LegOfSomeone

From Simreal

This is just another life-casting project, though I did a few new things in it. I'll discuss the newness. I don't have pictures of the finished leg (I took pictures, I know I did, but I can't find them! Argh!), so you'll just have to watch the movie to see it in action.

First, we lubed the heck out of his soft fur... insignificant amounts of leg hair, shouldn't be a problem.

Made the back half of the cast with plaster bandage.

A frame around the front of his leg, overlapping the well-lubricated back shell's edge.

Filled in and over the frame with Body Double. Covered the body double with more bandage.

To remove, we pried the two halves of the shell apart a bit. The back piece dropped off like a well-oiled slab of plaster. Yay!

Apparently, thin hairs get grabbed by the silicon harder than thick hairs. So, he should have shaved before we did this. He won't make that mistake twice! Removing the front half involved tearing much of the hair out of the front half of his leg... oh yeah. Good times.

I heated up large amounts of Chavant's NSP medium and cast a positive in the mold. By the way, Chavant has a $10 sampler of their clays that is awesome, and the NSP medium is also awesome. Hard enough to hold details, soft enough to still work, and can be made fluid with a heat gun to stick pieces together or smooth details.

From there, I cleaned up the positive, fixing the flaws caused by the hairs, and made plaster negative for it. I made a block mold, which I don't recommend, because it is really really heavy. But cheaper than a rubber-and-plastic shell mold.

Behind the scenes, I sculpted muscles around the skeleton framework I was using.. the three big ones. These I cast in solid gelatin, seperately from the rest of the leg.

These next pictures show the first crude, and not entirely successful, test of the leg.

The final leg was built thusly.

Using just the plaster negative for the front of the leg, I painted in several tinted layers of Eco-Flex silicon, thickened with Thi-Vex so it won't drip.

In the middle layer of silicon, I embedded strips of cheese cloth in the edges. These provide strength at the edge, as well as handles for manipulating the skin later.

In the last layer of silicon, I embedded fluffly spider web material (though a lmost anything fibrous would work). This I cut short and used as an interface between the silicon and the next layer. Since, you know, nothing sticks to silicon.

I took my three big leg muscles, each of which had a strip of cheese cloth embedded in their ends, and taped them in their correct places on the thigh bone. I then laid this entire assembly into the skin.

Heating up and foaming a huge mass of red gelatin, I poured the foam under, around, and on the muscles, embedding their meaty goodness in a soft bed of blood-colored foam.

Eventually, it all cooled and hardened.

What I had then was a layer of skin, and muscles around bone embedded in a soft fleshy matrix.

This was then worn over the actor's leg, providing a thick prothesis, and was dressed under a modified pair of pants.

In use, the actor cut through the pants, the skin, and tore through the flesh, pulling out and eating the muscles therein.

There were all sorts of problems in the execution, from problems getting blood flow to work, to the enthusiastic actors pulling the bone out of his leg and waving it around. Ahh! If I knew they were going to do that, I would have decorated the bone properly!

Overall, though, it was very cool and grossed out even the actors.