a horizontal plane in the foreground to a vertical plane in the background.





Just a couple great '80's fantasy movie-ish' practical makeup corpse faces





Notice the hidden ghost faces in the shadows