Follow related website bookmark from Reddit:
(tired of all those depressing IAMA posts so...) IAMA former prosthetics artist for movies and TV around Toronto. Worked on "300", "Skinwalkers", "Shoot 'em Up", and "Diary of the
For several years I worked as a prosthetics artist for movies and TV in Toronto. I worked on the movies, [300](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0416449) (pre-production), [Skinwalkers](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0461703) (on-set), [Shoot Em Up](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0465602) (pre-production), and [Diary of the Dead](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0848557) (pre-production and some on-set work too). In the end I stopped doing it because it is tough to find steady work. I figured I?d rather have a job that even pays slightly less, as long as it?s a nice steady stream, rather than the floods and droughts of the movie industry. 300: In the ?wall of dead persian soldiers? scene, all the fake bodies' hands are my hands. They cast the entire wall without hands, heads and feet to prevent them breaking off during de-molding. A couple days before the wall was shipped to the studio in Montreal they realized that the bodies were handless. So they said, ?Quick, we need to cast your hands!? They made a cast, and I spent the day filling the molds with expanding foam to create all the hands for the wall of bodies. The effects shop I worked for during 300's pre-production also did the scene with the tree full of dead people. In fact, the guy who got me into prosthetics, is an effects artist from abroad. He's married to my friend's sister and as a weird sorta dark homage to her, he sculpted all the faces on the female models for the tree, in her likeness... they're about the size of barbie dolls. For the larger version of the tree, (that actors could walk around) we used a giant fibreglass tube. We went to a park and found a tree with the bark texture we wanted this tree to have, and painted a 1'x1' silicone square on it. When it was dry, we took it back to the shop and used it like a stamp to reproduce the texture on the big tree. Skinwalkers: During filming of Skinwalkers, one day I ate lunch sitting next to Stan Winston, and didn't know it. I even gave him a bite of the chocolate cheesecake I had (I managed to snag the last piece, and Stan, was eyeballing it from a few feet away down the line) After he left they told me who it was. It was a good thing they didn't while he was there, or they would have had a fanboy freakout on their hands. On Skinwalkers, me and one other guy were in charge of all the stunt-people?s prosthetics. Our duties were, maintaining their body-suits, dentures, and prosthetic appliances. We would suit them up at the beginning of the day, and help them out of them at the end. There was a lot of KY-jelly involved. No joke! Shoot-em-up: I helped make 2 animatronic babies for the movie shoot-em-up. They had a baby lined up to "play" the part, but you can't have a real baby on stage while actors shoot guns with blank rounds. So we made one animatronic baby skeleton with a silicone skin, and another with no skin, that was to be placed inside a large tuque. In the movie, a character "gives birth" to said baby during a gunfight. But like the baby she couldn't be there with Clive Owen and co shooting blank rounds next to her face, so I also had to take a cast of the actress' legs. I don't think she fully-realized exactly what we were planning to do that day because she didn't shave her legs for it... To tell you the truth, I didn't even notice until we brought the silicone sleeves of her legs back to the shop. I built a plaster support structure around them, and poured in some poly-urethane to make a positive. I let it set and when I broke it open and pulled the silicone sleeve off, lo and behold the fake legs had hair, transferred from her legs to the mold, to the positives. The other guys in the shop joked that I should have charged her for a leg wax-job. I ended up having to pluck out the hairs with duct tape, and tweezers for the stubborn ones. It was gross, but that's the movie business :) We also did a ?carrot stabbed into the eye? effect (as well as a carrot-in-the-neck one) and a ?mangled hand with each finger broken? effect. Diary of the Dead: I got to meet George Romero, he's a really laid-back funny old man with huge glasses, and he plays with a yo-yo in the time between shooting scenes. I have a couple photos of myself in zombie makeup, that they put me in to do the camera test on diary of the dead. They put eye-blood in my eyes, which are eye drops that make your eyes water and stain all your tears blood-red, and sat me on a chair in front of 5 cameras and said "be zombie-like" while they changed camera filters and stuff to get enough footage so George could pick the right "look". We did an exploding-eyeball effect, a ?head being melted by acid? effect, and a ?sword inserted through the back of the neck and then sliced upwards, splitting the head in half vertically? effect. I'm happy to answer any questions you may have, if I can! EDIT: Due to some question of my authenticity [here](http://imgur.com/a/54PN3/diary_of_the_dead_zombie_makeup_test) are some pictures of me in the Diary of the Dead zombie test makeup. This is prior to being shuttled over to the set, and that funky eye-blood put in my eyes. [Me](http://imgur.com/tNcG7) non-zombified, and [another](http://imgur.com/YYowE) meeting satan in Osaka. EDIT 2: woah 200 upvotes! seriously? (300 would be more appropriate, but I'm not complaining) more