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Behind the Masks
An Interview with Jason Baird

Practical Creatures

Although many of the alien species to be seen in Episode II will be all-digital creations painstakingly animated and rendered by Industrial Light & Magic, there is still a place for practical creatures. This is where Jason Baird, Live Action Creature Effects Supervisor, enters the Episode II picture.

“That involves all the creature heads and paws,” explains Baird of his responsibilities, “as well as the animatronic creature heads and also prosthetic characters. It also involves organizing the workshop, and getting the prosthetics ready for on-set use.”

A 12-year veteran of the field, Baird ran his own company, crafting various creatures and prosthetic make-up effects for film and television. In March of 2000, Baird was recruited for the latest chapter of the Star Wars saga, with short time to prepare for one of his biggest assignments to date.

“It’s a real buzz. It took a long while for it to sink in that we’re actually working on Star Wars. It happened so quickly. Only when you see some of the big names on set, with your creatures, does it really hit you,” says Baird.

“When we first got the contract to do Star Wars it didn’t seem, from the way they were explaining it, like such a huge job,” recalls Baird. “But we quickly learned that there was quite a bit of creature and prosthetic stuff that needed to be addressed, more so from the prosthetics side because we inherited many of the Episode I creature heads. When we found that out, we had start building the crew.”

Baird’s crew grew to 12-15 artists working around the clock to deliver the required make-up effects. “The most challenging thing has been the organization — getting everything to click and be delivered in working order on time. It’s such a short time-span, because we’ve only really had, after getting set up, five weeks of pre-production. Three of those weeks were trying to get our workshop space into a workable environment. That left us only two weeks to start producing the prosthetic pieces and getting everything ready. It was a really tight timeline, but we managed.”

Among the featured creations of Baird and his crew are two new heroic Jedi alien characters. One male, one female, both these characters are prosthetic make-up creations with distinctly different builds and profiles. Both have the commanding presence of Jedi Knights and exotic alien looks.

“He’s a combination of mottled greens and browns and blacks, so I think it’ll look very cool,” says Baird, describing the alien color palette. “The female has horns as well as tentacles. She’s a combination of grays and whites and red. She should look quite stunning too.”

The decision to produce the two alien Jedi came pretty late in pre-production. For the male, Baird and his crew had three weeks to complete the character. “When you’re talking about a complicated prosthetic character, that’s a pretty short timeline.”

Prosthetic make-up creation is a painstaking process. Plaster-like life-casts must be made of the performers slated to play the role, so that the foam latex prosthetic pieces — called appliances — will conform perfectly to the contours of a his or her features. The make-up artists then glue the appliances onto the performer, adding additional elements such as teeth, horns or tentacles, and then the whole creation is painted.

Since many different appliances are pieced together for one prosthetic effect, the art of ‘seaming’ is an important one. “Once you get your foam pieces, you end up with an edge where they join,” explains Baird. “Seaming is basically trimming that edge off, and then using fillers to make those lines disappear. That way, you end up with a nice smooth surface to paint over, and you don’t see the line where the seams were. It requires practice and experience to seam properly, because if you can see a seam line on a character on film, you know you haven’t done your job. Makeup effects artists who know what to look for usually can see them. But most people can’t, because they’re usually hard to pick out.”

Makeup can be grueling to a performer, who must undergo hours of application and testing to get the perfect look. “We’d work out an initial test fitting with the prosthetics to make sure that they actually fit the actor. If they require special teeth, we take teeth casts. If they’ve got special eyes, we send them to an optometrist and they get their eyes measured and tested so that they’re safe to wear contact lenses. Then, we do our first test makeup, to make sure that all the pieces glue down right and that gets painted. We do a test fitting with teeth and contacts. This is so when we get on-set, we don’t run into any little problems that we didn’t see coming.”

The testing phase catches most problems early, though some minor glitches do sometimes occur. “During one take, one of Orn Free Taa’s contacts popped out, and he [actor Matt Rowan] actually caught it in his hand. The contacts were made slightly too flat for the curvature of his eye, which meant that it was slightly misshapen and it caught the little lip of the contact on his eyelid, so when he blinked it just popped out.” After that day’s shoot, Baird and his crew had the contacts remade, and Orn Free Taa’s eyes were restored for the next day of filming.

The Challenge of Volume

To facilitate communication, the creatures crew developed hand-signals for the actors and extras obscured with heavy masks. “They can signal by tapping their head to let us know that they need to get out,” explains Baird. For masked performers with on-screen dialogue, like the radio-controlled Senator Ask Aak or the Neimoidians, Baird has rigged a small radio to allow for communication between the actor, Baird’s crew, the Assistant Directors, and George Lucas. “They can’t talk back,” explains Baird, “but at least they can hear directions. Otherwise, it’s very hard to hear inside the suits. And when they’re up on their senate podiums, it’s very hard for us to get up there too.”

While individual aliens provide their challenges, Episode II also had the challenge of volume. Much like Episode IV’s famous cantina scene, Episode II has a nightclub filled with a variety of alien beings. Creating that exotic atmosphere within the club, as well as in the streets outside the drinking establishment, required a lot of creature masks. Baird’s task was simplified with access to many Episode I masks, but coordinating all those costumed extras was still trying.

“There’s all sorts of returning alien characters,” says Baird, “Rodians, Aqualish, Ishi Tibs, Weequays, Wookiees, ‘Mot Not Rabs’, Neimoidians and such. There’re lots of creatures and we’re doing some interesting things them to make them look like they’re female. We’re adding earrings and eyelashes and slightly different, lighter coloring in their faces, just a bit more colorful for the girls. We’ve added some freaky hairpieces to give them hair that looks a little bit more feminine than the other creatures.”

Though most of the extras’ performances don’t require anything more involved than walking or milling about in the background, wearing a hefty costume and hot, cumbersome mask makes it very difficult.

In between takes, assistants rush to aid the masked extras, offering water (with drinking straws to poke through mask openings) and miniature fans for fresh, cool air. “Keeping them hydrated and keeping their fluids up is very important because in these big costumes you sweat constantly.”

At times, the alien crowds number from 15 to 50 performers. “With 50 people wearing creature heads, you also have to account for how many people we need to look after them.” The shooting scheduled allowed for Baird to test his crew as production ramped up. The first big day required 15 creature extras. The next large assignment had 33. “That was a good test to find out what we needed,” says Baird. “For the 33, we had about 11 to 12 people standing by. It’s about a one-to-three ratio.” The assistants not only ensure the comfort of the performers, but also did quick makeup repair work on any wear-and-tear suffered by the masks.

“The ADs [Assistant Directors] really helped us out on-set,” says Baird. “They let us know when we’re about to break, or when we’re about to start again. When we know that, we know how much time we have to get ready. We’d let them know that certain characters may take five minutes or 15 minutes. We have that time to quickly get everyone’s gear back on and get them ready for camera.”

With the majority of shooting completed, Baird now waits eagerly — like many people — for the completion of the film to see the finished product. “I’m excited now to see how it all is going to come together with the computer generated imagery,” he says, “and to see the rest of the story surrounding the stuff that we shot. There are a lot of holes left to be filled.”