When my lovely wife Erica told me the Pittsburgh’s own No Name Players was producing Evil Dead the musical in June, I couldn’t believe that I hadn’t heard of it. I wondered who would be doing the FX? I sent them an email just on the off chance that they didn’t already have someone in place and what do you know?! Great! Don DiGiulio and I met for some coffee and he told me about some of the mind blowing FX in the show and I signed on right away. I read the script and it is one of the most hilarious things I’ve ever read. And it is completely full of crazy blood and make-up effects. We’ve been working on them for a couple weeks now and the shop is full of demons, blood sprayers, shotgun rigs, chainsaw parts, and electro-magnetic solenoids. To date I’ve been working with David Hartman, Kyle Roberts, Dale Capelanio, Michael Strapac, Courtney Jacobs, Jennifer Hoffman, and Michaela Sulka, with more folks coming on every day. This project is really letting us push our live on stage special effects to new levels. We will premiere our new dagger stabbing rig that creates an effect where a person may be stabbed clear through such that the blade tip exits the opposite side of the body, when the dagger is removed the blade disappears back into the body. I thought of the design for that a couple years back and even built the prototype version for Bricolage’s Hunter/Gatherers, but I’ve been wanting to do this stab effect for a long time. It is very exciting to me to get to build it. There are tons of puppet gags throughout the show too for which I intend to enlist the assistance of my robofriends Andrew Hosmer and Dan Thomson. And there will be blood letting. My god will there be blood letting. Complete with a splatter zone in the audience! This show is going to be awesome. More soon on the progress…
We are certainly plugging along with our work on the show. We’ve been doing a lot of casting and painting- severed heads, prop axes and shotguns, rubber daggers and chains for the chainsaw. Many molds have been made of Ash’s severed hand and the first foam latex hand is in the oven. The demon sculpts are nearly finished. Many of us had our hands on those pieces, but they are mostly Kyle’s work and they are pretty awesome. The chainsaw is nearing completion and has a sweet blood sprayer built into it. We’ve been doing a lot of blood sprayer work and just got in some 20gal/minute sprayer heads! They are pretty epic. We’ve been playing with some new blood recipes to get our costs down because there is going to be sooooooo much blood. Picked up a moose head from Don too, but I’ll tell you more about that later…
