The Character Shop
At Rick Lazzarini's Workshop, Creatures Take On a
Life of Their Own
Rick Lazzarini, The Theater Ghost from
Ghostbusters II and the Facial Waldo, a device
used to control the ghost
In the forefront of a new
generation of special makeup and creature effects
designers, Rick Lazzarini of The Character Shop in Canoga
Park, California finds himself in the position of
competing with the men who helped him hone his craft.
"It's a weird feeling," he admits. "I'm honored to be
going after the same productions as my mentors, but it's
kind of scary. My generation realizes the kind of
dedication it takes to succeed in this business."
"My generation realizes the kind of
dedication it takes to succeed in this
business."
Rick Lazzarini, founder, The Character Shop
While the new kids on the block aim to bring "a fresh
look, an enthusiasm" to the industry, Lazzarini and
others like him are acutely aware that they're building
on a foundation that goes back to silent screen great Lon
Chaney. "We're still at the stage where we're willing to
try new things, but we know if we fail we can always fall
back on traditional ways of doing things," he notes.
Working out of The Character Shop's
[6,000-square-foot] studio, Lazzarini creates
wearable makeup effects - "everything from a fake nose
and prosthetic makeup to an actual suit" - as well as
mechanical creatures controlled by cable or radio.
Projects are evenly split between commercials and feature
films. "Each requires a different mindset and a different
time frame," explains Lazzarini. "You need to make a
quick impact with a commercial because of limited screen
time, but you don't want to detract from the product
you're selling. On the whole, commercials build on
pleasant, wholesome, cheerful images.' Among Lazzarini's
commercial creations are the dueling World War I flying
aces in Duracell's long-running battery campaign. He has
two more Duracell spots featuring boxers and racing taxi
cabs waiting in the wings. How the characters in these
spots are produced is something of a state secret; he'll
only divulge that "they're puppets, and they're bigger
than you'd think."
For a series of Bell Canada commercials Lazzarini
outfitted actors playing office workers with animal heads
possessing radio-controlled eyebrows and mouths. He also
designed a beer-guzzling green alien for Heineken beer's
Dutch television and European theater spots. For these.
he also endowed an actor with a large. radio-controlled
mechanical head.
Feature films give Lazzarini the opportunity to create
"for the dark side." His work in Ghostbusters II
contrasted the traditional - "a gory, severed latex head
with blood and guts" - with the high-tech - a winged,
six-eyed, four-armed ghost, brought to life by
Lazzarini's latest puppeteering device, the Facial Waldo.
By means of special sensors attached to a puppeteer's
face, head and body, the Waldo allows up to 16 individual
features in a creature's head and face to be
remote-controlled by a single operator. "I originally
developed the Waldo for a puppet character in a Kraft
salad-dressing spot that never aired," says Lazzarini. "I
don't know why somebody didn't do it before me. Why not
have the controls analogous to what the creature does?
Although nobody actually put together the different
technologies in the right combinations before, the Waldo
is made of stuff right off the shelf; it's not from
Jupiter!"
"Sometimes we deliver a hunk of
aluminum or foam latex and have to breathe life into
it."
Rick Lazzarini
Lazzarini's Facial Waldo is currently being used at
Hollywood's Rhythm & Hues as a real-time method of
recording realistic expressions on a computer-generated
character. "The operator wears a cap on his head and
sensors glued on his face, so when he moves the computer
generated character does the same," Lazzarini describes
about the almost eerie machinations of his device "Rather
than actuate a 3-D puppet, the Waldo tells the
computer-generated character what to do."
The Character Shop's most unusual project to date was
for Nightmare on Elm Street V: The Dream Child. Lazzarini
was called upon to construct an unborn-child puppet in
its mother's womb, while a prosthetic Freddy Krueger face
looks through the womb wall trying to get at the child's
soul. "I wore Freddy's face for that sequence. I
frequently end up in makeup we've created," says
Lazzarini, who considers himself a performer and an actor
(he was seen as Pizza the Hut in Mel Brooks' Spaceballs).
"Sometimes we deliver a hunk of aluminum or foam latex
and have to breathe life into it, even if it's by remote
control; sometimes we're inside the makeup or creature.
Either way, it's giving a performance. Ultimately, it all
must show on the creature's face."
Lazzarini has been combining prosthetics and acting
since the age of six. "I was going to be Jesus in the
school play, so I made some wounds with crayons on
notebook binder paper and wanted to tape them to my hands
and feet. But that was a little too realistic for my
teachers. They made me wear socks," he recalls.
Undaunted, the young Lazzarini immersed himself in Famous
Monster magazines. He decided that creature making would
be his life's work after seeing Planet of the Apes. "That
movie got me started on this whole kick," he says. "The
creatures weren't just trying to scare you, they were
actually characters [you could relate to]."
Completely self-taught, Lazzarini recalls the perils
of the trial-and-error system in his home workshop: "I
was 12 and wanted to do a face cast of myself. I used
dental stone instead of dental plaster and wound up with
10 pounds of this stuff hanging off my eyebrows and
eyelashes. I had to use a hammer to smash it off." He
never made that mistake again. Good thing, too, because
he made the face cast of Michael Keaton used to create
the caped crusader's cowl in Batman.
"We're bending in different
directions to create characters we can believe
in."
Rick Lazzarini
Lazzarini progressed rapidly as a practical effects
wiz and makeup designer. While still a teenager, he made
outrageous props for the Tubes rock band. Then, as a
student at the Loyola Marymount University's Film School
in Los Angeles, he began working for the makeup effects
company responsible for creating such cult classics as
Slumber Party Massacre. Upon graduation he took a job at
a prop house, where he gained "knowledge of a vast range
of resources and materials."
As a mechanical designer and coordinator, he then
joined makeup designer Stan Winston in creating the nasty
buggers featured in James Cameron's Aliens. "I designed
some of the mechanics that went into the Queen Alien
creature. It was 14-feet high and 20-feet long, and had
to be sturdy enough to hold two people, who fit inside,"
Lazzarini explains. "We used hydraulics to turn her body
and a rail system to shoot out her tongue."
Lazzarini's next job was as mechanical coordinator in
the creature department at Boss Films, the company
responsible for the effects in Die Hard and the original
Ghostbusters. A stint as creative effects supervisor at
Apogee Productions followed, and then a period of doing
freelance work. He founded The Character Shop two years
ago.
On any given project, The Character Shop's staff may
be found engaged in makeup testing. body casting,
sculpting and model making, mechanical and electrical
work, woodwork, plastics work and vacuforming,
conventional design and illustration, as well as computer
previewing of how system mechanics will fit under a
cosmetic skin. The pressure is always on, says Lazzarini,
"to continually prove ourselves. Every time we work we
want to go one better than the last time." It wasn't long
ago, he adds, that clients were looking for effects for
effects sake, but that seems to be on the decrease. "Now
we're bending in different directions to create
characters we can believe in," he emphasizes.
Still somewhat of a young Turk himself, Lazzarini
can't help thinking about the next generation of creature
creators. "The people I'm hiring will someday be
competing with me, and they'll have my accomplishments to
boost them up," he says. "The next generation can take
for granted certain technical breakthroughs; they can
pick up off the shelf what someone else racked his brain
to develop. But at least it's comforting to think that if
any of them are going to start their own business,
they'll have to go through exactly what I did."
by Christine Bunish
