>>Bill Basso: Hi this is Bill Basso.
>>Shane Mahan: Hello, my name is Shane Mahan.
>>Bruce Spaulding Fuller: Hi, this is Bruce Spaulding Fuller for the Stan Winston School of Character Arts
and we're going to watch a behind the scenes tour of Predator II.
This is the initial full-figure design drawing that
was done by John Rosengrant
showing the whole critter. There he is being sculpted.
>>Bill Basso: This was my first job at Stan Winston Studio back in 1989.
I remember being really excited getting the call
to come in and work on Predator II, and I believe we were also doing Edward Scissorhands
at that time.
But to work on a Predator film was a real thrill.
Crash McCreery, rendering out a
A Predator face design.
This is Shane sculpting the hero Kevin Peter Hall Predator Head for Predator 2.
>>Bruce Spaulding Fuller: And John is working on the stunt head, so we literally did everything twice. On this film. Smaller and Larger.
>>Shane Mahan: Again, we're using WED clay,
which is an earth
water-base clay just to expedite the speed of things. I think in retrospect, I would've
used
Roma. This is Bruce Fuller
>>Bill Basso: There's Bruce. Bruce Fuller sculpting the armored backpack.
Including the medical kit.
>>Bruce Spaulding Fuller: Here I am working on the backpack
armor. Again, WED clay. We did everything WED clay.
Very kind of new experience for me not doing something organic, but doing something more
hard-edged.
See those shingles, more or less on the shoulder piece?
That was in Crash's drawing. I was handed a very, very complete drawing from Crash.
Stan's dictum was like, you know, I was to do a portrait of that drawing.
To actually make all those shingles in WED clay, that um,
that was very interesting.
Here we go to the Predator's bodies being prepared for molding. This is a WED clay sculpture,
so if you were to just leave it out in the open air,
it would dry out and crack and fall off the form.
And nobody wants that. What they're doing, is they're painting shellac
all over the clay. They're sealing the clay.
What happens next, is they're going to go with fiberglass, with gel-coat, and then back
it up with fiberglass cloth
and make a two-piece mold on this.
First, the clay needs to be completely, completely sealed
so that the fiberglass doesn't stick in it.
The clay can set out in the open air while the mold's happening.
>>Shane Mahan: At this point,
the mold has been, the sculpture's been laid up for a two-piece mold.
This looks like a test fitting on Brian Simpson, who was
one of our assistants on the first film, and then he was sort of shanghai'd into becoming
a stunt man,
and then he's had a great career ever since as a stunt performer.
You know, they're doing a test there with Stan.
>>Bruce Spaulding Fuller: See, at this point, we were trying to run
a different color foam
right in the same mold, so we would run two different batches of foam. We'd run a gray
batch of foam,
and then a yellowy batch of foam. Then we'd paint the gray in,
and then dump the yellowy batch right on top of it and close the whole mold up at the same
time.
You end up with this sloppy, but effective two-toned version. You can see the gray sort
of bleeds into the yellow, but it gets the basic colors where you want it.
>>Bruce Spaulding Fuller: This is Bruce Spaulding Fuller for the Stan Winston School of Character Arts.
>>Shane Mahan: My name is Shane Mahan.
>>Bill Basso: This is Bill Basso. I hope you've enjoyed this behind the scenes peak at some
of the effects work for Predator II.