Recent project:
Alien Heads

 

       I recently did a project where I had to create three UFO alien characters for a short film. They would be slip-over masks, which I would create, along with fake arms, worn by a very short actor. I thought it would be fun to show the stages it went through.

       Here is the start of the first sculpture:

  


       Ok, since I had to sculpt three character heads at once, I first finished the generic head shape, took these pics, and used the pics as a guide to do the other two head shapes, so the first one wouldn't have to be exposed and drying the whole time (water clay).


       Then, once the three general head shapes were roughed in, and looked similar, I went back to the first one (above) and started on the face. You will probably be surprised to see the direction this went, as it's cute and friendly, which is what the client wanted.
       Here's the first draft. They wanted this guy to look very sad, almost about to cry:



       Ok, so there was a lot of back and forth discussions with the client about the nature of the characters, as I showed them the updates to the sculpt. At this point it was decided it should look YOUNGER, more SYMPATHETIC, and SADDER. So I took a shot of the sculpt and did a rough manipulation in Photoshop to see what I should change. Then I went back to the sculpt and revised it:


       
 
        So, was this what the client was looking for? At this point I felt that it was getting too human-looking, but I was having trouble getting the emotion in there with more alien features. Well, sure enough, the client agreed at this point that it was getting too human, so I had to revise it to be more alien looking in structure, while still retaining those personality traits mentioned before. Here's what I ended up with for this guy:
 
 
       And here are the other two heads. Alltogether, the three guys were supposed to be: sad, neutral, and happy.
Here is the neutral one:

       And here is the happy one:

        Ok, for the arms, they wanted mostly human arms, but with no elbow, it would just come right out of the shoulder and go directly to the hand (there was supposed to be some question whether the characters were human mutants or actual aliens). Also, to just slightly hint at an alien look, I extended the base of the two middle fingers of each hand, I don't know if that's evident in these pics. I sculpted the arms slightly smaller than normal size. Here's the left arm sculpt:

     
        Here's the right arm sculpt:

     
        Ok, so here are the arms cast in latex, and painted.


      Here's a closeup of one of them.


       Here is the head painted. All the heads were pretty much finished like this. They wanted just plain skin color, and there wasn’t time to do a super fancy paint-up, so it’s rather basic.






      Here’s a couple of close-ups. One thing you have to keep in mind when seeing this is that they look rather creepy with the empty eye holes. They are supposed to be quite a bit more sympathetic, and you’d have to see them on the actor for them to have a sense of life to the eyes. Unfortunately, I don’t have any shots of them on the actors yet.

 

And there you go. Thanks for looking.