Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
Hello. My name is Kim Lysgaard Andersen and I've made a film called 'The Headless Lover'
Right now we're going to meet the man who made the special effects for the film.
And I'm not talking about digital effects. I'm talking about the dummies and the blood
- everything that takes place right in front of the camera.
So if you're not interested, then just go to another website. Now!
Hi Per.
Hi Kim. And welcome.
Thanks. I asked you to create a dummy head for my film. And it had to be rather flexible, right?
It had to be incredibly flexible.
Well, it all begins with a plaster head like this. But of course you can't just go find a plaster head
of the actor Michael Carře somewhere.
So we had to start out by making the plaster head ourselves.
In order to do this you have to create a mould of the actor's head.
We use something called alginate, which is the same material that dentists use to make moulds of your teeth.
We then have 3 minutes to cover the entire head. Making sure to cover every nook and cranny.
And as you can see, Michael's mouth is covered as well.
He actually became so relaxed that his lip dropped down, as you can see.
He almost fell asleep during the process.
As you can see, we leave a hole for the nostrils, allowing him to breathe through the nose,
but the mouth remains closed.
Once we've covered him with the alginate mould, we proceed by covering the mould in plaster.
In order to get him out of the mould we make a cut in the back. He then pulls his head out the back.
We then close up the mould and fill it with plaster and end up with this head with which we can continue our work.
Your entire film was a kind of tribute to Creepshow, so we tried to apply the same techniques as them
to pay tribute to Tom Savini, who made the special effects back then.
We also located a couple of eyes made by the same company as those of the eighties' Creepshow films.
We had to apply these eyes to the head, though.
But as you can see, the eyes of the plaster head are closed,
so we had to dig out holes for them in order to apply them.
And we had to adjust the lip as well to make him appear more dead.
Once we've applied the eyes, adjusted the lip to our liking and made preparations for the teeth,
we proceed to make a new cast of his head.
And from that cast we proceed to mould the actual silicone head, which, as you can see, it's a thin layer of skin.
Some might think of it as latex, but it is actually a bit different from latex.
Silicone is used for different purposes and it is more durable.
In the movies it is common practice to give people a self-coloured look.
But here we did the opposite and applied a lot of red, blue, black and green tones to the skin
to make the surface appear more lifelike.
It's a very slow process and it takes me two days to paint a head like this.
Once we'd finished painting the head, we sent it to someone who applied all the hair.
And if you take a closer look you can see that each hair has been applied individually,
and imitates the growth pattern of Michael's hair.
If you look at the sideburns, you can see how the hair kind of grows in different directions.
You can't see it anymore, but the head actually contained a number of blood tubes and the neck as well,
since Kim wanted the blood to squirt out a lot of times during the film.
We had rigged it in a way so that when the head tilts back the blood was able to squirt out of it.
You can't show a dummy head like this for very long, since it has no facial expression whatsoever.
People see through it relatively quickly.
So we had to cheat a bit here and there,
meaning that Michael Carře's real head has been matted in digitally in some places.
"Not finished."
That was all for now. Thank you, Per Kapper.
Michael and I say goodbye and thank you.
Stay tuned at www.bookofhorror.com for more things to come.