How Stranger Things' SFX Artists Created Vecna | Vanity Fair

he was covered in like ky jelly and lube and a kind of a wet looking gel so we gave wekner this kind of glossy sort of look every day that was our last part of the application process our last 10 15 minutes would be the four of us literally getting this product all over him to make him look really glossy and occasionally he would meet producers or some of the other cast members that come up shake his hand and just regret it immediately because they were covered in slime it's time for your suffering hi i'm barry gower and i'm gonna break down how we created the creature prosthetics for stranger things season four we were approached by the duffer brothers they were after their own iconic villain for this season and they wanted him to be very practical and i think they'd see now work with the night king and game of thrones and they'd seen our work with the radiation burns on on hbo's chernobyl they said to us we want our own iconic villain we need our strange things version of the night king well why don't we just approach the guys who did the night kings we were given various concept art designs by concept artist michael mayer who did beautiful incredible designs for the wekner character we were sent those designs and then we took a full body live cast of the actor jamie campbell boa from that point we had quite a large extensive build to actually create the character which we started with this full body life cast made out of plaster of paris when you do any prosthetic makeup which involves appliances overlapping onto other appliances there's a process called floating the plaster cast of jamie's body we painted completely all over with a soap product first and let that dry and then we sculpted vechna over the top in this wax modeling clay and then we needed to separate the sculpture into many different parts like a jigsaw puzzle and mold them separately but to separate them you need to submerge the whole body under water so the water sinks into the plaster of paris and reactivates the soap so the plasticine actually floats off the surface of the plaster paris this is the biggest thing we've ever tried to float a sculpt off in our workshop so we bought this huge paddling pool put it in our workshop and it took a day to fill with water and we'd built this scaffold piped kind of frame that we could screw into the back of jamie's body and submerge him overnight for the soap to reactivate we just drilled all these holes into his back so all the water can basically trickle out the body and we'll stand him back up get some little tools and start separating the sculpture down into many many different pieces make molds of those pieces and inject them with different materials such as silicone and foam latex there's about 24 or 25 overlapping prosthetics which created the entire character of wekner we decided to go down the approach of doing a full body makeup as opposed to a pullover suit because the character was going to be um he's going to have a lot of very intense strenuous kind of movements in the show he's going to be interacting with a lot of the main cast and we wanted to avoid any kind of buckling that you usually get with a rubber suit [Music] we wanted to adhere and glue all the appliances to the actors skin which in the end ended up with a process which started off at about eight and a half hours for the whole application process vectors prosthetics that they're made this combination of two different materials we use a silicon medical um gel which is encapsulated between a vinyl skin and it's incredibly soft and you can change the density of the prosthetic to make it firmer or softer so we make the prosthetic very soft so when everything's adhered to jamie's skin it moves very well it doesn't buckle we have a lot of stretch and it kind of contracts very easily but due to due to that actual um material it's quite weighty as well probably looking at about 10 to 15 kilos just in the head and shoulders then he had a full chest appliance a full back appliance the larger heavier appliances were his left arm which was basically a large sleeve and then a foam latex glove that went over his mechanical left hands he had dentures which went over his own teeth which were like clear vac form plastic sort of shells which were artworked so his teeth looked rotten and blackened and he had contact lenses as well full scleral contact lenses so we really put him through the mill there wasn't anything else we could get on jamie biggest challenges really were to obviously make sure he could talk he could eat he could see he could hear he has got ear holes through the prosthetic there we had to make sure obviously that vector would be able to go to the bathroom during the day as well so we devised a a kind of a system which went under his nether regions that we could pop open and he could go to the loo and obviously we wouldn't go with him you know there are all these things you need to take into consideration that you've got a human under there at the end of the day and they still need to eat still need to chat there's a lot of contributing factors that you have to take into consideration when you're doing a full full body makeup but it got to the point that not only we're our team like a well-oiled machine but jamie knew exactly where his arm needed to be at a certain time or turn his head or oh i'm standing now and now i'm lying down for jamie in particular he did go into a zen-like mode we would start off with music every day and because of the character i think jamie liked to listen to some quite aggressive quite intense death metal and it would be quite um hardcore there would definitely be a part during the process where he would become wekner he was kind of murmuring things under his breath and you could tell he was definitely getting into the vector zone and it was just really interesting because he would be sitting there very still moving his hand around would be airbrushing moving around him not really making much conversation he would be oh bassy sort of voice and then an ad would step on the trailer and jamie is there anything i'm getting oh yeah could i get a coffee with whatever and he'd suddenly sort of shift back into jamie again and we'd realize that we've got jamie in the makeup chair it was very clear from day one that we would be working very closely with the vfx team and there would be some augmentation to the finish of of wekner's look most notably it was the moving vines all over his body so even though they took our physical makeup itself they used software and animation to to give all the vines a slight movement and everything sort of slithered all over his body and they also removed jamie's nose as well on each application day we had a black nose on jamie with some little white marking dots so vfx could remove that in post but in the end we ended up with a character which is about 90 practical i think one of the most challenging things with the design was creating his large left hand with his extended fingers so this is something that the production were quite keen to us to achieve practically uh for the shoot so we created it was mechanical left hand with finger extensions which was covered in a foam latex prosthetic by our actor jamie wall it was sculpted by pat fode and duncan jarman and pat was responsible for wekner's left hand which the original design from michael mayer had wekner with really extended long fingers on the left hand the whole idea of wekner killing his victims by using his hand and sort of penetrating their skulls and sucking their brains out as such we were doing tests back at the workshop in the uk where we were using crew members and wearing the hand and trying to show the duffers oh this is how it could potentially work they looked incredible when he was moving them but they almost became a little comical when he was trying to sort of penetrate some fingers into the head so we actually reduced the length of the fingers probably by about four to six inches jamie came over to the uk came to our studio and we have had a complete set of appliances but nothing was pre-painted it was all bare but he had the long finger extensions at this time we'd been wearing it ourselves in the workshop and just making sure that the mechanics work correctly and we could only wear it for about five minutes or so and we were finding the strainer on our fingers it was making our hands ache so much by the time you took the glove off you could hardly move your hand because you had cramps so you're thinking this is going to be really interesting with jamie is this going to work he's going to be potentially wearing this for hours and on a shoot day and he came in he did the test and he wore this hand for like several hours took it off he was absolutely fine it was like water off a duck's back with jamie we looked a lot of different color reference for wekner's skin tones for his vines we were given beautiful concept art from michael mayer that was the perfect springboard for us and the interesting thing is it's great having two-dimensional or 3d art but when you have to translate that into physical prosthetic appliances we have to use different paints different bases we always look at real-life reference for different skin tones so we looked at a lot of different sea life we looked at a lot of bruising on people who'd had severe knocks to the skin lots of blues and greens and purples because we had this overwhelming amount of reference of different colors and what have you we had to really hone it in to only a few colors we actually had a makeup palette designed by a company called premiere products which had 10 different colors that we were able to use as a base each day as well we'd only have one makeup palette and we had 10 different colors so those are the colors that we use for the entire becca paint scheme in the end dude i survive so for victor creel his history was uh many years ago he had taken a razor blade and gouged through his eyes the duffers wanted quite an extreme makeup we had quite severe scarring going down the face but they also wanted a remnants of maybe a burst but scarred eyeball as well on his right hand side so the difficult thing we're doing a makeup of this nature is obviously you're covering an actor's eyes and the first thing we would normally do is once we have a cast of the actor is we would dome the eyes in front of the eyes they'd almost look like half golf balls in front of the actor's eyes and then we would make a former of the face with those arm sculpt the makeup over the top so when you have an appliance in the day and you stick it to the actor's face there's actually a cavity inside so robert was able to open his eyes and look around inside the makeup we were incredibly lucky with this character because we had robert englund who's an absolute seasoned pro with prosthetics he's probably worn more prosthetics than any actor going i think for us this was like a dream come true i was a huge fan of fangoria magazine and this is when i was starting to get into makeup effects and i loved creatures and in my bedroom at home at my mum's i had my whole wall above my bedroom was a shrine to freddy krueger and i just had all these posters to actually get to work with robert englund not only did we get to work on stranger things but to work with robert englund it's been like a dream come true and he couldn't have been nicer this was the fun thing we're doing to make upon robert he knew all the materials he knew all the adhesives we would be sticking a piece down and we'd be getting towards an edge and he'd be like i think he should be using some pros-aide adhesive there on the edge yeah we're literally just getting the pros aid and he he knew every little trick that we were doing he's so experienced with having so many makeup stuck on him it couldn't have gone any smoother with him we were very lucky so this is the sculpture of victor creel's appliance which uh you can see the difference in tone where the appliance finishes just prior to robert's hairline goes around his temples and down around onto the face and even though we're basically only scarring through his eyes we make the appliance a little bit larger and we cheat the nose forward as well he comes over at the tip of his nose here we cheat the cheekbones we cheat everything forward because we've had to dome robert's eyes out underneath so if we were literally just going to cover his eyes and put scars through them it would look it looked really really bizarre so it's actually turned out being quite an extensive appliance and robert's got this trademark great facial hair as well he's got this really beautiful beard so we had to make sure that we finished the appliance shy of his beard line as well it's quite a big appliance to go on the face um but it was all completely pre-artworked we'd hair punched some eyebrows into the piece some eyelashes which kind of curled up a little bit the wrong way as well and we put some kind of gloss materials onto the eyes themselves so it gave us this kind of horrible mucousy feel to the eyelids once it was glued onto the skin on the day we would just blend into the skin with an airbrush again and spattering various colors onto robert's skin but two-hour process i think on the day i think approaching a character like victor creel is probably a lot more grounded and in a way easier for us because we can look at a lot of real scarring reference as well i mean as prosthetic artists we look at some quite graphic material we look at a lot of facial scarring lots of trauma lots of different victims we've got terrible scarring sometimes we do very extensive burn makeup but somebody like victor creel's makeup we did look at facial scarring going through eyes so we knew he was human but we had to make the the appliance look very realistic and he had to look very grounded as well it is a very different approach because obviously wekner is a fantastical creature it's um supernatural it's part of the upside down so we are using lots of reference of fantasy references from wildlife all kinds of different references they're two very different approaches i'm just a huge fan of effects whether it's practical or digital i think still to this day you know the work by rick on american werewolf is still so significant and is still you know the standard that we all aim to be as good as um there's also like rob bow team's work on um john carpenter's the thing which is all practical effects as well at the time huge fans of these kind of early 80s movies which you know even by today's standards still haven't quite been beaten

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Id: 901Qn7WKs34

Length: 13min 17sec (797 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 17 2022