Special Effects & Props – Page 2

Mask & costume maker Magpiebones brings her incredible werewolf to life

She calls herself a mask and costume maker, but with all due respect to her astonishing mastery of craft, I’m going to refer to Briana Barber (aka Magpiebones) as a supernatural shapeshifter, because her latest personal project has transformed her into an utterly believable werewolf.

This werewolf costume, created over several years as a lycanthropic labour of love, features several types of synthetic fur, including NFT fur on the tail and hackles, detailed paint work, a moving jaw, hidden-heel digitigrade feet, a wire and foam-core tail, and a bespoke bodysuit to give the correct monstrous shape.

Check out some selected images from her recent photoshoot below. You can also see more of her astounding work on DeviantArt and Instagram. If you’d like her to work her magic and turn you into a mythical creature, be prepared to pounce when she re-opens for commissions in January.

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Angela Quinton Nov. 17th 2018

Rick Baker’s daughters Rebecca and Veronica become a new American Werewolf & her victim for Halloween

Every Halloween, monster maker / creature effects legend Rick Baker transforms his entire family with a themed range of makeup that he spends days preparing. In 2015 he and his two daughters became variations of the Joker, in 2016 he re-created the doctor, nurse, and patient from the Twilight Zone episode “Eye of the Beholder”, and last year he turned his daughters into characters from The Strain.

This year, with the help of his daughters, Baker revisited the work that won him the first Academy Award for Best Makeup in 1981 – a little film called “An American Werewolf in London”.

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Here’s his daughter Veronica as Jack (Jackie?) “Meatloaf” Goodman, who went to work today like all good and industrious werewolf murder victims do:

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A post shared by Rick Baker (@therickbaker)

And here’s his daughter Rebecca as David (Danielle?) Kessler. She stayed home from work today, but I hope she went to the mall (or Piccadilly Circus) so people can get a look at this incredible work:

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Now we know why Baker was revisiting some of his “American Werewolf” work last week!

Angela Quinton Oct. 31st 2018

Rick Baker shows off “American Werewolf” head sculpts & behinds the scenes info

Monster maker extraordinaire Rick Baker has been posting videos of his award-winning “An American Werewolf in London” werewolf sculpts on Instagram. The first is a looped zoom on fully-transformed David Kessler’s face, showing off the muzzle and right eye. This head was used on-screen, and after almost 40 years the “foam latex has turned to graham cracker”, but it still looks amazing.

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The second is a longer video in which Rick explains why “Change-o Head #2”, used during David’s first transformation scene, was intentionally sculpted with an asymmetrical face. This is a more recent cast from the original mold. Just think about that – this guy has the ability and desire to just make a new one of these whenever he wants.

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A post shared by Rick Baker (@therickbaker)

It’s so cool to see the skill and forethought that makes Rick a legend today was already in effect when Jimmy Carter was president.

Angela Quinton Oct. 24th 2018

Sorry, football fans! That scary werewolf suit is not a new team mascot

Everyone else in the world seems to be hyped about the World Cup, but for the past four days, the only football chatter I saw online was about was the new would-be mascot for Lobos BUAP, a team in Mexico’s Liga MX.

Photos and videos of this absolute lad started circulating on Twitter earlier this week. Without researching its provenance – I don’t know Spanish and I just assumed it was a cool Underworld Lycan / Dog Soldiers mashup costume someone wore to a convention – I tweeted a dumb quip and moved on. Then word started spreading on Twitter and in the media that this was actually a controversial new mascot for Lobas BUAP, whose previous mascot designs had been a bit more conventional.

I love this bit of editorializing from La Verdad [translated from Spanish]:

The primary objective of having a mascot is to capture the affinity of the little ones and to be able to interact with the fans in the stadiums, but the new Lobos BUAP team mascot has generated controversy due to its fear-giving aspect, having a height of almost two meters.

I can only speak for myself, but seeing a two-meter-tall werewolf roaming the crowd at a stadium when I was a little one would have made me a football fanatic for life.

News sources couldn’t pin down whether this horror-centric new design was a gimmick or a longer-term change established for the duration of Torneo Apertura 2018. That’s because the whole “new mascot” story was a misunderstanding that got blown out of proportion as football and pop culture sites repeated it. According to an article posted to Mileno today [translated from Spanish]:

The supposed werewolf mascot that went viral in social networks is nothing more than a project separate from the professional team, since its developers were only visiting the University Stadium.

The suit is actually a project by brothers Erick and Ivan Olarte, pictured above with their family. The latter is an architect who graduated from UAP, and he and his brother created the suit in their spare time for the sake of the challenge. The Olarte brothers have worn “Licaon” – as the suit is called – to a variety of events in the past few years, and while the media attention of the past week has been a wild experience, they are already setting their sites on their next project.

Disappointed? I am too, a little, but I also personally find “two brothers made a radical animatronic werewolf suit in their garage” a more exciting story than “football team tries to psych out its competitors by terrorizing fans”.

Angela Quinton Jul. 13th 2018

The soon-to-be-retired Werewolf Attack Puppet from VFX Creates

While at the West Coast Haunters convention last month we met Doug Schaefer, artist and one of the monster-makers at VFX Creates. I bought a Slaughtered Lamb sticker from him and we got to see a frenetic and very enjoyable demo of the wearable attack zombie puppet that VFX Creates makes.

They also make a werewolf attack puppet! Doug said they’re planning to replace it with a new model, and it looks like the single one they have left in stock is over 40% off. Edit: looks like someone snapped it up!

Here are the details:

The puppet comes with a harness and is light weight (around 12 lbs.) so it can be worn comfortably for long periods of time. The harness is disguised by a 2X black hoodie and a fake arm allows you to control the puppet while giving the illusion that your arm has been pinned to your chest by the hungry werewolf.

It was a pleasure to meet Doug and see him perform with “Sally”. I look forward to seeing the new werewolf he and VFX create.

Angela Quinton Jun. 19th 2017

More werewolf creature effects from Rick Baker, this time in a family photo

Fresh off last week’s Star Wars werewolf / Shistavanen reprise, Rick Baker is back at it with the werewolf creature effects. Yesterday he posted this 2008 photo of himself as a werewolf, about to get strung up by the ladies he’s menacing (his wife and daughters). This scene was remarkable enough that it served as their family Christmas card that year, but let’s be honest – they’re probably doing stuff like this every weekend.

Baker didn’t share any details about the werewolf makeup’s provenance, but it has a very (Beauty and the) “Beast”-ly design that looks great in this fairy tale tableau. I also see a resemblance to the Wolfman design that would go on to win he and Dave Elsey the Academy Award for Best Makeup three years later.

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It makes me inordinately happy that Rick Baker knows #WerewolfWednesday is a thing.

Angela Quinton Jun. 1st 2017

Rick Baker resurrects the amazing werewolf mask he “let George use” in Star Wars

The Star Wars werewolf connection hinges entirely on special effects legend Rick Baker deciding to use some of his off-the-shelf creature masks during re-shoots of the Episode IV cantina scene in 1977. Among those masks was a werewolf Baker had created on his own in 1973. As with seemingly everyone else in that cantina, the werewolf extra gained an official name – Lak Sivrak – and an elaborate backstory full of intrigue, romance, tragedy, sacrifice, most of which was told through Star Wars comic books.

Then in 2012, Disney consigned everything about the character except his name and species to Legends, the phantom zone for all retroactively non-canonical Star Wars artifacts. And that was it for poor Lak until earlier this week, when Baker set about re-casting a new mask from that original 1973 mold.

He posted four photos of his work – which I’ve embedded below – on his Instagram feed. The quality of his design and work is astonishing, and consider that he did all of this in three days.

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The hashtags and reminiscences in Baker’s comments make this seem like an observance of the film’s release anniversary – Star Wars hit theatres 40 years ago today –but it could also be a coincidence. Baker seems like the kind of person who’d resurrect a 43-year-old mold and then and pour, pull, paint, hair and trim a new mask on a lark – simply because he loves doing this sort of thing (and happens to be really, really, really fucking good at it).

Angela Quinton May. 25th 2017

May is the month of werewolf cakes! Check out this prize-winning “American Werewolf in London” creation

Werewolf News reader Jacob Bellingham shared a photo he took (and a link to a Dread Central article about) this prize-winning An American Werewolf In London-themed cake. Created by Karen Mitchell of Sugarlicious Cakes by Karen, it won a silver medal in the Decorative Exhibit category of the 2017 Cake International competition in London in April.

The level of detail on this thing is incredible, from the bloodwork to the details on the box. Check out the Sugarlicious photo gallery for more, including some close-ups.

Jacob’s family runs Little Brown Fairy Cake, who took home a Bronze in the same competition with the excellent Penguin cake pictured below. Despite looking like one of the least-tasty DC villains, it’s all edible, even the monocle. I told Jacob this in confidence but I think I’m a big enough person to admit it to the world, regardless of what it might do to my werewolf fan credibility: the David Kessler cake is impressive, but I kind of prefer the Penguin cake. What can I say? I like the prospect of eating Danny DeVito’s head, and of course, I didn’t have to travel to London to see (or eat) the best werewolf cake ever – it was right here in my kitchen in 2012.

Angela Quinton May. 11th 2017

Monster Legacy explains why werewolf Lupin looks like that in “Prisoner of Azkaban”

I tend to reserve “catchin’ up on my sites” for the end of the day, but any time I spot a new Monster Legacy post – even when it’s not about werewolf creature effects – it immediately gets my full attention. This one is about a werewolf, though: Hogwarts professor and Harry Potter fan favourite Remus Lupin.

Lupin’s werewolf form in the film adaptation of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban was controversial. Scrawny, sparsely-furred and almost rat-like, his transformed state in the film was neither what author J.K. Rowling described in the book (essentially a big wolf with some human traits) nor what most werewolf fans wanted to see (a shaggy, well-built human-wolf hybrid). This was a deliberate decision on the part of creature designer Wayne Barlowe, who channelled Rowling’s concept of “lycanthropy as sickness” into

a gangly, emaciated creature with distorted proportions… a hunched back, long and thin limbs, and a sickly, almost skeletal head.

The filmmakers were so committed to the concept that they built werewolf suits with stilts and limb extensions to use on set – practical effects that turned out to be anything but. Almost all of the clumsy suit shots were later replaced with CG effects that, while easier to work with, pushed the already-unconventional werewolf Lupin right down into the uncanny valley. A shame – I personally like the look of the practical suits, which seem to have more werewolf and less Gollum in the design.

Take a look at the full post on Monster Legacy for concept images, set photos, conceptual and practical details (including the reason why CG werewolf Lupin was put through an exercise regimen), and a reminder that Rowling wrote perhaps the most uninspiring depiction of a werewolf transformation ever.

Angela Quinton Mar. 15th 2017

This weekend, “Grimm” fans in PDX can buy all of the show’s creature props

Portland-area fans of NBC’s Grimm – which airs its final episodes this month – will want to gas up their cars, pack a lunch and gather up some rainy day cash. According to Portland Monthly, “a 40,000-square-foot warehouse stuffed with more than 120 episodes’ worth of Grimm props and paraphernalia will open its doors to the public” this weekend.

The announcement, which doesn’t actually mention the name of the locally filmed show (but c’mon, what else could it be?), promises “vintage furniture, antique furniture, mid-century modern furniture, clothes, costumes, household goods (new and vintage), doors, architectural items, signs, rugs, industrial lighting, lamps, books, smalls, primitives, collectibles, Christmas stuff (vintage and new), home furnishings, building materials, props, Halloween stuff, bicycles, hardware, kitchenware, chairs, apothecary, artwork, banners, restaurant ware, office supplies, costumes, tools, pallet shelving, retail store display stuff, frames, home decor, dining tables, benches, special effects items, linen, drapes, sports equipment, camping stuff, advertising, and so much more…”

The EstateSales.net listing has dozens of photos of the items that will be available. Much of it seems to be clothing and antiques, but I bet discerning fans will find plenty of props related to the show’s menagerie of werewolves, were-foxes, were-beavers, were-vultures and other Wesen.

Conspicuously absent from the listing is an address for the event. That will be announced tomorrow night:

The address for this sale in Portland, OR 97210 will be available after 7:00 PM on Friday, March 10th, 2017.

The sale will run from 9 to 5 on Saturday the 11th and Sunday the 12th, and 10 to 4 on Monday the 13th. Due to warehouse safety concerns (and possible rogue hexenbiest on the premises), no children under the age of 10 will be admitted.

Thanks to Violette B for the link.

Angela Quinton Mar. 9th 2017