Recently I caught up with Alan Hedgcock and Cliff Wallace of Creature Effects, a dynamic UK based special effects house. I spoke with them about their part in the recent thriller 28 days later and what it's like working with directors like Ridley Scott, Steve Norrington, Clive Barker and Ken Russell. Ladies and Gentlemen, speaking on behalf of Creature effects, Mr. Cliff Wallace.

NE-FX: Thank you very much for sharing your time with me today. Between you and your partner Alan Hedgcock you have some pretty amazing credits! From Hellraiser and Hellraiser 2, to Death Machine, Lair of the White Worm, Black Hawk Down and of course 28 Days Later.  That's a pretty amazing range of directors and film styles. What draws you to a project?

CW: Only the need to make some money and keep going really. Creature Effects is ten years old this year and that's something of an achievement, but we'd be lying if we said that every job that we do excites us wildly. The trick is finding something in that job that makes it worthwhile for you - so you try and use a material or an approach that you haven't tried before and try and get something out of it other than just a paycheck.

NE-FX: I can guess from your filmographies, but I would like to know, How did you two meet?

CW: We met at Bob Keen's company - Image Animation, I had probably been there about a year when Alan turned up. Bob has always had an enormous talent for spotting potential and enthusiasm in people, even when, in my case certainly, the skills were pretty embryonic.

NE-FX: Whom did you learn from and how did you get your start?

CW: I don't think I ever considered working in makeup effects until I saw 'the Howling', although I'd always been interested in horror films and literature. My list of influences is probably much the same as a lot of other guys I know who do this, I was brought up on Thunderbirds, and (Ray) Harryhausen movies, Hammer and Amicus pics, I built Aurora glow in the dark monster kits and read the Pan Book of horror stories so I guess Id always been drawn to the fantastique, but it wasn't until I started seeing make-ups actually move that I got really interested. I was in my early twenties at the time and was on a media studies course trying to learn how to direct pop videos. I just became obsessed and read everything I could, saw every movie that came out, and whenever a film was being shot in England that had makeup effects in I'd write to whoever was in charge and ask if I could go and meet them. The first person who ever replied to me was Rick Baker, who was in England doing 'Greystoke'. At this time Id made nothing, but Rick was very good to me and I got to visit a couple more times and meet Tom Mcloughlin who gave me some foam latex to mess about with. Later I got to meet Chris Tucker who was working on 'Company of Wolves', and there I met a guy called Dave Elsey who was a couple of years younger than me but was actually making all this neat stuff and was also looking to break in to the industry. We used to go and visit Chris at his house quite often, and to practice makeup on each other. There weren't any makeup schools back then so it was very much a case of making stuff in your bedroom. I churned out masks and used to sell them on a mates stall in Covent garden market, and a researcher from a kids tv show saw them and I got invited on the show. A company called Coast to Coast who did the Max Headroom make-ups saw me on it and offered me a couple of weeks work on a film they were doing. The film was called Rawhead Rex-which was based on the Clive Barker story. Id read the Books of Blood and loved them, and while I was there I heard about another Clive Barker project that was gearing up, and that lead me to Bob Keen's door. That project was 'Hellraiser '

NE-FX: Mr. Wallace, You worked on Hellraiser and Hellbound: Hellraiser II, what was it like working with Clive Barker on these projects?

CW: Hellraiser really was the best of times for me, and Clive was a very interesting person to be around. He was just on fire at the time, and he seemed to be in every magazine that you picked up. He had a show on in the West End 'The Secret Life of Cartoons', his first novel 'The Damnation Game' had just come out, and he was just bursting with enthusiasm and creativity. He was such a cool person to talk to, and he had time for everyone. I remember being quite upset when he left the Uk for the States. I’m still a huge Clive Barker fan.

NE-FX: The 'Frank' make-up in the first movie was amazing.  I just have to ask, how was the 'Frank Assembly' sequence done?

CW: Thanks. Frank was the first time I'd ever done a multi piece makeup so I was relieved it worked out alright. The suit was all sculpted in pieces too, mainly because we didn't have a big enough oven. I think it was supposed to shoot for two days, and poor Oliver Smith who played Frank ended up having to wear it for two weeks.  I didn't really build it to last. After the first day I think it was only the blood and slime that held it together.The Birth of Frank was shot some time after the rest of the movie had been completed and New Line had decided that they might have something good on their hands, so they put in more money to shoot some new stuff. Originally Frank had been bricked up behind a wall and he just broke out through the plaster. I think the birth sequence really lifted the film and it was great fun to do. Most of it was really simple. The puppet sections, the spine coming up through the floorboards etc were just rodded from beneath the set, there was a lot of wax meltdown effects shot in reverse for things like the brain growing and the organs forming. The final puppet was a fairly complicated animatronic from another movie that we actually found in a dumpster at Elstree studios. We stripped the old skin off and redressed it.

NE-FX: The Hellraiser series introduced the world to those horror icons the Cenobites. Where did the Cenobite designs come from?

CW: There was a couple of months before all the funding in place for the movie, and during that time Bob Keen, who was in charge of the fx took a few of us over to Clive's House to just brainstorm and talk Horror movies, and I guess the designs pretty much came out of those sessions. Clive had done a lot of drawings and had some Witkin photos and underground piercing and tattoo mags, books on modern primitives, (this was all  long before  this sort of stuff made its way into the mainstream) all this bizarre, beautiful disturbing imagery, and these definitely colored our thinking.  The one design that Clive had already pretty much figured was the leader, Pinhead. The way he's described in 'The Hellbound Heart'-the novella on which Hellraiser's based, is almost exactly the way he appears in the movie.

NE-FX: I'm sure you are no strangers to tight deadlines, what is the scariest deadline you've been up against and what were you doing?

CW: Most deadlines are pretty scary these days. Prep times on effects seem to have dropped dramatically over the past ten years. I think its part of the 'fix it in post' mentality that exists now. There’s very few jobs you couldn't do with a couple more days on, especially if you take our approach and always try and use a material or a method you haven't tried before.

NE-FX: What was the hardest/most complicated effect/character/etc. you ever did, and why was it so difficult?

CW: One of the hardest things we've ever had to do was for the promo for Massive Attack's 'Teardrop' . In the video the  whole of the song is sung by a foetus inside the womb. We built a silicone radio controlled puppet that was hooked up to computer which in turn was hooked up to a DAT recording of the song. Theres nothing else in the video... Just the baby. Before the shoot we'd been most worried about the technical problems we might encounter with using a computer controlled puppet, but as it happened all that part of the job went swimmingly, it was just going round the houses on how the thing should look that nearly floored us, and we just ran out of time really. I  dont think the paint wasn't even dry when we shot on it.The promo won quite a few awards but only we know how close to being an abortion it really was. I know Alan still has nightmares about it.


NE-FX: Sometimes you write for the Lab-Tech section in Make-up Artist Magazine, Are topics picked for you, or are you in control of what you write about?

CW: Our brief on Lab tech is very open. We can write more or less what we like, and that's what we tend to do , we write about new products we've tried or new methods. Neither of us are actually very techie, and we try and keep in mind that a lot of the magazines readership aren't either so we use it as an ideas forum really. If anybody wants to know anything more technical they contact us through our website


NE-FX: In the most recent issue of Make-up Artist Magazine, your Lab Tech article speaks highly of the benefits of performing lifecasts with silicone, and mentions some of the products out there available to do just that. Have you had an opportunity to use these new techniques on real gigs yet and if so, what was the result?

CW: The technology for silicone lifecasting is definitely there, in fact its been there a long time . I was talking with Chris Tucker the other day and he was telling me about a product that he used regularly in the seventies. I think it does have some advantages which I outlined in the column but for myself I don’t know how much of an advantage having a slightly more accurate cast is. I’m not the greatest prosthetic makeup artist and the difference in results between the two methods isn't huge. Will it make my own make-ups any better? Probably not. I think that would take a lot more than a fractionally less distorted lifecast!

NE-FX: What have you learned while writing for Lab-Tech in Make-up Artist Magazine?

CW: Mainly how hard it is to come up with something different to say in each column. Actually if you read them there is a definite preoccupation with new materials, as that seems to be the only place where advances can be made. The basic protocols haven't changed for decades.

NE-FX: Let's talk for a moment about your most recent success, '28 Days Later'. When was it actually shot?

CW: About two years ago now. I must say that 28 Days Later was probably the best working experience we've had as a company.  We were lucky enough to put together a really good crew of people, who were all working for a lot less than they could get elsewhere, and we got along really well with the Director Danny Boyle, and the Producer Andrew MacDonald.

NE-FX: 28 Days later was advertised a lot and seemed to do well in the US. How was it received in the UK?

CW: Better than anyone expected I think. It was marketed very effectively and it had made its money back within the first couple of weeks in the UK. Of course in the States its done incredibly well, somewhere over $46m. When we were making it there was a reluctance to talk about it as being a horror movie, especially as part of it was financed by the National Lottery. But I think anyone with a grounding in the genre knew exactly what it was. And thankfully it was eventually marketed that way. I think because it was a Danny Boyle picture it drew a slightly different audience, and my impression was that the real gorehounds were expecting something that was more Dawn of the Dead than Day of the Triffids, but I’m very happy to be associated with it, and very proud of the work we did on it.

NE-FX: 28 Days was marketed in the US as a zombie movie.  The movie's 'monsters' however were played as hyper-kinetic infectious speed freaks rather than zombies. What decisions were made to portray the infected people in this way with a simple makeup and contacts combination as opposed to a George Romero type Zombie?

CW: We were involved right from the start on 28 days, which is kind of unusual for us, and we did consider the prosthetic route early on, but the 'infected' aren't supposed to be dead so it didn't seem wholly appropriate. We talked with Danny about doing something almost subliminal which would manifest itself at the height of rage, and we knew Danny was interested in (Francis) Bacon-esque imagery, so we looked towards combining something prosthetic with something digital to literally depict a sort of Shape of Rage.  One of our crew, Dom Hailstone, came up with some great still images, that everybody loved but which the post production people said they didn't have a hope in hell of reproducing for the time or the money, which was quite disappointing. It might well have pushed the film in another direction visually but I think it would have been worth it.  Actually if you want to see the sort of thing we had in mind you should check out Dom's video for 'Violent Delight's' track 'Transmission'  which is quite extraordinary and was largely done on a home computer! Eventually as our workload increased on other aspects of the production, we took a step back from the look of the  'Infected', though I think we can lay claim to the contact lens design if nothing else which were based on a design we had done for a Nike Commercial a few years earlier.

NE-FX: In 28 Days Later, during a particularly emotional sequence, Jim (the lead) returns home to find his parents' bodies dead in bed. First off, Congratulations on some superb work on the figures, they were most realistic and disturbing. Second, How were the dummies made?

CW: They were silicone dummies based on full body lifecasts of the actors. We cast the whole body in alginate , then poured plastillene into the mould and backed it up with biscuit foam. Then we sculpted the figures down to make them a little more skeletal. We then remoulded them and cast out the silicone positives. Essentially the figures are backless, so we produced mostly seamless moulds so that we didn't have to spent time seaming . We pretty much always do it this way. We get asked a lot how to get rid of seams on silicone. The best way is not to have them in the first place or to put them someplace where they're never going to be seen.

NE-FX: There seemed to be an enormous amount of detail on them and gratuitous camera time because of it.  What was the construction time for the effect?

CW: We had two weeks, not a great deal of time especially as we had half a dozen other effects going on as well.  Andy Garner and Adrian Getley did the bulk of the work, and just about everyone pitched in with the hair punching.

NE-FX: With respect to the choice to shoot on digital vs. film, What decisions
were made for the makeup?

CW: Because we were shooting digital we originally thought the set ups were going to be really quick and that it was almost going to be guerilla film making which was one of the considerations in not going the prosthetic route for the infected. As it happened the film was very meticulously shot and lit and I think that's pretty obvious when you look at it.

NE-FX: Here in the US 28 Days Later was released with a 'feel good' ending first then they re-released the alternate ending. Which one was used in the UK and which did audiences seem to like more?

CW: The feel good ending was used here, which personally I think was a shame. I like bleak endings, but I can understand the thinking that lay behind the decision to reshoot it totally. I think showing the film with both endings as they did in the US was a really good idea, and Im glad they've put the alternative ending on the DVD in the UK. There is another ending which was kind of cool too.

NE-FX: I had the opportunity to see John Schoonraad and his crew do their stuff at IMATS London. How was it working with the Schoonraad lifecasting team on this project?

CW: I first met John on Rawhead Rex years ago, and we've worked together lots ever since. He's usually about on the most of the projects we do., either lifecasting or mouldmaking. He's been around a long time but is still enthusiastic about what he does. Im glad so many people got to see him at IMATS last year because he stepped in at the last minute, and put on a really good display. I do think he's very good at what he does.

NE-FX: Is he still an unpaid spokesperson for Nivea Crème?

CW: Yeah - the Nivea works a treat though. If we have subjects with short hair we often don't bother to baldcap them, we just slaver their head with the cream. That way you dont end up losing texture at the back of the neck or round the ears.

NE-FX: With more thrillers like 28 days Later, Wrong Turn and The Ring reviving horror as a genre, it would seem audiences are returning to fear as an escape again.  Why do you think this is?

CW: I hope they are, because I’d love to get to work on a few more horror movies. I don’t have any off-pat psychological answer for you, I don’t think we've suddenly rediscovered a need for catharsis , I don’t think horror films are reflecting some post-millenial social malaise, but  I do know that the film industry is  basically cyclical and parasitic in nature, and if horror films are making money again then hopefully there'll be the usual frenzy of bandwagon jumping that inevitably occurs and hopefully some decent movies will come out of it.

NE-FX: I'll bet you have some interesting stories about working with Ken Russell on Lair of the White Worm. Any comment?

CW: Yes, but I can’t tell you any of them. Suffice it to say that he's quite an eccentric man in the morning, and in the afternoons he's quite extraordinarily eccentric. Euphamistically speaking of course.

NE-FX: You also worked with Steve Norrington on 'Death Machine' who later went on to Direct 'Blade'. Mr. Norrington started out as a makeup artist, so was working under a director that knew your industry more of a challenge for you?

CW: I think most people who ever worked for Steve have found it a challenge. He probably knows how to do everyone’s job on a film set as well as they do. Steve is an incredibly good makeup effects guy, great sculptor, great mechie...so yeah, we did set out to impress on Death Machine, and certainly all the work we did back then with translucent materials was because we were trying to push the envelope a bit and impress him and that work stood us in good stead for everything we've done since. It was our first job as a company and so in some small way creature effects exists because of Steve Norrington-which is kinda scary.

NE-FX: You have worked with and amazing range of talented, diverse directors. What have other directors you worked with, like say Ridley Scott, taught you?

CW: I've always been a big Ridley Scott fan, and just being on set everyday was an education. A lot of the set ups were so complex that they'd take all day to prepare, just keeping your patience and getting the job done has got to be tough under those conditions. I’m always impressed by someone who can see the big picture but appreciates the details, Ridley Scott's like that and I think that's a good way to be.

NE-FX: Aside from budget, what are the differences between working on something like Black Hawk Down where realism is essential vs. the considerably more 'over the top' effects of something like a Hellraiser for instance?

CW: Over the past few years there had been a move to sort of epic war  movies, it started with Saving Private Ryan and Band of Brothers continued with things like Gladiator and the Four Feathers and Black Hawk Down and is continuing with movies like Troy and Alexander the Great where a lot of the work that people like us are doing is making  dead bodies and dead horses. Essentially we've become prop makers, and what we make is a tiny part of a far bigger picture. On something like Hellraiser, or the kind of movies that got me interested in makeup effects in the early eighties, the makeup effects were centre stage. Often films were made solely to showcase the effects.  So I think our role has shifted quite significantly over the past fifteen years. A decade ago we were pretty convinced that makeup effects would be dead and that everything would be CGI- that’s certainly happened as far as creatures are concerned, but elsewhere what happened is that the work didn't disappear, it just went someplace else...I can remember a time not so long ago when if you saw a dummy on a film set it would be painted with emulsion paint and have plumbers hemp for hair. Hopefully the stuff we do is a little more realistic than that.

NE-FX: What advice would you give to aspiring makeup and effects artists?

CW: Ok, the short answer is check out the FAQ page on our website at www.creature-effects.com and if you really want to do it, don't let anyone put you off.

NE-FX: What is your favorite movie?

CW: My favourite movies probably aren't fx ones, but if we're talking about movies with cool stuff in them, Id have to say The Howling, American Werewolf, The Thing, Videodrome, Pumpkinhead, Guyver Dark Hero, The Creature from the Black Lagoon. Actually around the time we started Creature Effects, Alan wrote a book called 'Behind the Mask' which covered what we think of now as being the Golden age of Rubber which I guess we think of as being the 1980's. I have great affection for most of the genre movies from that period, even the really bad ones, because they're the ones that really influenced me to pursue this as a career.

NE-FX: With the wide array of impressive work, it's difficult, but if you could have done any character or effect from any movie already made, what would it be and why?

CW: I don’t think there’s anything specifically. I never look at a film and think that we could have done a better job. But I do sometimes wonder...

NE-FX: What films are you working on now?

CW: I've just been doing some work on a new Jerry Bruckheimer movie about King Arthur and we're both about to start on Ridley Scott's new movie 'Crusades' (Editors note: this will most likely be released as “Kingdom of Heaven” though details are sketchy.) which should be a lot of fun.  It’s another big epic war movie, so lots more dead bodies and horses. If were lucky we might even get to do some makeups too.

Mr. Wallace, thanks you for chatting with me, and I wish you and Mr Hedgcock all the best in your future endeavors. Please don't be strangers, feel free to stop by the discussion groups sometime and see what the group is up to. I am sure our members would love to chat with you.

Cliff Wallace and Alan Hedgcock can be contacted through their website here or you can read their latest article in the Lab-Tech Section of Make-Up Artist Magazine.

Be sure to check out our other interviews here.