Saturday, May 30, 2009

ZOMBIE TYPE 1: PRODBLOG #8

Putting The Pieces Together

Day 8: Friday, May 29, 2009
T-minus thirteen days left. A little stressed, given that this isn't the only thing we're working on and more stuff (that we can't talk about) came up this past week to push this project further into spare-time-land. Which would be great if it were possible for a 7-day-week/18-hour-day situation allowed for spare time.

Anyway, Paul got the casts for the chest and thigh wounds done nicely, and he even squeezed off another couple of heads for me to experiment on with paint.


Can't really do anything serious with the heads until Paul can cast one in what's called "hydroshrink" resin. Recall that we made the head too big and it would need to be cast in this material, which shrinks 50% over two weeks. It'll probably be the perfect size in a couple of days and then Paul can make another mold at the correct proportion, and the resulting casts can be painted and assembled with the rest of the figure.

So, with thirteen days left, here's what remains to be done:

• Cast the head in hydroshrink resin, allow a few days for reduction
• Adhere the wound appliances and new hands to the body
• Paint the wounds and hands
• Cut and sew scrubs
• Dress the figure in scrubs, shoes and lab coat
• Cast properly sized head, with MEGO neck plugs
• Paint the head
• Attach the head to the body
• Paint in all surface detail such as blood and gore splatter
• Design the card art
• Print the card
• Insert card and figure in EMCE clamshell

• Do it all over about a dozen times.

Okee dokee. See you next time.

Wednesday, May 27, 2009

ZOMBIE TYPE 1: PRODBLOG #7

Finishing the head sculpt

Day 6: Monday, May 25, 2009
It's gorgeous outside and I'm stuck in the studio finishing the sculpt because the kids (as usual) just remembered they had homework due the next day, so we're keeping them in.  Happy Memorial Day.

Anyway, all the details are in, and here's how he looks:
Not used to seeing a MEGO with so much detail, I decided to compare it to other MEGO heads.  Below, you'll see the sculpt compared to (LEFT) the Bill Hinzman Night of the Living Dead head, which we all thought was a bit bigger than most MEGOs, then (RIGHT) a vintage MEGO superhero head.
Yep, I sculpted the zombie head too big.  At this size, it would look way too cartoony, so I'll have to consult my good friend and EMCE Toys partner Paul "Dr. Mego" Clarke about this when I see him tomorrow.

BUT TRAGEDY STRIKES!  That's right, just as I finally finished the damn thing, I dropped it on the floor.  Flat on its face.  Nose, lips, eyebrows all smooshed.  Grateful as I am that I never did this with any of my kids, I'm still pissed, and in about 20 minutes I've gotten it pretty close to where it was before.
Pretty close; if you look really carefully you'll note that the nose is different; actually, I like it better this way.

Time to fire it now so the Sculpey can harden and we can get a mold off it tomorrow at Paul's.  I'm lazy, so instead of setting it up in an oven and firing it over a long, steady period of time, I put it in a boiling pot of water for 15 minutes.  Worked before on other minor pieces I've tinkered with.

BUT TRAGEDY STRIKES!  During the heating process, a long crack opens up in the back of the head.  Right through detail lines.  That's gonna be a pain, but I'll revisit it tomorrow when I go to Paul's.
At Dr. Mego's Horrible House of Handcasting

Day 7: Tuesday, May 26, 2009
Paul recommends that I fill in the crack with some more Sculpey and let him cast over it.  So, I do what I think is a good job of hiding the imperfection:
Then Paul sets about putting together the mold for the head, when suddenly...
This head cast is making me nervous.  I just wanna get it cast now before something else breaks off it.  Neck seemingly repaired, Paul finishes molds for it, as well as the thigh and abdomen wounds, disassembling the body in order to do so.
Some SECRET PROCESS later, the thigh and abdominal wounds come out amazing.  Just like makeup prosthetics, they contour right onto the body part.  Good enough to check this part off and let Paul go on producing final resin appliques.
However, the head continues with its bad luck streak, and a large blob of uncured mold material results in a too-unattractive-to-fake-as-deliberate-zombie-goo spot on the first resin pull:

It's getting late, so I keep the resin to do some paint tests later in the week, and I leave Paul with the task of getting a better mold made.

As I leave the project in other hands, I check the calendar to see how much time we have left to finish this whole thing: fifteen days.  No pressure.

We interrupt this blog for some blatant pimpage...

We do sell stuff too, y'know...

Some of the most popular stuff on FearWerx.com is our military style zombie apocalypse survival gear.  We're getting these guys back in stock next Wednesday:
And if you order yours between now and June 5, you can save 10%.  Better get 'em before we send 'em out to conventions and they get sucked up like all our Winchester stuff. Click on the bag above to order...

Back to the trials and tribulations of action-figure making in just a few...

Saturday, May 23, 2009

ZOMBIE TYPE 1: PRODBLOG #6

Digging Into The Details

Day 5: Monday, May 18, 2009
With the body taken care of, it was now time to get into the details of the head so we could finish it off for casting. Time to work on the hair, a process I always wondered about. So, using one of the finer sculpting tools, I created hair flow by tracing lines outward from the "part" on the left side of the head. The drawing shows the zombie with messy hair (after a few tussles, that's expected), but I assumed the most logical place to start would have been from where the hair was initially combed.

Okay, that took a long freakin' time.  In order to get the look I wanted, it felt like I had drawn every strand of hair. Maybe that's just how it's done, but it was a real pain in the ass. 
 
Next zombie I do is gonna be bald, I swear.

That was about all I could manage that evening, so I closed up shop until the next day.

Day 6, Tuesday, May 19, 2009
Now comes the fun part, the details.  Went back into the hair to mess it up, which almost felt wrong given how much time I spent the day prior just getting it done neatly.  But, it had to be done and frankly, it seemed easier than the work I did the day prior.

Once I was satisfied with the hair, I went into the face and started playing with texture.  Getting there, but will wait until next time to finish it up.

Gonna need the whole day for that, because the convention's only a few weeks away and I need to cure the sculpt, cast it paint it, assemble it, costume it, package it...and then do it about a dozen more times.

And now we've pretty much caught up with the project, so the next entry will be in real time.  And hopefully soon, as time is running a bit short.

Happy Memorial Day weekend, everyone!



Friday, May 22, 2009

ZOMBIE TYPE 1: PRODBLOG #5

The body

Day 4: Friday, May 15, 2009
End of the work week (to everyone else...just means less phone calls and emails for me), so it was back to my favorite undead subject.  Before finishing the head, I wanted to attack the problem of putting the wounds on the body.

Since Mego closed up shop in the '80s, the action figure world was pretty much dominated by hard-sculpted toys with limited articulation.  More poseable statue than action figure, it started with Kenner's 3-inch Star Wars abominations and continued into the larger formats established by the brilliant artisans at Sideshow Collectibles and McFarlane Toys.  Hyper-detailed, amazing works of art, they could be sculpted into anything, tools made directly from the sculpts, and articulation cut directly into the plastic.

Not so Mego.  Megos were, let's face it guys, dolls for boys.  They shared a common body form, with heads, footwear and accessories to differentiate them. 

My partner on the EMCE Toys business, Paul "Dr. Mego" Clarke, recreated and improved upon the original Mego body years ago.  A sturdy, poseable body:
Unlike the head sculpt, I couldn't just dig into the body, and completely resculpting the torso and thigh would have meant getting an expensive steel tool and subsequent plastic runs made in China.  Not willing to spend the equivalent of a downpayment on a small house, I had to think differently.

The solution was to approach this like a makeup appliance.  If this was a zombie film that required an actor to look the way we illustrated on 5/8, we couldn't very well cut into him (well, not if we liked him, anyway). So, we built up some Sculpey over the lower part of the ribcage and abdomen, laid in some rough ribs and guts and tore up the surrounding area.
After I smoothed out the ribs, plumped up the exposed organs and texturized the surrounding flesh, I applied some Sculpey to the thigh and sculpted in some tears, bites and pulped musculature.

Ultimately, these pieces would have to be cured and molded so the resulting casts could be glued smoothly onto the contours of the individual bodies in production.  I had no idea how to approach that, so at this point I put the bodies aside and figured that I'd leave it to Paul to come up with a way when the time came.

ZOMBIE TYPE 1: PRODBLOG #4

Getting the proportions right

Day 2: Monday, May 11, 2009
It was a busy day on other projects, but the itch to get my hands back on the clay was unstoppable, and I think it was because I wasn't happy leaving the piece with such a disproportionate skull structure.

Even though I got the expression, I left the guy with a prehistorically low forehead. It goes without saying that we all prefer zombies with generous foreheads -- makes it easier to shoot 'em in the head.  So with what little time I had that night, I built up the forehead, put some definition in the ears and laid in the first foundation of hair. I was satisfied with the overall shape of the head after that and closed up shop for the night.


Day 3: Tuesday, May 12, 2009
This sculpting thing is addictive. I spent the day moving faster than normal through regular business just so I could get my hands back on the head. I really wanted to get to the good stuff like wounds and textures, but I knew that I had to complete the structure, so that night I got to building up the neck.

In War of the Dead mythology, a "class 1" zombie is a recent post-mortal, but necrosis and other decay advances quickly, so the neck needed to exhibit pronounced musculature through the skin. The sternocleidomastoid muscles on either side of the neck and the turkey-like tendons hanging from the jaw would be all I needed to make that happen:

While I was at it, I snuck in some detail work by tearing a pronounced cut in the sneering upper lip that pointed to a similar cut in the lower eye lid under the empty eyesocket.  Satisfied, I then closed up the rest of the structure around the neck.


And, even though I didn't really need to do it yet, I couldn't help but rip this motherfucker's throat out. Really enjoyed it, too...as I tore back the flesh, shredded the tendons and gutted the windpipe, I pictured the throat of any of several unsavory business associates I've sparred with during the past year...



Um, maybe I should talk to someone about that.

ZOMBIE TYPE 1: PRODBLOG #3

Starting the head sculpt
Okay, I need to preface by saying: I'm not a sculptor.  My strengths are in illustration and 2-D kinda stuff, although I do all the paint masters and prototyping for the EMCE lines.  I've done enough manipulation of 3-D stuff that I figured this was a good project to experiment with.

Reason 1: It's not for a client, so it's not like we'll get in trouble if I fuck it up.

Reason 2: It's a zombie.  If I fuck it up, it'll just look like a really fucked up zombie.

Day One: Saturday, May 9, 2009
That said, it was time to grit my teeth and start pushing clay.  First, I started with the expression, figuring that this would be the place from which the rest of the head would spawn.  No idea why, it just seemed to feel right.  I have no idea what other sculptors use for an approach, and I wanted this to be one of the few times that I really let loose artistically.
Okay, that wasn't so bad.  But for the record, I prefer zombies that really look fucked up, and now that this was committed to clay, dead eyes and a sneer didn't really say "this guy got really chewed up and came back from the dead" enough to me.

Knowing that there was still more to do, I wanted to see if there was something I could do at this stage to at least start this guy on his way to looking a little more worse for wear...

Now that's better.  Nothing like plucking out an eye to give the impression that someone's been through something more vicious than a drunken brawl on a Saturday night.

That was enough for one day.  I gotta company to run, so as much as I wanted to keep going, I had to switch sides of my brain and do the math part of running a business.


ZOMBIE TYPE 1: PRODBLOG #2



Dawn of the "Type 1" Dead
Why did we decide to do a zombie "Mego"?  A few reasons.  There are no generic "zombie" action figures out there, especially not in the 8" scale.  Most of the zombie figures out there are either overly stylized or from a franchise.  We wanted to make a zombie that could fit in (or fight) with all the other Megos in a person's collection.

In addition, we wanted these zombies to come from our own intellectual property,War of the Dead.  WOTD spawned from the very first FearWerx product, a novelty item called theZombie Outbreak Survival Kit(over 25,000 sold and now out of print).  In the kit was a series of zombie
"classification cards", where we divided them up into seven classes, based on age, how they were ressurrected, what kind of damage they were capable of, etc.  (NOTE: click on the images to see super-enlarged versions in a separate window).

One of the reasons we retired the ZSK was because (I'm embarassed to admit) the art was outdated, rushed and goofy.  They were really just sketches I did in my spare time while I was trying to sell my last business, and if I had any idea the ZSK was gonna start a whole new business, I would have put more effort into them. So, when we picked which zombie "class" we'd make into a figure, we picked "Class 1", but it needed an updated approach.

Updating the "Class 1"
The sketch you see below still uses the basic elements of a "Class 1", a recently-revived zombie (or "post-mortal" as we call it in WOTD) that contracted the zombie "virus" by being wounded by another zombie.  The original sketch shows a zombie in hospital scrubs and bandages; the idea was that this was a hospital employee (doctor, nurse, orderly) who was attacked by someone who was brought in during an outbreak.

When designing the figure, we had to marry the original "Class 1" idea with the practicalities of doing a "Mego".  So, we were pretty much limited to what we could do with the head sculpt, hands and perhaps some appliques.  We went with a nasty throat wound (which has become a bit of a cliche in recent zombie films...almost like a nasty vampire bite...more on that later), and a hint of partial devouring in the abdomen and thigh.  We added a lab coat to hide bare arms that would have required more complex tooling. 

ZOMBIE TYPE 1: PRODBLOG #1

We've got a cool project coming up that we thought merited a production blog.  And, as many of our projects are subject to re-prioritization due to factors out of our control, we wanted to wait until we were pretty far along before we started.

So, we're gonna start showing our first work in progress: an 8" "Mego-style" Zombie action figure, being developed exclusively for the upcoming MonsterMania horror convention, June 12-14 in Hartford, Connecticut

First, a brief word about MonsterMania:
MonsterMania is the biggest horror convention on the East Coast.  Thousands of fans gather 2-3 times a year at their usual location in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, to meet big-name horror/cult personalities, see rare or upcoming films and buy great horror-themed merchandise (like ours!).

This year, promoter Dave Hagan is bringing MonsterMania to New England, with a huge event featuring Bruce (Evil Dead) Campbell and Freddy Krueger himself, Robert Englund and dozens of other guests coming to the Crowne Plaza in Hartford, CT.  It's gonna be a biggie, and we'll be there with our usual huge footprint, managed by crackerjack FearWerx Brand Manager Scott Lefebvre.  We've been to every one since early 2006, and it's our flagship show.

About our action figures
Our sister brand, EMCE Toys, specializes in producing 8" figures in the classic MEGO style.  We produced Star Trek and Planet of the Apes figures with our partners Diamond Select Toys and launched our own Night of the Living Dead figures over the last 2 years.  You can visit the EMCE site at the link on the right side of this page, and you can pick up the NOTLD figures at the FearWerx store.

The figures are typically produced in China, and feature rugged ABS bodies and PVS rotocast heads like the old MEGO figures (only better!).

However, the figures we're producing for Monster Mania are going to be limited to a few at that show, and since you can only do rotocast PVC in large quantities, we're doing the head in solid resin, the first in our new series of EMCE "Hardhedz".

It's my first time, so be gentle with me.

2009 has been a very busy year for the FearWerx brand, as well as all the other endeavors under the SphereWerx "corporate" banner: EMCE Toys, SciFiWerx, HeroWerx, KlickWerx, etc.

Because we're all so busy, the interactive part of SphereWerx, the "KlickWerx" brand, is too busy with other interactive endeavors to work on our own web-related projects.  hence, our web presence is kinda all over the place.  The phrase "The cobbler's children go without shoes" couldn't describe us better.  In fact, the very first SphereWerx site was nothing more than a static apology:
And if you visit the corporate site now, you'll see that it hasn't really changed much.

However, the FearWerx brand needed a place to post news and information, and the homegrown code in the FearWerx e-store just wasn't cutting it.

So, here we are.  It ain't pretty, but it's useful.  Like a Prius or a Spork.  And this is our first time, so be nice to us.  We'll get this blogging thing sooner or later.

- Joe Sena
President/Creative Director
SphereWerx Micromedia