What you working on Tom? Pumpkin Head!
Well what the hell is it? Pumkin Head.
What's that thing right there? Pumpkin. Head.
I'm Tom Woodruff Junior and I'm a co-designer of pumpkin head.
I'm Alec Gillis, I'm also one of the co-designers of pumpkin head.
The year was 1986 I think it started in '87, we shot in the summer didn't we?
Yeah, I think so. It was after monster squad and it was exciting for Stan
because it was his first directing gig and we were there to support him, he stepped out of the design process.
This is Shane Mahan sitting with John Rosengrant. Hi it's John... John and Shane.
Let's go back in time. Here we are hard at work at the Stan Winston studio, this is
what we did every day. What it does show you is that we
very serious young men.
This is one of the first drawings that I did for the baby version of pumpkin head, what's interesting is that the looseness
of all these drawing was all we needed to sell the idea to ourselves.
This was about all we need to do back then, we were designing to take it to
the next step which was sculpture. I cringe at the perspective on the eyes on that,
but it got us to the next step. I think the final drawing of the
head was based on the accumulation of all the other drawings that were taken, bits and
pieces. I did the final drawing of the head and Tom did the final drawing of the body
and then I sculpted the head and then you sculpted the body with John.
I think John is opening up a clay press? It was a version of the movie where
it needed to incorporate some of Lance Hendrickson's features into it and that's something that
I worked on. Shane is working on the intermediate stage pumpkin head, and here's Alec---
I think I had just returned from Predator during this period, or maybe it
was right before I left, I can't remember. I think you had just come back.
This is me, Tom, because I was pumpkin head, this is our trash bag version
test, the idea is to really show the silhouette, because silhouette is what the design is all
about. When we're doing monster stuff that's the biggest thing; more important than any
detail is the silhouette. We cover the performer in black leotards and we have a bunch of black
built up foam, black plastic on the head, we can really evaluate how the shapes work
and how the shapes move when the performer is in motion.
This was an early test of the supports, the leg extensions, which we never intended
for them to be weight supporting and being able to walk around on two legs, there was
always the idea that we would have some kind of a rigging system to take the weight off
because we didn't want to build them up so big that we made the legs bulky in order
to hold the weight. We wanted to keep everything really thin and really sleek in design.
Here are some foam pieces up top over the metal and you could see it was real heavy.
This is also another harness test we were doing with foam covered legs.
And Tom's uncovered legs, he's in his daisy-dukes. I'm in the background
where more appropriately lengthed shorts. You can see the progression of
it, it has an organic feel and flow. This is Dave Nelson making his cameo appearance,
he was the key mechanic on this and he came up with some really nice articulated insert
hands, as you can see. Of course those where just used when Tom's hands in the suit were
just pose able, there were never articulated hands in the pose able suit.
There were enough design aspects of the movie that each of us felt like we
had a fair contribution to it because of the different stages Pumpkin Head.
People are going to look at the pictures of these paintings that are so theatrical,
but a lot of these are flash photographs so they really blanch every thing out, otherwise
you're going to think, "What the hell, the paintings are so rough."
Here it is in raw foam, so once it came out all foam we were anxious to get
it on Tom and start moving around and check it. But you can see the progression from the
garbage bag test to here where it's starting to feel like something.
The hole the in throat is actually where Tom sees out.
The head is on top of his head. Which again is a cleaver hiding
place, which we had learned from aliens; the head set on top of the actors head and the
neck is where the hiding place for the eyes were.
You can really see it starting to come to life, very dynamic at this point.
Here we are painting away. I remember John was quite a workhorse
when it came to painting; cranking out heads and bodies and so on. I think I painted the
head and the neck in about the same amount of time John did a lot of paintings on hands.
Tom was painting bodies as well. This is the end-of-skull for the
baby version where the only mechanization it had was the eyebrows and the eye balls,
and the open and close jaw. Mechanic Steve James adding weight
to the head, stage two I think. Shane painting away. Where those transition make-ups or were
those just faces to go on? I think those were some king of
transitional make-ups. I ended up painting those on. You can kind of see a little bit
of the Lance Hendrickson vibe in there. The whole paint scheme of this
thing was we found some things in a forensic medicine book; that kind of dead, decaying
flesh look, and that was the idea. We wanted to make sure it was very opposite to aliens
with black... very different from that. We're starting to test out the mechanisms here.
We had varying thicknesses in the
skin to create the panther-like look so that the wrinkles that were sculptured in would
get accentuated when the creature snarled. We also created, for parts of the
mechanism like the cheeks and the brows, instead of just have hard shells we created poly-foam
sections so that they would actually compress a little bit when they were moving the skin,
so you wouldn't see hard edges. I think Shane and Richard came
off of Predator, and Tom, Alec and myself had gotten started ahead of when they came back.
Shane was also heavily involved with the witch makeup.
I had jumped off of all the creature stuff and gotten involved with the witch and
started her process, which was time consuming. So as the guys were finished the suits I was
finishing her. I don't think we realized that
Pumpkin Head would become the cult favourite that it became, we were just doing what was
fun and that made it even more rewarding when the film did well for Stan, everybody remembers Pumpkin Head.
People always ask us what our favourite
monster was and you're always giving the answer, "Well that's like trying to pick
your favourite child", but really my favourite child is pumpkin head.
Just don't tell the other kids that.
This is Tom and Alec for the Stan Winston School of Character Arts saying thanks for watching.
I'm John Rosengrant, keep your eyes peeled for more to come.
I'm Shane Mahan, thanks very much.