Category: Special Effects & Props

When I heard that last Wednesday’s episode of Face Off was the conclusion of a two-episode competition involving vampires and werewolves, I had to take a look. What I saw puzzled me: alien werewolves. In “Cry Wolf”, the four remaining competitors were tasked with creating werewolves displaying “newly-evolved feature specifically designed to take their vampire rivals down”. They did something very similar a year ago. Is it a rule that every challenge on this show has to be hampered by the requirement that the creature be from another world? (more…)

“Autumn Moon” is an upcoming werewolf film written and directed by Randy Fabert, who wants it to be “the most violent werewolf movie ever made.” That’s a goal I can respect, especially when the werewolf committing the violence looks so horrifically great. It was built by Fabert’s own shop, Fabert Makeup EFX Studio, and it’s exactly the kind of practical monster I want to see on the screen. (more…)

2012 short film Bad Moon Rising combines practical effects and smart directing in a manner calculated to stimulate the part of the brain labelled “werewolves killing motherfuckers”. Enjoy all seven minutes of it here.

Director Scott Hamilton and crew put it together as a promo for a feature length film about a bank full of hostages that turn out to be werewolves. Its showcase is a lengthy werewolf transformation that’s achieved solely through traditional effects, and which I thought was very well-executed. BMR is a “modified version of the feature film’s opening sequence [that] was shot in order to act as a guide to the overall feel of the film”. All right, Hamilton, my appetite has been sufficiently whetted – please tell me where I can see (or help fund) the feature!

For more information, including an extensive gallery of mid-transformation photos like those below, visit BMR‘s web site.

The Moose Jaw Times Herald has a nice little chat with Leo Fafard, the Saskatchewan actor playing the eponymous werewolf lawman in WolfCop. Most of the press about the film so far has been about its victory in the CineCoup competition, but now that filming’s actually underway, we get to hear about the rigours of shooting (zero sleep and sub-zero temperatures) and Fafard’s approach to playing Lou Garou.

He said Lou Garou and the post-transformation WolfCop are completely separate from each other, even though they inhabit the same body.

“One’s way more animalistic, not only in his movements but in his attitude,” Fafard said. “The other one’s, I mean, he’s got complexities of his own. He’s a drunk but he’s a cop … he’s a bit of a lost soul.”

Read the rest of the interview here, or for more updates on WolfCop’s progress, check out @WOLFCOPTheMovie on Twitter or the production blog on Tumblr. Stay warm, WolfCop crew!

Once again, the folks at Tom Spina Designs have come into possession of a discarded husk from a moulting werewolf (or possibly a suit from Underworld: Rise of the Lycans), and through an alchemical process called “having great skills”, TSD artist Patrick Louie has reconstituted the disembodied head and ragged torso into a wicked full-body display. Here’s a video of the process, which included the creation of new hands, lower legs and feet to match the rest of the suit, as well as a themed display base.

And here, in greater detail, are some of the photos from that video, cribbed from the Tom Spina Designs Facebook page (which I’m sure you’re already following, because what are you, nuts?). Click for larger versions.

Damn, the detail on those hands and feet! Wonderful work, Pat! To see the finished result, visit the Custom Mannequins – Themed Movie Costume Displays section of the TSD site – as of this post, it’s the first entry.

Face Off is a Syfy series that pits prosthetic makeup artists against each other in our society’s favourite form of gladiatorial combat: reality television. Here in Canada, Face Off runs on the Space channel, a channel I don’t have because it doesn’t air any of TV’s three reasons for existing (Breaking Bad, Community, hockey). But after several people on Twitter told me that Tuesday the 26th’s Face Off would be about werewolves, I made a note to dig around after the episode aired to see if I missed anything good.

On this episode, called “Howl at the Moon”, the teams (contestants? combatants? victims?) were told to create full-body werewolf suits. That task alone would be hard enough without any difficulty modifiers, given the time constraints in place, but this being reality TV, of course there was a twist: the werewolves couldn’t be from Earth, but instead had to be from any other planet in our solar system that has a moon. (The space nerd in me is delighted at the fact that four of those planets don’t even have solid surfaces on which werewolves could stand.) Here’s the promo video:

And here, after what looks like the requisite out-of-context hissy fits and fabricated melodrama, are the results:

None of them are what I would call “classic werewolves”, but then, that wasn’t the point, was it? To me, all four are identifiable as werewolves and aliens, and I think they look terrific, especially considering the conditions under which they were designed and built.

Here’s the episode recap on Syfy’s “Face Off” site (complete with a streaming version of the episode for those of you in the United States), and here, courtesy of Cinema Makeup School‘s Twitter and Instagram feeds, are some photos of the winning design by @waynesworldfx and @krisfxkobzina. Good work, guys!

This looked like an interesting episode, but I don’t think I’ll be paying the extra $10 / month it’ll cost to get Space added to my cable package. Nevertheless, it’s great to see werewolves and prosthetics makeup artists getting this kind of exposure.

Did you see the episode? What did you think?