One of the company’s earliest creatures for Fringe was the subterranean ‘mole man’ for episode two, ‘Night Of Desirable Objects.’ As Masters recalls, “It was a very specifically designed character, head to toe; silicone face and a wild body make-up application system that we developed on another show. He was played by a stunt performer named Nat Philips and we gave him nasty nails and big awful teeth, so that was a really cool character.
“That episode was very dark, and I think that was a case where they actually wanted to shoot more inside the cave but they ran out of time and money so we ended up not seeing much of him. I thought he was still pretty creepy, but there was a lot of really great stuff in there that a lot of people didn’t see.”
MFX’s first major challenge on the series came with a sequence in ‘Earthling,’ which required a character to literally crumble into dust on camera. “That one scared the crap out of me,” claims Masters, “so I made Dan do it in the LA shop. After a few experiments, his team came up with an interesting mixture of practical materials that actually looked pretty good cosmetically as skin and cloth, but were fragile as hell. We shot it cracking apart in one shot, but in sections, to create separate elements of the arm crumbling, then the torso, the head falling, etc. We shot the hell out of it to get all the cool ashy parts.
“And Then Zoic, supervised by Jay Worth, painstakingly took those elements, and elements of our actor, Joe Towne along with several layers of particle dynamics and created quite an amazing shot, inter-cut with shots of the practical head smashing to the ground.”
“The ash effect scared the hell out of me as well,” agrees Rebert, “mainly because I hadn’t done or heard of anyone doing it successfully. The difficult thing about the Ash-guy effect was that the skin and wardrobe needed to be clean without any blemishes or signs of the effects to come. I’ve done crumbling ash effects before on bodies that were already charred, but this was completely different.
“What we ultimately ended up using was a craft material called Paperclay, which was pressed into silicone moulds to create a thin shell. The shells were rigged with pull-tabs and filled with blackened papier maché, while the outer surface was scored with a blow torch, then painted at the last possible moment, in its final position. Not a perfect technique by any means, but it was the only thing that seemed to work.”
Next: Parasites and exposed brains.
