[00:00] Here we are at the E.G.P. EFFECTS INSIDE studio.
[00:15] We're going to talk to the main man, the commander of Chief District, Waxinghi. They were going to talk about some of the stuff that went on in. Take a look. Here we are with Vincent Guastini.
[00:38] Hey, you're in the effects studio. Good to see you too. Hey, everybody. We have Vince and his compatriots here at VGP. Of course, on every night.
[00:52] We had an absolute blast on that project. I had so much fun on that show. You guys killed it, and I can see that some of the... Yes, she made it.
[01:04] She made it into your hall of horror. Yep. So I want to take a step back real quick. You've had DGP, Effects and Design Studio, for how many years now? Probably over 25. What are some of your more well-known projects?
[01:18] I would have to say Dogma, Reckoning for a Dream, Letters of Iwo Jima, Plagues of Our Father, In King's Dinner, Child's Play 3, Bill's Most Vogue Journey. I was on Saturday Night Live for four years, and I was Will Ferrell's personal makeup
[01:31] artist, and was nominated for an Emmy on that show. So, you know, that's kind of the gambit, what's been going on. How did you get your start in practical effects, you know? Take us back to the beginning. I would say when I was a kid, I used to watch a lot of, like, Godzilla movies.
[01:45] Ray Harryhausen was a stop-motion master, and he did, like, movies like Shades of the Argonauts, the Skeleton Army. Famous, yeah, stop-motion. Yeah, all of those stop-motion things. So that was like kind of my first like looking at movies and going,
[01:57] how the hell did they do that? What was it that sort of clicked for you when you thought to yourself, I want to focus on creating practical effects, you know, I want to be a monster maker. What was that for you? The thing. Okay.
[02:09] Yeah, it was the thing. So I went into the theater and I saw it, and there was a scene with a blood test.
[02:30] I thought you feel that way Gary You were the only one that could have got to that point Well do you laugh When the guy hits the ceiling during the whole you know mayhem that was going on
[02:44] and I remember I'm watching and seeing everybody yelling on screen. There's somebody in the movie seat in back of me, and this guy's yelling. And he's, like, grabbing a seat like this and he's going down.
[02:56] And I remember I looked back and I saw him do that. It made an impression on me that the screen can actually do that to somebody. A picture. Yeah. A series of moving pictures. That I want to do the exact same thing with my work.
[03:09] That's awesome. If someday I can do that. Do you remember the first practical effect you did on your own in your basement lab or whatever it was? I'd have to say I did some experimentation of makeup on my mother's arm.
[03:23] I did some burns that was in the Grand Illusion book. A gelatin burn? Yeah, well, it was actually, it was all made of paper bags. Very cool. It was painted with latex. Mm-hmm. And then painted. And even Tom Susini saw it at a convention, you know, a picture of it.
[03:36] He's like, wow, that's great. I go, well, it's a copy of your makeup. You did it with Bernie. Mm-hmm. So he's like, oh, wow. I go, this is great. Yeah. But I know I had a similar situation when I was a kid. You know, there were movies that I saw that were just pure magic.
[03:49] Mm-hmm. But I didn't really realize that there was a way to do that. And it wasn't until I stumbled upon this book, Grand Allegiance 1 and 2, where I realized there's this thing, there's an industry.
[04:02] But back then, you find one of these books and it's a holy grail. Yeah, the information is like you found a treasure in our shelf in some library somewhere. Yeah, in your home. And you're like, oh, how do we do this? But it graduated from there.
[04:15] It graduated from Tom Savini. And then I started knowing about all the other professional artists like Dick Smith and Rob Bottin and Rick Baker. All right, so what does the process look like, you know, from start to finish? The process is usually we get a script.
[04:27] After we get the script, we break it down so that we know how many effects are in the show, what we're handling, what we're not handling. And then from there, once everybody agrees what I'm handling and what the date or budget would be about, we go back to doing designs.
[04:42] And so to me, that's the most important. That's like plotting out a movie, you know, do everything in prep. We're doing that with designs. Once we've sculpted the features or whatever change we're going to make, It could be an elf, it could be an ape, it could be whatever.
[04:57] Whatever the designer of the project is calling for, we take another mold off of that. From there we run our materials in either silicone or foam rubber and then we run them in the oven for three or four hours and bake them and then we pull out our skins Before I painted the other hand I used silicone so we had a different set of paints
[05:16] for that as I said for the for the hand puppet that comes out of her chest it's called wheat so it's made out of foam rubber and so that has a whole different type of paint which is a closed paint and so I'm using a closed paint broken down with the ancient alcohol and that's like
[05:30] a paint-through-air brush and I can airbrush the entire creature. Right now I'm just laying down the base of all the dark and shadow. And bring that culture to see, you know, it's just a light piece of flesh before it becomes a light.
[06:05] How's the bomb account going to work? I have the trick here, and the giant syringe. You pull it through and put the tube right through the puppet's mouth. And it shoots it.
[06:17] What's the stuff in there? Green, it's character lights. And the other thicker green stuff is character lights. Okay, great.
[06:30] Action. No! No! No! No! Cut to another head that we have that we're going to put on a prosthetic face, a melted face.
[06:45] A bunch of goo comes out of that. Keep your hands. You're going to grab on the back. And then you're going to grab it and you're going to pull the knot off. And the other hand too. Go ahead and reach towards your forehead.
[07:00] There you go. There you go. Okay, cut. All right. Nice job, brother. Three, Arkham City, take one.
[07:12] So we're talking about practical facts. Obviously, people think of creatures, you know, the werewolf transformation of the American world. That comes to mind. I mean, practical effects also encompasses, say,
[07:24] an old age makeup, like you transformed Ellen Bernstein in Requiem for a Dream, right? As a way for the filmmakers to tell the story, this transformation of this character from point A to point B. Yeah, it's not all exploding heads, it's realism.
[07:38] You know it about you know there one thing that the thing too you can do some beautiful monsters and they can be gorgeous but if you going to copy real life and you don do it successfully which is really hard you going to be able to tell
[07:51] People are going to be like, okay, that's fake. So doing the old age and doing a proper thing that's from real life is really, really tough. So when you can do something like that successfully, then you know you've done a really good job because nobody can tell.
[08:04] Here's the tricky subject, right, and the one everyone always wants to know about. Sure. The marriage of practical and visual effects. you know and this question has been going on since Jurassic Park came out the film where
[08:17] the practical effects industry sort of heard the the death bell you know and realizing oh my god that was good so look at that film though the practical that's good that was my point that's exactly my point the practical looks incredible
[08:29] and that film is a perfect case study
[08:42] for a marriage between the two, right? Perfect. Because you use tactile when you can, which has that tactile, it's here, it's real, that's cinema, you know? It's moving pictures. And then you blend that
[08:54] with your CG full screenshots and it becomes this magic trick, you know, in your mind it's almost impossible to discern between the two. It was the most beautiful symbiotic relationship I've seen.
[09:06] And I'm hoping on certain projects when it comes to the bigger budget movies that people aren't screaming for practical. Let somebody, a producer or director, sit down and go, we're putting this much to practical, this much to CG,
[09:20] and that's the way it's going to be, and we're sticking to it. For young filmmakers at home, how else can they practice this craft? You know, these guys and gals watching. Do the same thing. Yeah. Yeah, go to YouTube and get as much information and on the Internet as you can and practice.
[09:35] also I think one of the best and probably is the future is Matt Winston so stay with him I think that's fun we'll leave it at that because you have real professionals that were
[09:47] that worked at Stan Winston's and some people that were inspired by Stan Winston or worked a great deal in the industry and you're getting exactly what the pros do and how they do it and that's invaluable information
[09:59] so thank you very much for your time and we look forward to seeing what you do next awesome alright thank you guys very much bye good luck everybody