Whedonesque : Comments on 17448 : The monsters of Buffy and Angel.

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August 30 2008

The monsters of Buffy and Angel. FX artist John Vulich has some lovely sketches of early Buffy and Angel monsters up at his MySpace site. More cool Buffyverse stuff of his can be found over at the Optic Nerves Studios website.

Gacked from the Almost Human website:

Q: "Hey, I've noticed a lot of people claim to have done fx makeup for "Buffy" and "Angel"... what's up with that?"
A: Unfortunately, a lot of people do claim to have created FX for these shows. Let us clarify: John Vulich did amazing work on "Buffy" for 5 seasons and also did "Angel" season 2. Dave Miller did the first season of "Angel" and Joel Harlow contributed to Season 6 of "Buffy". Robert Hall/Almost Human did Seasons 3-5 of "Angel" / contributed to Season 6, and all of Season 7 of "Buffy the Vampire Slayer".

Any one else who claims to have "created makeup fx for these shows" is misrepresenting themselves. Most likely they were sculptors, painters or technicians who worked for the above shop owners or one of the MANY day player on set makeup artists who applied the prosthetics over the years for the larger episodes. Hope that helps.

Simon | General | 08:39 CET | 7 comments total | tags: optic nerves studios, almost human, angel, buffy, john vulich

Those are really amazing. I particularly like his design for the robot from I Robot, You Jane. Most people seem to really dislike that episode, but I love it, and the robot (crap, I can't remember his name) is one of my favorite designs in Buffy.

It's also interesting how some of the photos of the demons look different from how they seemed to be appear in the show. The Cthulu looking thing from Dopplegangland (the kind that doesn't go poof), his tendrils look much like like tusks in that picture. And I guess they never showed a closeup on the face of the arm-spear demon from Season Four, because I definitely don't remember that face.

alpha5099 | August 30, 08:49 CET

Moloch ;)

timeerkat | August 30, 09:44 CET

Amazing work. Pulled my heart strings a bit with thoughts of John Ritter. Wonderful man.

Madhatter | August 30, 10:26 CET

Yeah the Ritter make-up was fabulous.

Quite liked the Moloch design, it maybe references the historical imagery and descriptions of Moloch a bit better than the more than slightly Predator-esque implementation managed (I didn't think much of the episode myself but the monster design was decent enough, in isolation and not moving).

All in all some lovely work though, very creative stuff that maybe sometimes blended into the general context a bit on the episodes, nice to see it showcased and all due props given.

Saje | August 30, 10:47 CET

I keep staring at the John Ritter photo...it looks so real I cant get over it...I am now convinced Vulich could have done a way better job making Two-Face look convincing in The Dark Knight.

Vespa | August 30, 16:15 CET

Thought Two-Face looked fantastic in The Dark Knight, personally. But then I know a lotta folks who claimed they thought the CG in the Spider-Man films (especially where Spidey himself is made of CG instead of a stunt guy on wires) was way too obviously CG, but I never saw it. I dunno, maybe I'm blind. I spotted how fake the CG version of Brandon Routh looked during my second viewing of Superman Returns.

Kris | September 08, 06:40 CET

Yeah I thought Two-Face was easily good enough not to affect my suspension of disbelief (and that's from someone that thought Spider-man, at least in the first film, was a bit too CGI-ish).

You could tell it was CG with Two-Face if you looked but it was very well done IMO - and you couldn't get anything like that effect on an actor's face with 'Ted' style make-up, you just couldn't get the depth of wound and appearance of seeing right into his face without an animatronic head.

Saje | September 08, 09:43 CET

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