Crater Lake Monster Resumes!

Well…I got back to it yesterday. It won’t be long before I can mold this. Now before you can say where’s his teeth let me explain something. Casting those tiny teeth as part overall mold would be iffy at best. My plan is to make the teeth separately and make a mold for the teeth I can easily get resin into without trapping bubbles. Then you, the builder, add them one at a time into the mouth. This was done to the stop motion puppet and the full sized large head I built for the movie.

The head was sculpted toothless and the teeth added later.

The sculpture is a cross between the puppet and the full sized head. The reason for this is Dave Allen originally had sculpted the stop motion puppet in Roma clay. He hadn’t finished it yet but wanted to give me a copy of the head to sculpt the full size from as a reference.

He used dental alginate and made a cast for me in plaster. Later when the sculpture was finished by “another artist” on the shoot he changed the head somewhat after I already molded my huge sculpture. So there was no way to go back and adjust it.

These kind of things happened all the time in movie making. I could talk about what “another artist” did on Star Trek the Motion Picture to my Spock ears half way through the production but I’ll save that for another article.

Here’s the sculpture at present. I hope to finish it today and then do the base which will have ripples in a circle emanating from the neck. The base will be molded separate and cast in clear tinted resin to resemble water.

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This was my very first movie job. I was referred to the job kindly by Rick Baker. Ve and I were living together at the time and the sculpture took up much of our apartment kitchen!

Here is Paul Gentry in the kitchen next to the water based clay sculpture I did on the floor. I made a huge plaster mold. and cast the head out of latex supported by a fiber glass under skull. The under portion of the chin and the next were constructed out of foam, cotton and latex. I took the picture. You can see our barber chair and the mask shelf of our Toluca Lake Apartment back in 1976. Paul is holding the plaster cast of the head in his hands.