Monday, March 24, 2014

Taking a break: Jaynestown Statue - Firefly

Still taking a little break on the blog since I am a little overwhelmed elsewhere. In my absence, here is some stuff I have never shared from my days in the Makeup FX industry! Today... today I have something SHINY for you...

You remember that one time that I mentioned I worked on Firefly? Well here are some images to back that up! One of the biggest things that I worked on for the series was the statue of Jayne. I was "in charge" of putting this together, but I had a couple of great guys working with me on this and we all worked really hard on fabricating it. The head was from a life cast of the actor that was then modified by one of the sculptors... and the hands you ask? Why those lovely meat hooks on the statue or my hands. We needed some fists for the statue and mine were the right size.

For the record, I thought I had WAY more images of my work on FF, in addition to some process steps (like me when I was getting my hands cast)... and for the life of me I can not find them. I will have to look through my non-digital photo archives to see what I can find. If I find anything else I will be sure to share. Enough talk, here is a statue I worked on back in 2002...

Since the statue was mostly a bunch of pieces cobbled together and then coated in resin is was not a pretty site when completed. A coat of paint was needed to tie it all together and make it presentable for review by production. If you look at the base... that is was the whole thing kinda looked like.

We started with a generic body form that was the appropriate size and then started adding the additional parts... feet, hands, head, etc.

Once it was altogether we dressed the entire thing with clothes provided by wardrobe.

The statue is held up by metal rods in the legs that run trough the shoes and into the base. This caused ALL SORTS of problems on the day of filming when the statue had to be broken off and knocked down... OOPS! There were lots of outtakes of failed attempts. Eventually the metal was cut and the thing went right over. I *THINK* some of the those failed attempts were edited together with the successful break in the episode.

While mostly made out of resin and two part rigid foam it was a bit of a pain to move around.

While the plan all along was to make it look like the statue was made of foam it was decided in house to give it a nice paint job before going off to set...

SO...  one of the temp painters spent a bunch of time painting the Jayne statue up all nice and pretty with detail and texture...

So that is could go to set and be covered with mud by props and set teams. Now you know what the statue really looked like!

For this episode I also designed the burn makeup for the Stitch Hessian character. I went and looked at the design... it was SO bad that I am not ready to share it yet. ALSO... again, I can not find all the images I thought I had including some pics of the final makeup on the actor and some process images. Not sure where they are, but if I ever find them I will be sure to share them here on the blog.

That is all for another exciting Monday on the blog, see you back here on Wednesday! Until then...

For more samples of my work or to contact me regarding my availability head over to my website: www.christopherburdett.com

12 comments:

  1. I am unfamiliar with this show. This much work was put into a prop? And why was it inanimate?

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    1. When I worked in the industry we often more work for less of a return. I will have to post the images, but I spent weeks building a miniature house for a movie. The plan was to burn it down... which they did. In the final edit of the movie they used a still of the house and added digital fire and effects. Weeks resulted in fire and was never used. Sums up a lot of the FX business to me.

      For this particular piece, it was a statue of one of the main characters. It was to appear to be made of mud... a tribute from those believing me a hero.

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    2. YOU MUST WATCH FIREFLY!!!

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    3. Ugh Ryan! You just made millions of Browncoats scream! ;) LOL

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  2. PS, I just spent three minutes of my life verifying i wasn't a robot so that I could satisfy my need to make this post.

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    1. I appreciate it. I have changed the settings again. I was having a lot of issues with spam. If the problem returns... so will the road blocks.

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  3. Thanks so much for sharing this. It's wonderful.
    Was the weird bamboo forest hand-created or was it already there for some other reason?

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    1. You are very welcome! Glad to hear that you are enjoying this post. The bamboo "forest" was created for the episode.

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  4. What other props or set pieces did you make for Firefly?

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    1. We were a special makeup FX house, so all those dead bodies and the "Reaver" makeup was us... the frozen body is space that hits the outside of the ship was ours. We did a bunch of wound makeups and such. I designed the burned makeup in the Jaynestown episode. We were going to design and build the suit for the bounty hunter, but wardrobe ended up doing it. We were going to have done a bunch more stuff... but there was that issue of only being 13 episodes...

      We were working on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, and Firefly all at the same time, so there was A LOT going on in the shop and our hands were on and in everything for all the shows. The statue of Jayne was the biggest single thing that I was in charge of for FF that I can point to and people will remember... and my hands were used for the statue, so I am directly connected to it.

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  5. So when Mal tells Jayne that "every man ever got a statue made of him was one kind of sumbitch or another." do you look at your hands and proudly think "those are this sumbitch's hands"?

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    1. Sadly no. It was more then a few years after working on the show before I was ever able to even watch it. The problem of working on TV and movies for me was that I never had time to watch what I worked on. Now that I am in games... I never have time to play what I worked on. By the time I finally had the chance to see Firefly I was a little separated from my work and could enjoy it for what it was.

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