Neobums: Building Little Background Characters for Neotropolis

A while back my friends at 32Ten Studios were forced to go out of business.  It was a sad day and truly the end of an era.  I was invited down to tour the facilities one last time before everything got auctioned off and get a look at what was going up for sale:

32Ten was the last traces of some pretty impressive cinematic history.  If you're not familiar with this shop in San Rafael, California, it's because it used to be called Kerner Optical Research, LLC.  If you've never heard of Kerner Optical, that's because it was more famously known as Industrial Light and Magic.

See, ILM had a bunch of their offices and workshops located at 3210 Kerner Boulevard.  To keep passers-by from being interested in what was going on inside, there was no signage outside to indicate that it was the home of Industrial Light and Magic.  Instead, one door was labeled "The Kerner Company, Optical Research Lab" an intentionally boring name that nobody would ever look twice at.  When ILM moved across the Golden Gate Bridge to the Presidio in San Francisco, they closed down their practical effects shops and shifted focus to digital effects.

Many of the folks who had been working in those practical effects shops decided to open their own business in the same place and just used the name on the door as the name of the new business.  For a while, Kerner Optical worked on a wide array of films ranging from Pirates of the Caribbean and Indiana Jones to Elysium and Avatar: the Last Airbender.

Eventually, Kerner went out of business and much of their equipment was auctioned off.  Then a bunch of the employees decided to open their own business in the same place and just use the number on the door as the name of the new business.  32Ten continued to work on a wide variety of film projects before ultimately being told by their landlord that it was time to leave.  They wanted to convert the site for use as storage and offices.

Weird.

As a result, a lot of major motion picture history would be dismantled, auctioned off, hauled away, or sold for scrap.  Case in point is the screening room:

This cozy little theater is where Spielberg and Lucas sat to work out the final cut of Raiders of the Lost Ark.  It's where THX sound was invented.  It's also probably the first movie theater with stadium style seating.  And that's just one of the countless bits of amazing that lurked around every corner of the facility.

But I digress.

All of the equipment was going up for auction.  Much of it was lined up for viewing before the auction began in the main stage.  This was the same room where they blew up the second Death Star for Return of the Jedi.  On this day it looked like so:


Mixed in with all manner of amazing stuff was this little guy:

I come to find out that this guy was originally made for the cantina scenes in the music video for Weird Al Yankovic's "The Saga Begins."  You can see the video here: LINK.  In those scenes, countless alien creatures can be seen in the background.  You won't see this guy though because for some reason he didn't make the cut.  

While he wasn't up for auction, the mold they used to make his head was.  I had no idea what I'd do with it, but it was just intriguing enough to get me to bid on it.

Lo and behold: I ended up with the winning bid.

The mold sat on the bench for a couple of weeks before I went ahead and poured a latex cast filled with FlexFoamIt III from Smooth-On.  Here's the back of the head as I was demolding it:

After trimming off the flashing from the casting, he was adorable:


Months later we cast another one and my assistant Rachel painted them up.  She did an amazing job:


We named the pair "Slurdat the Conqueror, Opressor of the Seven Moons of Kanus 9 and Dealer of a Billion Deaths," and his brother, "Steve:"


That year the crew was all going to attend Neotropolis, an immersive, live-action, cyberpunk themed event in the Mojave desert where attendees get to roleplay and explore the dystopian future on the fictional off-world colony of Kepler-609c.  You can see more about the event here: LINK.  If you were a particularly observant attendee at Neotropolis 3.0, you may have spotted the pair behind the bar at the Gentleman Loser.  They were just a pair of heads and didn't really do anything and I couldn't help but think we should've done more with them.  This is basically all they did at Neotropolis:

Fast forward to this year and we were gearing up to go back to Neotropolis.  Mixed in with all of the other projects in the shop, we were slipcasting a lot of stuff with red tinted latex.  So on a whim, I pulled a new casting from this mold:


Rachel sewed up a little sandbag and we used a toddler's onesie to make him a quick and easy body:


To give him a bit more personality, I sliced his mouth open:


This would be very important if he was going to fit in at the bar:

I added a wire armature in his arms so that he could be a bit more posable and started looking out for secondhand kids' clothes to dress him up.  I ended up getting a lot more clothing than I'd expected. 

So we made another one:

The mold didn't get put back in storage and we were doing more latex slipcasting, so we made a few more little alien heads.  Along the way, things started getting silly: 


While I figured we could easily dress them in whatever thrift store toddler clothes to cover them from the neck down, the would probably still need hands.  So I sat down and sculpted out a couple of pairs of hands in oil-based clay:


These were molded in Ultracal 30:


Once the molds were good and dry, we started slipcasting copies of the hands.  Before demolding, each hand was fitted with a wire armature to make it posable and filled with foam.  Now they could grasp objects:


And make friendly gestures:


To give them a bit more weight and make it easier to sit them upright and have them stay, Rachel stitched more sandbags fitted with grommets so we could attach a length of pipe for a sort of spine:


The foam-filled heads were fitted with a length of armature wire which ran down into the spine pipe to keep the head from lolling off to the side.  The hands were attached to a piece of rope or armature wire that ran from side to side and was zip tied to the spine armature.  Then the whole thing was placed in a onesie, filled with poly-fill stuffing, and then dressed in hand-me-down kid's clothes and shoes:


Before too long, we had started lining up the finished aliens on the bench:


Soon, they started taking over:


By the time we were packing up for Neotropolis, there were twelve of these little dudes.  Along the way, some of them started getting names.  The first pair we had made last year was "Slurdat" and his brother "Steve."

The new batch started with Jorbu the Bartender:

Somewhere in the mix, we also made "Hiss Cratch" who went to work for Neotropolis Power and Cable:


And Blamo got hired to help out at Xenogon:

The rest were going to travel to the colony on Kepler-609c with no prospects for employment, just hoping to find a way to a better life.

These guys were a lot of fun:

This little bum spent the entire event passed out in Spacer's Landing, the local sake bar, where he very much made himself at home: 

The rest ended up on the streets, either begging for handouts:






Or passed out drunk:


Or both:


Along the way, most of them ended up making friends:







Some found love:


Especially this little alien Don Juan:






When it became clear that most of these little guys had very serious substance abuse issues, some people even staged interventions:


But mostly they just sat around asking for handouts:


This one little guy had the most adventures though:


Originally he was hanging out in the VIP lounge upstairs at one of the bars.  All day I'd spot him there every time I walked past and he seemed to be having a good time.  But at the end of the first day, I noticed the bar had closed and the little alien had disappeared.  Later that night, I was walking past the Sentinels* precinct office and one of the Sentinels flagged me down and mentioned they had one of my little aliens in the detention block.  They said they'd picked him up on a drunk and disorderly violation.  So there he was, sitting on the bench in lockup and looking angry.  

"Do you want to bail him out?" they asked.

"No," says I, "if this is what it takes for that little bastard to learn his lesson, he can spend a night in the cooler.  No reason for me to come up with bail money."

Some time later that evening, I happened by the Sentinels office and noticed they had shut down operations for the night.  The office was unmanned, save for one little alien sitting at the dispatch desk:

The next morning I went back to the detention block to spring him.  When I arrived, he was nowhere to be found.  The Sentinels on watch that morning had no idea where he'd gone.  He was just gone.

I spent the day out and about and didn't spot him until late in the evening when I wandered into Ghillie's Arcade.  There I found him sitting at a table with someone reading to him.  So I guess he was all taken care of:


He spent pretty much the whole day hanging out at Ghillie's Arcade:


The following day he disappeared again.  No idea where he went or what he got up to, but on Saturday night he turned up in the detention block again.  I mentioned to the Sentinels that I was thinking about going around town and rounding up the rest of them in preparation for the end of the event.  He suggested it might be better if they arrested them all instead.

So, aside from the three who had jobs, the rest were rounded up in a colony-wide crackdown by the heavily-armed Sentinels:


The arrests were swift and brutal and showcased the oppressive nature of the Sentinels' brand of mercenary law enforcement practiced on Kepler-609c.  Before too long, the detention block started filling up with ornery little aliens:


People shouted in protest, but their pleas fell on deaf ears.  By the end of the night, all of the little aliens who hadn't found gainful employment were behind bars:


It seemed a sad end for many of them:

But this will not be the end of their story.

Stay tuned...