|
Welcome
Taphophilia (dot) Com...
A repository of morbid curiosities:
Thanatology and Taphophile Issues, Cemetery,
Funeral Industry and Death Related News.
A Taphophilia Thank You...
Taphophilia (dot) Com would not be possible without the knowledge, experience and talent of DarkestWeb. From its conception and early development, DarkestWeb was faced with many challenges; from inspiring and motivating, to providing guidance and direction. The continued dedication and support has produced results greater than ever expected, and for this, I owe a huge debt of gratitude.
Announcements
Graveyards of Chicago:
The People, History, Art, and Lore of Cook County Cemeteries
By Matt Hucke And Ursula Bielski. Discover a Chicago That Exists Just Beneath the Surface - About Six Feet Under! Take a tour of Chicago's permanent residents! Please visit the Lake Claremont Press website to purchase your copy of Graveyards of Chicago today!
Green-Wood Cemetery Arcadia Publishing announces the release of Alexandra Mosca's historic account of one of New York's most famous cemeteries. Aracdia Publishing's Images of America series has an extensive catalog of many cemetery publications! Please visit Arcadia Publishing to purchase your copy of Green-Wood Cemetery and to browse other available titles!
Men of Mortuaries Calendar
To purchase your 2008 calendar, learn more about the KAMMCARES Foundation, or to be featured in the 2009 calendar, please visit Men of Mortuaries.
Epitaphs: The Magazine for Cemetery Lovers By Cemetery Lovers
For information regarding subscriptions, single issues, submission guidelines, deadlines, classifieds or advertising for future issues, please visit The Cemetery Club.
Guardians of the Soul: Angels and Innocents, Mourners and Saints, Indiana's remarkable cemetery sculpture
with photography by John Bower and foreword by Claude Cookman is now
available. Please visit
Studio Indiana for more information.
West Springfield Massachusetts: Stories Carved in Stone by Rusty Clark features information on early New England gravestone carvers with more than two hundred photos and illustrations. Please visit the Dog Pond Press website.
|
|
Making corpses for Six Feet Under is stiff work |
|
|
|
|
Written by DeadGirl
|
|
Friday, 11 June 2004 |
June 11, 2004
In the realm of MastersFX, a special effects studio, the bizarre is commonplace. So is the art of death--an art that the studio embraces in supplying make-believe bodies and prosthetics for HBO's Six Feet Under.
When the mortuary drama returns for its fourth season at 9 p.m. Sunday (Eastern and Pacific), the company's Emmy-winning handiwork will be on display again. If a stiff is needed for the Fisher family morgue, this is where it comes from. MastersFX also has designed special effects for HBO's Carnivale (note the head resembling actress Adrienne Barbeau, which was used in a scene in which her character ostensibly dies and is revived); Kingdom Hospital; Stargate SG-1; Stargate Atlantis; and for films, including Hidalgo and Predator.
As clever as the monsters, aliens, animals, and other figments of the artists' imaginations are, it's the human corpses and heads--mundane but astonishing in their realism--that catch the eye. The Six Feet Under trademark opening, with some poor soul meeting his or her demise, demands realism, especially when the victim ends up on a mortuary table, closely scrutinized by the camera. "Their work is a huge element of the show because if these bodies or injuries didn't look 100% real, we wouldn't be giving viewers the you-are-there sense," said out executive producer Alan Poul. "They [the bodies] just have to be super-lifelike, or it's going to blow the quality of the scene," agreed MastersFX effects producer Dan Rebert.
The company's contributions are detailed in a 20-minute featurette included in the second season DVD set, out in July, Poul said. Six Feet Under was created by out Oscar winner Alan Ball. It stars Peter Krause, Michael C. Hall, Frances Conroy, Rachel Griffiths, Freddy Rodriguez, and Lauren Ambrose. Full artificial bodies or heads are required when a scripted injury is so grotesque it would be difficult to simulate on an actor or when a scene would be more easily filmed with an inanimate form. With a fake corpse's cost being roughly equivalent to a moderately priced car, only one or two are made per season, Rebert said. In other cases makeup and prosthetics are used on actors. (If the camera captures a bit of eye movement or breathing by someone playing dead, digital effects can be used to erase the evidence of life, Poul said.) A body's creation represents equal parts technology and artistry, said Todd Masters, who founded the company in 1986. Special effects in general encompass "drawing, sculpting, performance, painting. Everything you can do in a creative environment," he said.
The MastersFX studio, deliberately placed in an anonymous, out-of-the-way building to thwart would-be souvenir collectors (Masters recalls Star Trek fans rifling trash bins), is where the morbid magic happens. (A second studio is in Vancouver, Canada.) The process starts with a "life cast" of an actor's head, made with a seaweed derivative called alginate that's also used by dentists to form tooth impressions, Rebert said. The fragile, rubbery material is reinforced with a plaster jacket to hold its shape and then filled with clay, which can be easily molded to open or close the eyes and add injuries. Life-casting a full nude body is trickier, Rebert said: The cast is removed in pieces and reassembled on a steel-welded framework, or armature. "We build it on an armature standing up so we can walk around it and see what it's going to look like," he said. A fiberglass mold is made from the ensuing clay sculpture. "Once we have the mold, we take silicone and brush or cast it in for the skin. Silicone is a skin-like material, and we plasticize it and get a pretty realistic feeling." The fake stiff is far from complete. The equivalent of a skeleton is placed inside, made to be floppy so when the body is laid down gravity pulls it into a natural position. The muscle structure and internal weight of a human body also is re-created. Among the finishing touches in the weeks-long effort: Hair is placed, strand by strand, on the newly born "skull."
Injuries demand a special creativity, Rebert said. In creating the head of a woman who slammed into a cherry picker (after exuberantly popping up through a Las Vegas limousine's sunroof), the MastersFX designers were told to think of art, not forensics. "We had real pictures of heads with that type of damage and they [the producers] thought it was too much," he recalled. "They wanted it to look more like a Picasso painting...rather than be literally, 'This is a crushed skull.'" Those who appear as Six Feet Under victims respond variously to seeing lifeless versions of themselves. The woman playing the cherry-picker victim was fascinated; an actress in another episode was decidedly less so. "She had finished a heart-wrenching scene, going through the convulsions of dying" in bed, recalled Masters. Moments later, he came in bearing the limp look-alike to take her place. "She had issues with that," he said. (AP)
http://www.advocate.com/new_news.asp?ID=12723&sd=06/11/04 |
|
Taphophilia?
taphophilia (taf′ō-fil′ē-ă)
ORIGIN:
From the Greek words taphos, meaning "tomb" or "sepulcher" and philia, meaning "attraction or affinity to something, in particular the love or obsession with something"
DEFINITION: 1. An excessive interest in graves and cemeteries. 2. A love or fondness for funerals, graves, and cemeteries. 3. In psychiatry, a morbid attraction to graves and cemeteries
Quote Repository
“Where life is more terrible than death, it is then the truest valor to dare to live.” Sir Thomas Brown
Shirtless and Sculpted
The Men of Mortuaries 2008 Calendar is now available! All sale proceeds benefit KAMMCARES, a breast cancer foundation.
|
