Deux ex Machina
Fallen Angel required vast amounts of creative work to bring its vision to the screen. From make-up to visual effects, Xena’s own angelic host pulled out all the stops…
Official Xena Magazine: Issue 02
It was easy enough for the script writers to send Xena and Gabrielle to the afterlife in Fallen Angel - all it took was a few strokes of their pens. But to actually transform warrior and bard - plus assorted denizens - into realistic-looking angels and demons, then set them to battle in Heaven and Hell... That required a little more work.
To create the hosts of angels and hoards of demons seen in Fallen Angel, an intense collaborative effort between the producers, make-up artists and visual effects people was necessary. Here, you can find out just how much work went into this stunning episode…
A WING AND A PRAYER
When Lucy Lawless appears on the set where a demonised Xena will battle an angelic Gabrielle, her metamorphosis from standard warrior princess is astounding. The full body make-up, prosthetic facial features and horns - not to mention fully extendable bat wings - make this a creature you really wouldn’t want to meet on a dark night. This Demon-Xena is just one example of the colossal amount of awe-inspiring prosthetic make-up work done for this episode by Bruce Spaulding-Fuller and his team from KNB FX Group.
Says Spaulding-Fuller, “Xena goes to hell and becomes a demon... so we’ve tried to create an incredible look for her. We’ve got a gelatine appliance on her forehead, cheeks and chin, and we’ve padded it up with a snaky scale look. We’ve built her cheekbones out and we’ve made her brow a bit more evil and demonic.
“We wanted to do a traditional red demon, but at the same time not traditional, so we tried to break it up with different colours of red, reflected in the scales. She’s got little horns sticking out of her head, large yellow contact lenses, and full bat wings of course, which weigh quite a bit.”
The full make-up for Lawless took two and a half hours to apply, and this is only for her demonisation. It’s much easier to become an angel - the only additions for Xena are wings of hand-dyed goosefeather. Spaulding-Fuller explains that prosthetics and bat wings are “only for the evil characters”! Most of the make-up design work for Lucy Lawless went into the Demon-Xena character, which to Spaulding-Fuller was not surprising. “We wanted to do something that was still recognisable as Lucy. But of course, Xena would have to be the ultimate demon in hell!”
In fact, Fallen Angel seems to be full of demons and angels, which is not surprising given that the episode is set entirely within the realms of Heaven and Hell. Spaulding-Fuller’s description of the latest scene’s shoot gives some indication of what this involves: “We have at least eight demons in here today, running around, chopping things up.”
The bat and angel wings require a great deal of work for the production team, actors and stunt doubles alike. It's a lot of work for one episode. But this is a season debut, and as such, deserves special attention. As Spaulding-Fuller says, Fallen Angel “is just an incredibly huge episode. We have about seven technicians with us from the US, and we design and create all the make-up and all the wings.” One set of wings was “created out of goosefeathers and hand-dyed, for the Archangels. They were a lot of work. We did everything in about two months, start to finish, and they're still shipping feathers down. We have to repair the wings at the end of every day. They get beaten up very badly - the stunt player demons just want to thrash them around. So we work for about 16 hours getting through the shots, then another four hours at night to repair everything.”
An episode as impressive as Fallen Angel naturally requires impressive effects. For the production team on Xena, however, it's all just part of the job. After making a quick joke about landing in New Zealand and shooting in Hell, Spaulding-Fuller is quick to praise the team helping put Fallen Angel together. “We've got a really talented crew of people here. It's a lot of hard work, but we’re having a good time.”
DIGITISING DEMONS
The set for Fallen Angel's ultimate angel/demon showdown doesn't look much like fire and brimstone. Instead, in the studio, it's a big blue screen and lots of cameras.
That’s where Visual Effects Supervisor George Port comes in, explaining that in this episode, the entire background environment will be computer generated, then matted onto the blue screen behind the action currently being filmed. “On some of the shows, when we do a blue screen we sometimes use real environments. The Second Unit will shoot a whole bunch of empty plates that we'll put blue screen characters into. But since this [Fallen Angel] exists entirely in Limbo-sIash-Heaven-slash-Hell, everything is created. It's not like going out and saying, 'Well, we’ll just shoot that', it's 'Okay, what do we create today from nothing?’”
According to Port, it's important that actors and production crew alike understand the direction that the process is taking. “Usually the director comes and talks them through the storyboard. At the beginning of this episode we had some mock-ups that were generated by the mattepainting department, that we showed everyone, so that everyone knew what the art department's idea of Heaven looked like. That information has been turned into the environment that we're building in the computer and that's actually happening as we speak. The matte-painting department will create this environment which all the digital puppets will fly through - scenes that the blue screen sequences will happen in front of.”
Digital puppets? “We're cutting between real people and what we call digital dolls…” Port begins an in-depth explanation of specific scenes and detailed meetings. “Basically my job is to sit down with the director and work out what they want to do, then work out the best way to do it. In this case, it could be whether we use practical wings from KNB, or going through the shots and saying, ‘Okay, this shot will be a close up; that's a Second Unit shot; that's a blue screen shot with practical wings', this will be computer generated, Gabrielle flying up to a matte-painted background; this will be the real Xena on a harness being pulled into frame with real wings; this shot will be Second Unit with an actor with real wings, or possibly an actor with digital wings, coming up into a digital background.’ So basically we go through each one of these shots.”
Port is impressed with KNB's prosthetics work too. “They have done a great job on the wings. They’ve got little hooks on the ends, which puppeteers put a little blue rod into, to animate and move them around.” Luckily for the actors, a single winged character is not always played by the same person. “Because of the way we shoot things,” Port explains, “the wings would be on the actor for some of the time, and on the double, the stunt double, the stunt double's double, the stand-in, the caterer…” It's easy to get carried away, obviously. “We’ll be integrating the physical wings with the computer generated people with computer generated wings... so the combinations are seemingly endless.”
If it sounds like a lot of work for one episode, that’s because it is! For Port, production meetings for Fallen Angel were much longer than for an average Xena episode. “On a typical Xena you maybe have a half to three-quarter hour meeting for visual effects. For this particular episode, we had two three-and-a-half-hour meetings on the visual effects alone. The shots are more complicated because you have recognisable people, direct cuts from real people to digital people, and stunt doubles with digital requirements.”
This episode is certainly a first, in several senses of the word. Every one of the shots seen in Fallen Angel, Port states, “is either blue screen or entirely computer generated.” Lots of work, lots of effects and lots of fun - if the efforts put into creating Fallen Angel are indicative of what is to come, season five of Xena: Warrior Princess promises to be the most entertaining yet.