The Revenge of Kong: The Pteranodon

I have become engaged in a King Kong fan film project called "The Revenge of Kong", where my job is to create a bunch of stop-motion dinosaurs. I started with a creature, that will hopefully look something like the above image in the finished retro-styled film. It's the grand Pteranodon, once in my childhood the greatest flying monster that ever lived, but now dwarfed by even bigger airborne reptiles that have been dug up from the fossil beds. I have to admit, I've hardly learned the names of these new paleonthological discoveries -to me the Pteranodon is still the king of the winged giants of prehistoria.

My main inspiration, in keeping with the retro feel, was Charles Knight's paleonthological artwork, which, by the way, was also the template for Marcel Delgado, who built the original Kong puppets.

To build the armature I resorted to a classic reconstruction of the Pteranodon skeleton fossil from the American Museum, and lined up aluminum wires along a print-out of this reconstruction, cutting them to the appropriate lengths.

The aluminum wires are left bare where the joints are, but covered with bits of thin metal rods where the bones -the hard parts- are in the real skeleton. Thermoplastic, also called Polymorph, is holding the whole thing together.

I wanted to be really careful with how the head turned out, so I sculpted the better part of it in Monster Clay medium grade, mainly using tiny loop tools.

This sculpture was encased in a dental plaster mold and a hollow latex copy of the sculpture was produced from this mold. The crest was cut from cardboard, the back card of a drawing pad, actually, and then coated with latex. The latex, by the way, is tinted with Monster Maker's latex tints. And I have, as you see, started to cover the armature with soft string and thin polyurethane foam.

Where my thumb is there is a wing nut buried in the thermoplastic, and this will function as a attachment point for a support arm, holding the puppet up when animating it.

Here we have the puppet covered up with string and foam, and I've also started to add a chest cage crest with cotton and latex. This crest is, as I understand it, where the strong muscles for the arms were attached on the real animal.

I covered parts of the puppet body with cast textured latex skins, and painted the whole thing with two layers of tinted latex; First a black, and then the traditional Pteranodon orange. Basically the last layer was dry brushed on using a foam sponge, leaving dark shadows from the black layer underneath peering through here and there.

Now, to create the leathery wing membranes between the outstretched arms and the body I've mixed up some plaster of Paris, basically cheap hobby plaster, and poured it into a cradle of clay (Soft Monster Clay). The Pteranodon puppet is then submerged halfway into this plaster mix, which (important) has the consistency of about whipped cream.

Using pipe cleaners and pointy tools I'm painting in the skin shapes using tinted latex, finishing off the job with a sponge dipped in the latex. I've applied two layers.

When the plaster has set up it's just about carefully prying the whole puppet out of its plaster cradle, washing it off, and adding details like airbrushed veins, and of course painting the eyes.

My flying rig support arm will be covered with greenscreen sticky tape, and become invisible when in front of my greenscreen background.

Here we have the finished puppet. It's about a foot from wing tip to wing tip. There will be more prehistoric puppets for this Kong fan film project, so stay tuned!

Puppets by Request: King Kong

Last year, British animator and King Kong enthusiast Lee Ashworth asked if I could make him a Kong replica puppet, and I set forth on my mission with some trepidation. Kong is one of the greatest pop culture icons of all time and I figured nailing down his look wouldn't be an easy task. I was right. It took me over a year to get the damn thing finished, and in the end it doesn't really look like Kong anyway. But we'll get back to that. I did blog about this project last year HERE.

After many attempts at sculpting Kong's face, Lee and I finally settled on this look.

Lee had sent me a ball and socket armature for his Kong puppet, but I deemed it to small to work for the hairy Kong puppet; I couldn't find any fur that was short enough. Instead I made one of my usual aluminum wire armatures, built after the same dimensions (though slightly scaled down) as one of the original Kong armatures.

Kong's eyes were plastic beads, which had a filed down smooth flat top surface,with added printouts of Photoshop eye art, and then covered with Crystal Clear plastic from SmoothOn.

Though the original Kong face was built up by master craftsman Marcel Delgado using cotton and "dental dam" (some kind of latex material which creates condom-like skins) I knew that I could never get the same felixibility out of one of my own latex constructions. Therefore the face was moulded in DragonSkin FX silicone. The eyes were inserted into silicone sockets.

The body was simply padded with foam rubber pieces. I added only enough of detail to get some bulging shapes under the fur.

Kong's face had, besides the jointed jaw, aluminum and copper wires inside the brow and the upper lip. Teeth and gums were sculpted in Chavant clay and cast in moothCast plastic from silicone moulds. The tongue was built up with latex and cotton.

Apparently Kong's fur in the original movie wasn't as gorilla-black as the black and white film suggests. It's been said that it was actually brown. I found a soft fake fur of agreeable length, which I decided would work well. It's a very dark brown, and has a slight stretch to it.

The build-up procedure was very simple. I just cut bits of the fur, like I was making patterns for an overall, and glued them down over the foam padding using a flexible contact cement. I also sculpted and cast in silicone Kong's ears and a chest piece.

Adding fur to Kong's head was another matter. Had I simply glued down bits of the fur like for the rest of the body, he would've had a huge head of hair. Instead I had to clip tufts of hair and glue them down a few hairs at a time, gradually making my way up from the neck to the brow.

This is a real low-budget Kong. I can point out several faults with this puppet, including a too thick neck, a slightly crooked jaw, a fur that's too long, etc, etc. But I think of this as "Kong Mark 1". I plan to give this character a go again and again, until I've nailed him down and found the best fur for this project. At least Lee got a pretty decent practice puppet out of this one.

Puppets by Request: Kong and the Cyclops

I am asked more and more often to make puppets for other animators, which is fun, but also steals time from my own projects. At the same time it's interesting to try and recreate the look of classic movie monsters. It's a lot harder than I initially thought.
Right now I'm working on a on a King King puppet, which will be just under a foot tall. As you may know, that is smaller than the original 1933 puppet by Marcel Delgado. The client sent me a ball and socket armature that he used for another puppet a while back. I modified this armature and will be using it for Kong.

I've done two face sculptures; One slightly rounded, which is the one I've picked for this armature, and one slightly elongated and a bit bigger. Right now the head I prefer has red "eyes". I touched them up in a few images to get a better look at what they might look like finished. Also, the teeth are just put there for a quick look.

 Also, you might recognize this fellow, which is being made for another client:

Again, the teeth are just there for show at the moment, and the eye will, of course, be replaced with a realistic one.