Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/759117
extremely excited, and many of the sculptors felt that this was going to be some of the best work done in years. An annex shop was eventu- ally set up at Make Up Effects Labs to accept the main shop's overflow. Pedro Valdez coor- dinated this shop with the construction of our background masks and fiberglass molds. Scotty Fields, A.J. Menudo, Alex Noble, Josh Sacks and Josh McCarron all added their lab tech skills in both shops. Except for the scripted aliens, all of the make-ups needed to be generic (meaning that they would be sculpted on someone other than the actor that would be wearing it). This is not the ideal way to do things as it presents fitting problems, but it was necessary due to time restrictions. The actual actors who would be wearing the make-ups would not be available until shortly before they would go to camera. As soon as a generic life-cast was chosen, one of the sculptors would then rough sculpt it based on design, Joel would then determine how the sculpture would be broken down into various pieces and overlaps based on how he wanted them to be applied. Next, the mold maker and silicone runner would have their input as to their needs and once everyone was satisfied, the sculpting would continue. The Burbank crew had a build schedule of 2½ months to sculpt and mold the majority of the characters. Then, we would send the molds to a new shop in Vancouver where a crew would be hired to run the molds in silicone and paint and prep everything for application. It took three huge semi-trucks to move our shop to Canada. We had a bigger shop with at least 40 people working full time on running appliances, pre-painting, assembly, dental work, etc. We still had several characters that needed develop- ment so Joel, Richie Alonzo and sculptor Joey Orosco tackled those in Vancouver. The other crew that came with us included Gil Liberto, Brian Blair and John Halfmann in the mold shop. Lenny MacDonald started painting and detail work on the Quills' characters. The local artists in Vancouver were simply FANTASTIC! They were all so well-rounded in skills that we could give them anything and they would do it all well, particularly painting. They would take those silicone pieces and give them really amazing paint jobs, which really elevated the make-up designs. I felt that with this Canadian crew and the American crew in Burbank, that this was possibly the best crew that I had ever worked with, anywhere. Several of the Vancouver shop crew were also used for make-up applications as well. The painting staff was comprised of these artists: Bronwyne Sloley, Werner Pretorius, Mike Fields, Felix Fox, Lance Webb, Caitlin Groves, Kyle Huculak, Erin Peters, Holland Miller, Daemon Cadman, Frida Norrman and Corrine DeBarry. The next big task was to run all of the silicone appliances. The challenge with this was that the appliances would be big, thick and heavy. They had to be soft but not too soft or they would distort. Fortunately, we had similar experiences with these problems on a previous show, The Green Lantern, where we developed foam inserts and reinforcement techniques to make large appliances work. We only had one test day per character and I would estimate how soft we should run the silicone, but often Joel would determine during the test that we needed to go even softer since he tested every alien character himself to establish the look. Since we were using generic appliances that were not cast on the actual actor, Joel needed a softer appliance in order to stretch the pieces to fit. I am also happy to say that we had no adhesion problems or delamination issues in spite of the weight. We used approximately 650 gallons of PlatSil Gel 10 and the silicone crew was staffed by Vancouver artists Raj Mariathasan, Matt Aebig, Jeff Leblanc and Caitlin Groves, and headed by Tegan Colby. Shelagh McIvor cast Spock's ears. They all did an incredible job in the time frame that they had. Several of the characters had to be pre- assembled and various detail pieces fabricated. Carolyn Williams was mostly a one-person department in this regard. She fabricated and installed hundreds of Quills, detailed horns and claws for Reptilicus, refurbished various appli- ances so that we could reuse some of them on stunt players, preassembled the Tyvana pieces, detailed the Satine characters. The list could go on. Tracy Lai and Toby Lindala handled all of the dental pieces that we needed while Shelagh McIvor, Crissy Renaud and Amelia Smart handled most of the seaming and hair punching. Although the majority of the make-ups were prosthetic appliances, we also constructed sev- eral silicone background masks. These were constructed with a silicone skin and fiberglass