>>IAN STEVENSON: Hi, I’m Ian Stevenson.
I was part of the crew at Stan Winston Studios for T2.
>>EVAN BRAINARD: This is Evan Brainard.
I was one of the mechanical engineers on Terminator 2: Judgement Day.
>>BRUCE SPAULDING FULLER: This is Bruce Spaulding Fuller, and I worked on Terminator 2: Judgement
Day.
>>EVAN BRAINARD: The “Pretzel Man,” the “T-1000”, this was basically the last
time we see him as he explodes and falls backwards into the molten metal.
On the day when we were on set all we did is the initial movement.
And then Jim Cameron, the director, swapped in just a white frame.
You can see like one or two frames, it’s just white
and then we cut to the second puppet – full free standing puppet –
where there’s a whole leg mechanism that’s operated from below
with four puppeteers: two puppeteers on each leg.
>>IAN STEVENSON: So this is Bruce Fuller sculpting on one of the T-1000 heads.
>>BRUCE SPAULDING FULLER: The head that I’m working on is for the T-1000 and it’s for
what we called the “Pretzel Man.”
A lot of the heads for both Arnold and the T-1000 were cyber-scanned for the first time
instead of life-casts of the actor.
And cyber-scan was pretty much in its infancy at the time.
They were very rough.
We actually made molds on them and made a clay press out of the molds and then cleaned
that up and that’s how they were achieved.
[The Final “Splash Head” Effect in TERMINATOR 2: JUDGMENT DAY]
>>IAN STEVENSON: So this is the T-1000 split head after it gets shot by a shotgun.
That shine that you see on the inside there, it’s (Krylon) Crystal Clear.
We piled on layer after layer after layer of Crystal Clear in order to get that shine
after having very carefully sculpted it and smoothed it out for the molding process.
This is John Rosengrant wearing the split head suit.
His head’s cocked back at an absolutely horrendous position to get this shot.
[Off Camera Voice: Action…
Okay]
>>IAN STEVENSON: So here we took an actual police uniform and we put it over a body
and then we impregnated it with resin so that it would hold a shape after we’d dressed
in the wrinkles as we wanted them.
Then we split the arm.
Christopher Swift sculpted in the detail to make it look like a big splash split.
Here you can see Christopher Swift standing behind me helping to secure the arm as we
do our first initial tests of the arm splitting open.
In the actual film it flies open quickly but we didn’t want to damage any of the cables
or any of the mechanism that operated it in our first test here.
And you can see the cables running down my leg that leads to a controller which allows
the arm to split away from the body and controls the hand, the arm.
The left arm is not mechanical.
As you can see it’s mine.
I have to hold it very still.
Every time they move that lever it puts a lot of pressure
and you can see my body kinda shaking around as they’re moving it.
[pause]
Chris Swift and Andy Schoneberg are working on the big splash body,
a very similar effect to the one that happens with the head after it gets shot with a shotgun.
Again the same process we used… for the uniform parts.
We used resin to capture the wrinkles and hold them solid and then sculpted in the splash.
Then this was shined up with Crystal Clear and then a mold was made on that.
Here we’re taking it apart for mold making.
Got a little dodgy there…
Now here you can see it was a full puppet.
You can see the puppeteers peeking up from behind.
There’s Shannon Shea and Evan Brainard.
>>EVAN BRAINARD: In that shot where we see the legs operating, Shannon and I are probably
operating the handles that make the puppet go up and down
and there’s probably two more guys below that are basically handling just adjustment.
So like you could go left to right or forward and back under the power of those two guys.
>>IAN STEVENSON: This is the first test of that mechanized split –-
>>EVAN BRAINARD: And what we did is used a cut out piece of nylon plastic, just a sheet
of it.
And we folded it in half and that’s the puppet closed.
And it was under so much tension that we had to have a locking mechanism and that was held
together with a pneumatic cylinder.
The neat thing about the nylon is we could, you know, cut it to any shape.
So once we saw what that pattern looked like open, you know it was a very organic splash.
>>BRUCE SPAULDING FULLER: I don’t think many people, because it was the first CG film
and CG gets a lot of credit, I don’t think a lot of people realize how many puppets are
in this film.
I mean there are at least a dozen different puppets of different things in this film.