Locations part 2, Costume and Makeup

LOCATIONS AGAIN?

Although we were building sets we could only afford the bedroom and hallway, the bathroom front door and cellar stairs had to be real locations. I must have scoured for hours on right move and google search looking for the right places to film in. All those specific places I needed were in very difficult to find, at least in the specific look I was going for.

Most bathrooms were modern and to find a period bathroom in the UK was so hard. A few prospects presented themselves. The first came from a house in Crosby Liverpool in the form of a well maintained but recently sold Victorian house with all the original rooms still intact. I managed to contact the owner by dropping a letter through the door and got myself a tour of the place. The owner was lovely and the place fantastic but the front entrance didn’t look big enough to sustain the illusion of such a large house. The cellar was a no-go and the bathroom was very good but we had recently stumbled upon a place I knew about from the beginning but hadn’t considered.
Suggested to me as a place that could be dressed as a bathroom by a location manager – Victoria Baths in Manchester is a 1900s untouched building which now functions as an events venue.
We got a tour round and found not only an anteroom of the Turkish baths but also a very good cellar. We arranged to book it and this left us only with the front entrance.

I had visited a place in Macclesfield but the owner couldn’t allow us to film there due to another recent production who had treated the place very badly.
I found through another location manager the house of a man who was a tutor in Liverpool who let out his house for many filming locations. I got a tour round and found the entrance if dressed properly would work but still had to arrange a fee with the owner….

SHAKE AND MAKEUP

Our monster mask was progressing in the computer but not in the right way but Demitris assured me it would come together in the sculpt….
After a few weeks of sculpting the head began to look magnificent and was drifting back over to the concept art it had come from. It would open its mouth as the operator did and would work perfectly.

One issue that presented itself was due to Demitris busy work schedule we had to look at getting or hands built elsewhere. I decided to buy premade up ones from Basement FX in the US
which would service us fine for the fleeting glimpses they would be seen.

We had also moved over from foam latex to silicone as Demitiris believed we would get more realistic flesh tones out of the mask and more translucency with our lighting.

COSTUME DRAMA

Mike Keogh producer had passed us onto Rebecca Chubsey an upcoming costume designer who I met with in Manchester. Her first designs where wrong but mainly because of a mistake in the brief I had given. she went away and came back with inspired designs for the clothing our monster needed, a tattered shin length gown with multiple layers and large humped shoulder and back to help break up the human silhouette.
Masons designs also needed refining which were originally the belly button high slacks and suits that newspaper men used to wear. Rebecca realized we needed a classic suit design that still lasts through to today, your basic lounge suit that offers a formal front with minimalist colors, black with white shirt and black tie.
The victims outfit similarly needed tweaking from a cardigan knitwear approach to a more stylistic pastel and art deco style, a more hitchockian vibe to help sell the era we were in more.