Another sculpture assignment I received from the production of the film “Michiel de Ruyter” was to recreate the cruelly lynched bodies of the brothers De Witt, a prominent Dutch politician from the 16th century and his brother who were attacked by an Orangist mob and lynched in the Hague. Obviously there’s a serious story here, and I won’t try to commit it to this page (read it here), but it was famous and compelling enough to make me want to take up the job.
You might ask, why not just use actors? But these corpses had to be eviscerated and lacerated to such a degree that that would be impractical. But engaging the services of one of the excellent special effects studios was budgetarily out of the question. A compromise was found: me. The production designer Ruben Schwarz and myself settled on the idea of culling various body parts from display mannequins, cutting them up and reattaching them. Then we covered them with layers of hard casting wax colored with powdered pigments (from the paint mill De Kat). This allowed us to cut into the surface skin to expose flesh. Wax is actually quite forgiving, as long as you aren’t filming in the extreme heat of the day. Using wax kept the costs down and is a rather low-threshold material to work with. We were rather pleased with the results, and so was the director.
Categories: FILM & TVHANDWORK - ARTWORK