Making a Lifecast of Norm for The Zoidberg Project

hey it's norm from Testim I'm back here at Frank Ippolito shop Frank you're working on the Zoidberg project which if people haven't checked out you should because it's amazing an ongoing project and we want to check in one of the things you talked about first start of this was that how you would sculpt around a life cast a model that you've cast of someone an actor that you could work two to bake build the mask to make it fit them specifically yeah so we want to learn about the process of making a life cast it and volunteered to give me a life cast yep what are life tests used for in movies and production and whenever there's a makeup or a creature that's specifically designed to fit a person you need to have their life cast so that it fits the contours of their face and when they make prosthetics to make you know old age or monsters or anything like it'll match up with their smile lines and where their eyes are and eye bags and all that stuff so I'm gonna sit in a chair you're gonna get like a 3d scanner or something and no you sit the chair and you're not gonna move for about thirty minutes while we put silicone and everything else all over you all right well bring will and do some color commentary you know I'll get get like rusty so norms wearing a hobo tuxedo here looks like a black garbage bag Frank yeah well it's kind of the easiest way to do this okay we're gonna lifecast him down to here so okay so we're protecting his delicate skin from the from no I'm just trying to you know keep him from getting stuff all into the lap okay that's good so what's next what's the first thing you do in the process and put a bald cap on him oh I can't wait for this this is fun gets to be bald this is a silicone adhesive called Telesis 7 so made for gluing on prosthetics like movie industry stuff so what are you doing that Frank it looks like you're you're taking off bits of the cap to let the other stuff it's using using a solvent that's made for this kind of a bald cap to just kind of eat away a little bit of the edge so Frank it look like you're applying something else to Norm's head I'm using a release cream it's called cholesterol actually okay it's a leave-in hair conditioner okay and I'm also going to put it on his eyebrows and eyelashes just so that the silicone doesn't stick to it too much so just to be clear it's it's to make the silicone come off easier yeah this additive that I'm putting into the same thickener from when I did the little silicone prosthetic on him that one yeah okay so this is the actual Tuesday yeah this is another two part of silicone mix them together and then they'll turn into rubber okay and what we're going to do is we're going to do his ears first because I have a pet peeve about life casts that a lot of times people don't get the ear detail correct so we just do the ears first and then we'll use a little bit of the excess to thicken around the the bottom edge of the life cast this stuff is called body double from smooth on this is the standard set there's also a fast one so you do this by volume or mass yeah this is one to one by volume okay it's nice having these really bright colors I think this is just another reason that smooth on is like a really good forward-thinking company you have two very vibrant very different colors so you know when the colors are homogeneous that it's mixed correctly What's it feel like norm slimy so you guys are really gooping that up into like the folds of his ear all through everywhere yeah the the purpose of doing a live cast is to get the most accurate reproduction of the person's head or face or features or whatever you're trying to do Batman needs a cowl then you have to make a copy of Ben Affleck's head so that you can sculpt you know the new bat cowl so you're saying normal you get a bat Cal now we can make that call can I'm still here us yeah okay I'll be fine so this goes on pretty thick how long is this going to take to cure right the whole process is going to take about 35 minutes from the time that we started on his ears to the time that he's out so it's somewhere between 30 and 40 minutes sometimes it depends sometimes we're clicker it'll probably take a little bit longer because we're kind of yapping and this additive is another atom from smooth-on it's called hyperbolic and it helps release if you have a lot of hair like you could pretty much lifecast me with this beard and it would just realize right out of the hair huh I've been able to put it on my arm hairs and just kind of swirl it around and just slide right out it's definitely preferable to having to shave or something sometimes you have actors that you can't shave but you can't have shave or they don't pay attention they come with you know five o'clock shadow or not that there's a lot of hair on him but just out of habit I put a little bit of this in there it gives me a little bit more work time and drops the viscosity of the silicone so I get better detail so norms we're going to go over your whole head now so all you do is sit still and that's it just sit still I suppose eyes closed you guys are just gallopping it on there and spread it out these are just spatulas right these are just popsicle sticks or tongue depressors or whatever you want to call them I've seen people do these life casts with their hands like what their fingers gooping it in and ya just okay like when you do alginate life cash you typically use your hands I like using gloves because that way I can go between steps and clean up quickly and but these gloves like if I stuck my finger in the silicone it'll inhibit a bit of it and that means it it won't cure so that's why I use the little stick and I don't touch the silicone with my hands so obviously if the if the silicone doesn't set up right that would be bad because then you're going to peel it off and you won't get a good mold but is there other stuff that can go kind of sideways with this well I've never personally had an issue with the silicone going bad this stuff's designed to be very resilient to contaminants when I say contaminants things that would make it not cure so I like you know I'm sure that most most things that typically would inhibit silicone are blocked to a degree and this stuff it seems like it would be kind of intense to be inside there right now you know most people I know it's kind of relaxing um you just kind of like you know you can kind of Zen out go into a little your own little world getting a full-face mud pack yeah pretty much when I did Danny DeVito's lifecast he was pretty much falling asleep when I was doing it okay he actually was nodding and I had his Danny wake up uh-huh so I noticed you're not packing the nose holes like you packed the ear holes yes that's not a good thing we when you do these life casts we go very carefully around the nostrils because that's obviously where he's still breathing but it makes it so that you don't distort the nose by putting like straws or something weird in there and I think that if you would put straws in the nose it would not only deform the nose but I think there's a danger and if you bump it it cutting the inside of the person's nose so I've never done it and I like I never recommend it there's so much information on how to do this stuff there should be no reason that you do you know horrible mistakes like sticking your hands in plaster which I've heard horror stories of hold on wait you mean people take a bucketful of plaster jam their heads anything there and their hand of it their hand yep thinking that they're going to be able to take it out and they end up having to have their hands amputated so do you guys always start from the top for a reason or just because that's that's where you start you know I guess it's like when you wash your car you know you start at the top of the car because the water runs down exactly I think that's why I kind of instinctually do that because of the way you wash your car because of the way I was taught to wash the car like I just remember dead telling me no stop start at the top you're a kid you're stupid you just start washing like you don't offender and you're like the hoses right next to the wheels yeah exactly but this stuff's thick I guess it doesn't matter I can start wherever with this but I want to start in more important places with the material not that I ever really run out of time or anything like that but you want to get the important parts first the important parts are the face and the head shape so this is the last of the material you guys pre-measured yeah yeah this is the last of the edge I really want to ask more about he's doing in there but so when this is cured well this just pull over his head as one whole piece now we're going to slid it up the back okay just a small slit right up the back which is why Nora thickened the center of the back of his head over the top yeah okay so this is this is pretty much it like we're we're all smooth now everything's good all the thicknesses are good so now it's just waiting until it cures now yeah now we got to wait a couple of minutes until this stuff kicks off all the way so while norms over there resting well easy what's next here the next thing we're going to do is put a plaster bandage jacket on the outside of the silicone this is going to keep the silicone in the right shape because silicone is just a floppy rubber it's like those ice cube trays or cake molds or whatever yeah just like those things that they kind of hold their shape but something this large is going to just flop in on itself so we're going to make a plaster bandage jacket a front and back section that when we take that all off of his head we can put it back together and it registers and it will be the correct so that's what all the rest of these molds have on the outside it almost looks like fiberglass or something like that yeah so these are the plaster bandages our plaster bandage just I'm going to touch I apologize suction but they're they're just like they're just like cloth with plaster and fused in gauze basically yes and you dunk them in water okay and wring out the water you don't want them too drippy and soaking wet okay and then we're going to start putting them on the norm so the mummy phase of the caching and you'll go front to back on the seam it's going to I'm going to do the front side first sure okay then keep going on those other ones does it get hot inside the silicone at this point I gotta imagine well the silicone is a bit of an insulator but they will warm up people I've heard people comment and saying that it does get warm at this stage yeah I assume after you've done enough of these and you you figure the pattern and you have a strict strategy for forgetting the pieces on the most part sometimes things will switch things up or whatever so my theory I'm putting this little piece here right now is that the most delicate part of the life gas is going to be the tip of the nose because if you set it forward or or whatever so I want to have this piece on there and done early so that well the other pieces are setting up you know the last pieces are still a little bit soft this one will have been on for a long time and it's the most set up I mean obviously I did around it will it just be one layer of plaster yeah these are these bandages are folded over three or four times depending on which ones I'll need two more so this step is how I separate the front in the back half I take just slices of paper towels that are damp okay and I put them on the edge of the plaster bandage and that acts as a kind of a barrier so that now I can go right into the next layer of plaster bandages and it won't stick so that way the front the back are two separate pieces because otherwise if I just went and started putting the back half on he'd be stuck in there yeah that would be bad yeah it would be a bad thing so there we go so I have this um it's like a pencil but it's activated with water okay so I just kind of put some marks of cities your registration marks yeah these are just if it doesn't line up I know that there's something wrong or something misaligned and the Front's already solid pretty solid yeah you're going to pictures extra norm yeah let's take some let's take some photos okay so he's hit the pastured ride yeah ready oh that was easy hop straight off oh god Frank don't drop that we'd have to do it again so now I just want to loosen up all around the edge okay so I got my finger between the scissors and you so I can they're safety scissors yeah there's a little you know they roll their lip there but I keep my finger underneath and I run the scissors up the length of my finger and you're zigzagging so that there's no runs well I zigzag so that when you put these back together they line up a little bit better because if you just make a straight line it can shift easy okay but if he zigs a good bit you can tell where it should be at least yeah it's much thicker than I expected the silicon well in them in this in this section I had her make it thicker it's especially thick yeah it makes it easier to do this part well it's really uncomfortable oh it's so stuck to his skin norm how are you it's go rebirth back there's enough for Revere first view of your face Wow let's ignore but backwards so norm you've been life cast now how you feeling I covered it's gonna take me a little bit but that felt awesome can't wait to see how it turns out Frank what's next for this process next is to fill it with plaster epoxy or whatever I end up doing and I'll get around on that the next couple of days awesome can't wait see how that turns out we'll have a little clone of me at the office let's check that out alright so we're back here for a couple weeks at Frankie Bilodeau shop Frank we cast this cast my head a couple weeks ago and now it's what's gonna happen this this mold is all done it's all done I filled it with plaster and now we get to reveal what a copy of your head looks like alright let's do it there you go my goodness that is a striking likeness wow I didn't realize there'd be so much detail it's every single pore it's all the forms how did you take this cast turned out I think this is a really really clean cast these materials are designed to take all of your forms and all of your detail so that we can sculpt prosthetics or whatever we need to we wouldn't do is any good if we didn't have a perfect replica alright so you had the silicone mold right and two halves of that and then you just combine that and then pour plaster in what's the process I basically just brush plaster in and then as the plaster started setting kind of built up a thickness inside of it oh yeah a little heavy and now I know what I look like bald you'll be you do this for all of your projects when you're working on prosthetics for actors and all projects right yeah a lot of times we'll take this and then I'll remould it to make a master so I can make multiple copies on it this this mold is good too to make a couple of copies but to really make them good and make the mold last a long time we want to remould it again and then you'll be sculpting a Zoidberg on top of that so for the Zoidberg project to make that Zoidberg a mess exactly so all this is in the article on the Zoidberg project the lifecasting is in the part two and then in part three is how to remould this to make the master awesome well thank you so much Frank for giving us a sense of this process and this something that people can learn and read about online and try at home even well there's a ton of information out there whether it's on the internet through tested through smooth ons website there's there's a lot of education and there's a lot of simpler smaller versions how to do this stuff - you don't do a whole head you can do just a face or just like a part of a face okay or here on our yeah so just take these simple steps and you can apply it to just about anything awesome and you invite a lot of that on test comm that's where the Zoidberg project lives its ongoing through next year so excited see how that will turn out subscribe to our YouTube channel Frank thanks again thank you now you're a real boy

Channel: Adam Savage’s Tested

Views: 575,051

Keywords: testedcom, tested, zoidberg project, lifecast, frank ippolito

Id: SSNgdML7XBM

Length: 18min 34sec (1114 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 02 2014