hey it's Norm from Tested don't come and at the end of six months finally we're
almost ready almost ready almost to reveal the Zoidberg project if this is
the first time you're seeing this project you're in for a big surprise
this is Frank Ippolito makeup artists a special effects artist
you have been working on this for us for several months now and it's been quite
the journey yeah let's walk through that process now we wanted to create a
Zoidberg a lifelike Zoidberg costume for WonderCon and that all starts with
design yeah so here we have Zoidberg basically from the television show right
and it looks very cartoony and what did you take from this you want it to feel
like the cartoon but I wanted to bring a little bit of life to it a little bit
more realism mm-hmm and our director friends at Futurama sent me turnarounds
of Zoidberg - can I give me an idea of all of the little nuances of the
character right the shapes of silhouettes and what you're telling me
forms is the most important the most important thing is the forms on this
because you could get in and sculpt all kinds of little details but it's not
going to be Zoidberg so right got a it's got to look like him and in the broad
stroke forms and then you went and found some inspiration online other people
who've kind of interpreted their version of Zoidberg what it would look like if
he was the real-life character yeah I found some some drawings online and then
my friend race did a couple of designs in Photoshop and this is one of his
which is kind of a little bit more of a realistic version of soy burger and so
now I want to find the happy medium between this and the cartoon so and so
you with race the next step was to turn this 2d design into a 3d sculpt yes and
you guys built maquettes which we have right here so talk about the process of
building these in that cats so we took a small head form and we just put clay on
there to just kind of block out some shapes and this is where we got to kind
of play with designs like somewhere a little bit more extreme and a little bit
more monstery somewhere a little bit more subdued and this is just to kind of
get a feel for forms before we go into the giant one mmm and like here looks
more like a Cthulhu character yeah but what did you end up with you wanted
something that was I wanted something that was still a little bit more leaning
towards the cartoon and had that like hint of realism with the textures yeah
right of his skin and from there you build a life-size sculpt yeah now we
don't have that sculpt here cuz you actually use its sculpt you could see
stored in the base destroyed what was the sculpting process like we took a
life cast of another friend of mine and I started just putting clay on there
similar to the way the maquettes were done but full-sized and from there I
worked out all of those forms and shapes and and got the silhouette to where I
liked it and just kept refining it and refining it until it it felt like
zoidberg mmm felt like a silly park it's like it's just that's the description
you just get to a point you're just like yeah that's it got it alright so when
you got to that point you needed to create a mold because it wasn't clay
that we're gonna put on our head so you want to create a there was gonna be a
foam latex yes and talk about the mold making process so what we did is I made
a two-piece epoxy mold is an epoxy from smooth on I made a core insert which is
where the animatronics are gonna fit inside of here
so it almost feels like a little hard hat so if you imagine that the air space
inside of a hard hat yeah that's how much room I have to fit the animatronics
Wow servos and the radio and all that stuff and if you look at the inside of
this mold this is the texture of that sculpt yes right all you all the the
wrinkles all the creases it's all here including the holes for the eye forms
yes but what's not here are the tentacles is what brings tentacles you
didn't mold that in one piece yeah because they're in front of his face you
the way mold making works that wouldn't have been able to get the clay out right
never would have worked so I had to cut his tentacles off to make it work right
and so you know separate bowls of that so there's a separate set of molds for
that and that's what this is it's it's again a two-piece and it's got a core
inside of there and that will take fingers to me yeah that's that's the
amount of space that we have for the animatronics in the tentacles mmm if you
look at this without there that's the sculpture a negative but then this is
how much room I have for them and that fits in there and that itself is one
mold and then both of these get injected with foam latex all right and then you
get something and then I get a foam casting this is your first foam cast
this is the first foam casting out of the head mold and you could see that the
tentacles have been cut off mm-hmm I don't have the tentacle part it's it's
with the animatronics right so okay this looks terrifying yes it is
very weird-looking without his technical can I also mention that this foam latex
smells like it smells like sponge cake there's a sweetness to it that's weird
it is weird but I can't help but smell that sorry I'm home latex really stinky
and Roland does something to his phone where it doesn't stink too bad
best in the business he also makes the foam latex smell real nice yes and these
are the seams so where those two pieces come apart yes okay so we had a get rid
of these seams you cut them off and then you fill it with a little bit of
patching material then you got to put the tentacles back on and then once you
do that then we have another casting which in the middle of a paint process
yeah this is Zoidberg with the tentacles now on hmm
but it's not just gonna be a mask yeah that our Zord board actor is gonna wear
you also have the feet with feet which these are unfinished versions of the
feet but there's gonna have the sandals built on the right and this will
eventually be kind of like a shoe okay okay and then we have the claws which
aren't here either those are being worked on right now I'm working on by my
friend Ben mm-hmm and then we also have this body form it's gonna go underneath
the Wardrobe so there's wardrobe yeah wardrobes getting built Wow
and then this is the form which gives sword very kind of that Bell shape it's
so many different techniques and processes that come together to make
this costume animatronic sculpting molding casting painting and wardrobe
and it's all gonna come together at WonderCon which is just next week yeah
so we're not gonna make you wait we're gonna jump to WonderCon right now and
we'll see you there and we'll see Zoidberg there
here we are we're at WonderCon 2014 Frank today's a day
finally finally and it's also your birthday happy birthday Thanks are you
working on your birthday yes um so since we've seen you it's been a week and you
finished up and you your team finished up Zoidberg yes whole let's go over all
the components now there Johnny let's say from the feet up okay zoidberg's
feet right there these were sculpted and then molded and
then this is just a latex skin with a poly foam inside and this is foam
fabricated l200 on here we just glued some rubber on the bottom so that I
don't slip and fall and tear up the phone okay that's the cool it I put him
on earlier in there plenty comfortable socks in here I'm just going bare feet
in there your feet bare feet they'll be stinky by the end of this one awesome
thanks Frank moving on up you have hands claws laws so once we made the body of
the claws out of the fiberglass so that it'll click and then my buddy Ben bathe
he fabricated all the rest of this risk together it's just latex that's glued
onto here there's a leather glove inside and then just some stuff to kind of bulk
up the arms so it's not too skinny all right how flexible is not gonna be how
the whole it moves really well listen to that Wilton well that was what you know
I wanted to get away from is that original poly foam and latex casting was
too stiff right and this just has a ton of movement so Ben did an awesome job
putting this together and watch him on Jim Henson's Creature Shop yeah so the
Wardrobe there's pants with suspenders there is this mock turtleneck thing and
then the lab coat Wow and this is all custom made yeah this is all custom made
we added a little bit of cotton batting just to help hide some of the ribbing on
here make it a little smoother right and of course whatever was doing for is the
sculpture of the head let's get to that all righty
Wow here he is that sure looks good so where the paint job is finished it looks
very different from what you showed us last week yeah well what I started doing
is doing a whole lot of subsurface kind of detailee stuff to really give a bunch
of life to it but the next morning I went in and I was like you know what
everything that we've done started off a little bit extreme and trying to make
things to life and then we real dit back in cos øy
burgers a pretty simple character yeah the same thing with the colors he's a
flat tone in there not that I wanted to paint him all one color there's they're
still shadowing and some color differentials but he needed to be a
little bit more normal colored a little bit more plain to really just sell what
the rest of right he's only three colors that's white he's that green color is
coral II cannot color yeah sweet and then inside the animatronics yeah I'm
gonna move got the remote right there alright so there was no control here it
puts on there you go and what explain how this works
so we have four servos up in the top of the head and then there's four cables
that come down to these little mechanisms originally my buddy Terry had
designed a 12 servo system which they would have been able to do everything
but Terry had to go jump onto another project so my buddy Pete Chewbacca came
in and put all this together is and we made it work so we're gonna have someone
Manning the animatronic you are going to be dressing up as Lloyd bird it's her
birthday could not be more appropriate when I walk the floor of WonderCon and
surprise the fans there you go alright let's do it
thank you
oh here all the head is gonna wet