This is one of those shoots that just sort of came out of wanting to make a messed up looking freaking prosthetic - something that ignores human facial anatomy. The design isn't original, I've seen different instances of it even after I sculpted my ages ago.

I just knew I wanted to make it a little more messy and organic looking - the idea of a series of mouths, or rows of teeth, while freaky looking, isn't exactly disturbing looking - at least not to me - because it's so surreal looking. So I tried making it look a little more fleshy and gross and I'm totally happy with the results.





Originally the shoot was to be done with another friend of mine, who likes the weirder/darker stuff, in another province in a really old, amazing looking cemetery - but that didn't happen for a couple reasons. I decided I need to get this shoot done and was looking into contacting some of my regular folks when a friend of the original model contacted me and we arranged it all right away and within a week had the shoot done.





This is actually the fastest makeup/photo shoot I've ever done. The makeup took six minutes to apply. I did make the piece all up beforehand - but I always do - but this one, because it requires next to no blending, was literally just slapped on, a little fiddling with the edges to get them to lay down and a quick blending with the makeup along the edges and six minutes later were were done. I also was doing them makeup out of the back of a car in a church parking lot beside a major roadway. I never took the time to notice if anyone was watching us.




And there you go. I will be selling these, but only on Etsy I think, or at least only when I have one made, I'm not going to offer them them up otherwise. It's a thick piece, so it takes a lot of foam and there's a buttload of the resin teeth that have to be made, so this one will be a little pricier than normal, I'm thinking $70.

I came up with the idea for making wall mounted beast heads years ago, of course I never got around to it and since then I've seen several others making them - that's always annoying. However, I finally got around to it, it was mostly the finer details of reproducing them consistently that stopped me from doing it right away.

The biggest stumbling block for me ended up being two relatively simple things, the plaque itself and the eyes.The biggest problem was sourcing locally and then sourcing within Canada online. Neither really panned out in a way I felt would work for me without driving the cost of the final piece up. Then I suddenly happened upon some small plaques that were very inexpensive and it went from there.

As for the eyes, I didn't want to paint them, so I wanted something I could just plop into place. I found some glass black glass beads that would give the troll that soulless look. The tricky part was designing all this to be done with just a single mould with a minimum amount of work involved to reproduce the piece.

So I took one of the stones, glued a wooden stick to it. Because that how you make eyeballs, right?


I made a mould of that and created to silicone copies.


 So I could sculpt around them to create a socket and pull them out without distressing the sculpture.


It worked perfectly. It took less than a day for the sculpt. I pretty much just made it up as I was going. I knew I wanted a fat little weird troll-like head and that was it.


I was happy with the result, and that it didn't take me days of agonizing over details to get it to turn out. From there I made a stone mould, with a flat back to it, drilled a hole in that and the mould was done in less than a day as well.

I thought the best and least expensive material would be latex filled with expanding foam, I'm used to it and I had all these supplies onhand already, so that was a pretty easy choice.


And there you have it. I had minimal cleanup around the edges, no other post-mould adjusting, cleaning or detailing to do, I just had to paint it, glue in the eyes and stain the plaque and mount the sucker. It was a lot more work than I'm making it sound, but it's fairly easy work overall, just takes a couple hours to produce one of these - unless I do them in bulk.

So yes, I am selling these. At the time of posting this I've just made the first prototype one, I'll be running off a couple more and doing a run of 5 for now and seeing how well they sell. Now that I've done the whole process and know my costs, I came up with a price of $40 for each one. Anyone interested can contact me, themonkeyrodeo@gmail.com.

So, after all that, what is a Pygmy Blood Troll? Here's some information on this ugly little critter.

The origins of this vile species is rather complicated. While most all creatures of Demonic origins are peaceful, docile beings, Pygmy Blood Trolls are quite the opposite.

It begins with the Blood Parasite, a leech-like worm that is responsible for most modern Vampire myths. They infect a living host, leaving them mostly dead in all appearances, using their bodies to then feed on blood from living victims. Normally this process simply works with the parasite taking over the internal functions of both Demons and Humans, Humans being much more susceptible because of their weaker physiology.

Demons are more resistant to the Blood Parasite on average, 27% of all Demonic species are completely immune to them. Trolls specifically are immune to Blood Parasite, however one species, Earth Trolls – who can hibernate deep in the earth for hundreds of years – actually absorb the Blood Parasite.

In most cases the parasite is simply consumed internally with no ill effect, however in pregnant Earth Trolls, the fetus is bonded with the parasite, altering its entire biological structure. One Pygmy Blood Troll (called as such since they never grow over a foot tall and most trolls range from seven feet to several hundred feet tall) is a somewhat hazardous nuisance, several are a much different matter. Pygmy Blood Trolls procreate much like modern day rabbits, within months there can be as many as one thousand.

Pygmy Blood Trolls usually feed on smaller animals, but have, on occasion, attacked larger creatures in packs. They are incredibly dangerous in high numbers since their Trolls physiology makes them strong for their size, and very tough to kill. The Blood Parasite physiology makes them very fast healers and immune to pain – it’s is believe the only true method of killing a Pygmy Blood Troll is to decapitate it and burn the body immediately. They will also, like their parentage, burrow deep into the earth where they can hibernate for hundreds of years and are near impossible to find in this state – this makes controlling Pygmy Blood Troll outbreaks a very difficult task and on that must be handled immediately before they either procreate or enter hibernation.

Day Nine has come and gone - and it went really, really well. I estimated about 5 hours, plus some time to shoot some other cutaways that would allow one actor to be over and done with and another to not have to return until the very last shoot. We ended up being done 2 hours early and even after the additional shots, and doing a makeup job, still came in under an hour short of what I'd expected. I was pretty exhausted afterwards, which I usually am, but I still managed to get the scenes edited shortly after it was all done.

I've always meant to edit right after filming while it's still fresh in my mind, and for once actually did so after the last shoot - which I'm lucky happened since some shots were no good and had to be redone - so I was able to get the actor back in time before he shaved and threw out his costume. Good timing and it reminded me I should be a little more pro-active in getting this done.

I don't want to end up in the end with missing footage and a pile of work I just don't have the energy to wade through/ I started organizing all the footage by scenes tonight and I'm going to attempt to get some major editing done - there's only maybe half of what's shot so far that hasn't been edited, so it's not too bad just yet.

So here was our cast for the day, we had just enough zombie heads on sticks to go around for the picture.

I've been fortunate up until this shoot to have had nothing but smaller shoots with only a couple actors (aside from the opening stuff) and today was our first return to that and the next few shoots are more or less the same. Hoping to get it all scheduled so we're done early to mid-September, we'll see how that all goes.
 




The biggest snag we had was one of the actors, John MacDonald, had shaved his head - I meant to remind him a week or so before the shoot and didn't and literally 2 days before this shoot he did it. Admittedly a small thing, but just one of those things you can't get around - unless you have the opportunity to have him put on a hat.

Normally, this would feel like it was added and forced, but we had a really good spot to put it in without slowing things down or causing things to feel too out of sorts. Most might not even notice we did it on purpose

We even got to hose someone down with blood today. We had another Zombie Eater appearance that left him a little bloody - possibly causing some continuity issues if you don't believe he'd clean himself up. I might go back and use some other footage or even reshoot a couple closeups later if I don't think I can live with it.

The biggest issue of the day was once we got the prosthetic on for this sequence, I noticed there was a huge tear in the back on the neck, luckily it just meant we could only shoot him from one side so it was unnoticeable and upon examining it when I got home I noticed it was the one place on the inside I hadn't reinforced with latex. So I'm hoping it'll last for the very final shoot so I don't have to make another one.


And today was Ancelene's last day, as well as Mark's. We ended up shooting a little extra into another scene to take care of them.



Overall I think it turned out alright, not perfect - but these things rarely are. When you're shooting something like a sledgehammer to the face it's hard to have it turn out exactly like you thought it would, we got it covered well enough though that with some sound it should work.

And since it was Ancelene's last day there was a couple minor shots I needed to get and redo to fill in some gaps. One didn't quite turn out like I'd planned, but I'm going to see if I can rework it without having to reshoot it again.


And then came the sledgehammer to the face. This was actually in the original script and when it came time for the rewrite I made to to keep it even though it happens completely differently than before - even a different character hitting her.

The worse part of this was keeping the piece on until we were ready to shoot. The hammer, with only part of the handle, was glued to the prosthetic after a quick paint job and finally glue to Ancelene's face, so she had to wander around with only one eye, holding up the sledgehammer so it wouldn't pull the makeup off. And rather than go all the way back to the location, I brought some of the location to us - just a pile of leaves since the ground where we're shooting is littered with them.


And that's it. Another day over and done with, everything pretty much turned out as expected. Got a shoot next weekend as well that should be interesting and I'm seeing if I can shoot a little more to get around some scheduling issues that might cause more delays.

Not a whole lot to go on about, we've been on a sort of break through the month of July it seems. We did have 3 shoots, but they were all small shoots - still important though and I'm glad we got them all done.

First, we finally got the opening sequence done - had to alter it in order to finally get it done, but I was okay with that and added a little extra to the end which I'm hoping helps tie it in better to the rest of the movie. We'll see.

The main difference was shooting with 2 people instead of the 3 I'd planned, so it wasn't too much of a change overall.


Both Alana and Michelle are really great to work with, so it went by pretty fast was at least a fun shoot if not a short one.

And here's the line of the day from that shoot:
And today's shoot was the first with the Zombie Eater character, which was pretty awesome. Here's the only shot you'll be seeing of him though - when I see this I wish my video camera could get awesome depth of field shots like this, but I ain't rich so I'm sticking with what I got for now.


 Here's our small cast from the shoot. All out shoots this month seemed to only have two actors.

The biggest part of the day was finally getting to work with the full head makeup piece and seeing what the Zombie Eater would finally look like onscreen, and I'm pretty happy with it so far. It's one of those things you just make it up and hope for the best. I wasn't going for the most original looking creature every and plus I wanted to keep it simple for a couple of reason - being my first attempt every at something like this. I didn't want to go overboard and I wanted it to seem a little familiar, so I think I was able to do exactly what I intended with the character.

Here's Steve out of makeup. Rather than have him suffer in there throughout a long shoot, we shot the sequence sort of in reverse to have him done with right away.

Tim fell down a lot today.

The new and improved Zombie Frog. Last year he was just a simple, kind of fragile foam latex frog, I made him out of mask latex and was able to give him a much better paint job this time around. It was a little heavier, but we managed to keep him glued on long enough to get things done.

He stuck really well to Tim's forehead.


Overall it was a fun simple sequence to shoot. We'd done it last year so this time around it felt really familiar still and we ran through it really quickly.

And here's the line of the from today:

It's been a busy couple week, despite not shooting much. I've been spending the time getting the rest of the FX as done as possible so there's no holdups and I'm not rushing last minute to crank something out for a shoot the next morning. The biggest thing to overcome was indeed the Zombie Eater, everything else after that has been so simple.

Another big prop that I finally got turned out was the Saraphine Corpse. It needed to be simple and lightweight. I used a plastic skeleton I'd purchased last year as a quick fix zombie death sequence for one of the actors, however that ended up never even being shot and totally written out in the end, so I was left with this thing so it was a pretty obvious solution.


I went with just latex and tissue paper, some might think that's a little on the simple and cheap side, but I didn't want to destroy the thing, I can just peel all this off and reuse it for something else later - so as far as I'm concerned, the least destructive method, is always the best.

Here's a quick shot of the final prop. I used an old wig, bought for last year when this was a living character and a new dress was found and distressed and dirtied up.

Here's a closeup on the Voodoo Necklace prop - it's not something you'll be seeing up close or that will impact anything - just a small detail I wanted to add because I wanted to.

And finally a look at the facial prosthetic for the live action version of the corpse prop. Not only will this be on the live actor, but I'll be attaching it to the corpse prop as well, even if you don't see it all that well.

Day 5 on Bimbo Zombie Killers! Undead in the Water is over with, without too much fuss. It was a bit of a pain to schedule since one actress couldn't make it, but in a way it all worked, because there was no way we'd have gotten it all done and we got done the worst of it. So next time, much easier.


Here's all our crap, you can't see most of it actually, but it's all there. I realized once we got the location I'd forgotten the sledgehammer prop, so thankfully, Julia ran back to Hazel Grove and got it. That was pretty damned awesome of her.

A friend of Tim Wartman's came along as our zombie for the day - it wasn't until I was soaking him in blood that I realized what his shirt said. And even he didn't get the significance right away - but we got a good shot of it, so hopefully it read well under the blood onscreen.

The fake axe in the arm gag worked perfectly, pretty damned happy with how it turned out.




I think John is loving that shotgun, he does look pretty bad ass with it.


Okay, not so bad ass here.



and Tim Gormley showing off one of the props of the day.

Cast shot, from left to right: Mark Wells, Tim Gormley, Tim Wartman, Julia MacDougall, Julie Laforest, Mary Gaudet, John MacDonald and Bill Pineau.

To was the first time I was doing two shoots in one day, luckily the second was too big a deal, but I realized pretty quick how terribly unprepared I was for it. Hopefully it'll all turn out.





And finally, the best line of the day:

And don't forget, we've got 18 days left on the fundraising campaign, we need all the help we can get. There's a link on the right sidebar.