everybody norm from tested here once again joined by Jasper Anderson of mr.
chickens prop shop that's right you're an effects artist down in Hollywood
you've worked on a bunch of films but in your spare time you also make creature
effects for hans and halloween and for many maybe any time of year yeah
and you've brought today one of your prop effects which is I love this it's a
it's a projected rear or front projected in this case but animated head tell me
about this so so this is the ghoul he's it's actually just a vacuform face shell
like this one and then what what's going on is that there's a video that's being
projected onto it from the front that kind of takes the flat image and wraps
it around so you get the illusion of a 3-dimensional head that's talking to you
totally and we've seen this effect use and all sorts of haunted attractions
even rides even yeah it'll make you know some very famous rides use effects like
this I love that you have different forms that you've sculpted at different
characters and what I love to know is how do you find a balance between what
is gonna be in the video versus what needs to be in the form because they're
working together in this projection mapping that's right I mean so the trick
is like you know a lot of people used to just kind of like grab a styrofoam wig
head and try to project a face on it and the thing is that like that's not the
shape of a real person's head and so what I did with these is this guy is
actually a prosthetic makeup on myself and so I used the mold from that makeup
to then make the face form so that the video and the head are actually from the
same source so it's kind of like you you flattened it and then you're wrapping it
back around the same shape you're all deriving from whatever character source
you're filming right and how much reduction
to happen or if this was a perfect face casts of of that creature would that be
a better effect like because this looks really nice and if you take away the
video it's actually pretty a morphus yeah it's kind of there's kind of like a
little playing around to figure out exactly what it is but what I found is
just kind of like smoothing out a lot of the features and especially the features
that are gonna be moving like the lips you know are gonna be going up and down
so if it had the lips you know perfectly shaped it would you would see that they
were rippling yeah yeah and so it's stuff like that that you know looks
funny when the projectors turned off but once it's on then the effect kind of
just works on its own it makes total sense now what about the video filming
and getting that to wrap around you film yourself in the character what do you do
with that video to get it to work so I took the video into After Effects
and I had to kind of have the projector running while I was editing it in order
to make sure that it was actually matching up because just the straight
video isn't quite enough and you have to kind of tweak the shapes and stuff and
like on this one I animated the eyes to make them a little more exaggerated and
cartoony so you're kind of creating somewhat stretching your because when
you're shooting for video that's expecting a flat canvas right this is
not and also I'm actually needs to blur the edges didn't get it a little bit
yeah to make it blend on to a white background um I see that you
this is front projected but I've seen online you've also experimented with
rear projection is that the same same process it's really it's very similar
but the difference is that when it's rear projected then I've got a little
tiny projector that I had to kind of chopped up and modify to be able to work
in inside the head and so it's a lot trickier to engineer but what's cool
about it is that then it's all self-contained and then the head can
move around right which is really kind of an unexpected extra level of it right
whoo you almost combine it with an animatronic neck
something and create a real moving character although for the purposes of
adding a display something like a head in a jar
maybe Futurama tired or in this case you have characters that live in in domes
and in or wig that is very very cool effect tell me about the other pieces of
this vacuform phases very reflective you could get a off-the-shelf wig where
would you get something like a dome like this so this the globe is from a
lighting supply place and I think they make them for like street lights but you
can find them online and they'll cut the openings usually big enough so that you
can you know fit it around the head and if you dress that up with a good wig you
get like a whole illusion for not a whole lot of trouble yeah I also know
that you do other projection effects not just on faces until you've experimented
with faces on flat surfaces kind of a ghouls coming out of walls right yeah
I've I found that like this kind of stuff is really fun and they're kind of
big show off effects but what I think is really cool about projectors is that you
can do these really subtle little like shadows off in the corner and and sort
of unexpected little things that really add like an extra element to to whatever
you're putting on totally totally I mean this is the kind of thing if I could
have a projector running 24/7 I'd want to have it's great all sorts of
characters and it really does sound like a lot of work to film something create a
character and then also tweak it in the the video image to get it map onto this
use do you sell these as kits these are kits yes very very cool people can find
out more about your kits jestro's kits at chicken props calm yep as well as
other animatronics and other creature things that you youtube but thank you so
much for sharing with us yeah you're cool my pleasure
you