Making Talos Awakes: Setting joint angles

Making Talos Awakes – Part 11 of 20

Simon and I had to work out how to sculpt the Talos Awakes figure using the cast skin of the restored animation model. Also how we could reconfigure casts of a standing figure into the complex and compressed kneeling pose without degrading the surface.

I had used wax at the maquette stage but ruled it out for the master for two reasons:

Wax’s tendency to deform
The degradation that the wax surface would unavoidably suffer during construction

Both of which made wax unsuitable.

Heat bending

After settling on resin as our material of choice, Simon identified specific resins that offered a degree of flexibility when heated to 70°C. Subsequently he sent me a box of bent body parts cast in the various candidate resins.

Some had the desired flexibility but failed to hold applied form when cold. Others delaminated when heated and manipulated. Others still just split without moving at all. Eventually, however, we found suitable products that would, when cast hollow, enable me to heat manipulate Talos’ joints and set them by quenching in water.

Left side view of Ben’s Talos Awakes maquette on an early mock-up of the plinth

Right lower leg with a heat bent ankle section

Right ankle and neck bends

The first bends I successfully completed were two of the more simple positions to achieve, the right ankle and neck.

Before bending I cast silicone rubber into the hollow sections to prevent collapse. To isolate the bends, I filled the spaces above and below the rubber with fibreglass. I also removed resin on the compression side of the bends to accommodate the movement. Once oven heated and repositioned, I fixed the joints by quenching in cold water.

I made three additional neck grafts to correct the left side of the throat, a collapsed area on the compressed side of the neck and a section beneath the helmet rim.

Shoulder bends

I cut under each armpit to sever the connection between the upper arm and the rib cage. This facilitated rotation of the shoulders to their correct positions. I also used a die-grinder to reduce the inside of each shoulder to a uniform thickness of 2-3mm to prevent the resin from tearing during the bending process.

As with the other bends, I cast silicone rubber into the shoulder and filled the remaining cavity filled with fibreglass. I heat-bent the shoulders to the correct positions using guides and measurements taken from the maquette.

The more complex right shoulder bend with its six corrective grafts

Corrective shoulder transplants

The right shoulder was the most challenging, requiring six transplants to correct distortion of the pectoral muscle, shoulder blade and upper arm below the bicep and to reinstate the under-arm area at its new angle. The left shoulder was far simpler, needing just two transplants to reinstate the under-arm area.

The simpler left shoulder bend with just two underarm grafts

Note

It is worth noting at the beginning of this description of the repositioning process, that Talos Awakes is not and could never be a carbon copy.

We had two angles of film footage to work from, the iconic side view and a frontal view. Inevitably the animation model was arranged to achieve the best shot in each case resulting in differences between the two poses. For the purposes of the film this was not an issue as the model is seen in two dimensions. However Talos Awakes has to work in the round so I had to make some anatomical and pose adjustments to achieve a sculpture that works effectively in three dimensions.

These sculptures were hand made by Raven Armoury in association with The Ray & Diana Harryhausen Foundation.
Based on effects characters created by Ray Harryhausen for a Charles H. Schneer Production.
TM & © Columbia Pictures Industries, Inc. All Rights Reserved.