FX Reveal: A Look at Vincent J. Guastini’s Work on Comedy Central’s This Is Not Happening
Steve Barton
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Rarely do we cover anything for networks like Comedy Central, but when FX maven Vincent J. Guastini gets involved with a project, we know one thing for sure… the FX work will be bloody, sick, and ridiculously cool!
Such is the case with his work on Ari Shaffir’s “This Is Not Happening.” Dig on some amazing imagery below along with a note explaining what you’re looking at from Vincent himself.
This show is a fucking blast to work on! Comedian Ari Shaffir, the show’s host and creator, and Comedy Central are going all out for these openers: stunts, explosions, and all kinds of practical effects.
For last year’s season we did two major effects for opening segments. We had to re-create a scene from THE THING which would be shot Matrix-style in bullet time. We also had to create duplicate Ari Shaffir faces on a bunch of little people who are chasing him… and for other segments as well. For The Thing segment, instead of a creature head like the one featured in the original movie, the director wanted our creature to be a giant heart… namely Ari Shaffir’s heart. So we made a giant-sized one that breaks out of his chest and hits the ceiling.
For the new season we had to create some aliens. I told director Jeff Tomsic and producer Nate Young, “Let’s go crazy and go outside the box on these aliens.” I was sick of seeing wall-eyed dome-headed shaped creatures; it was time to up the ante.
The setup for the episode is that Ari comes into contact with sort of the Queen Bee of all the aliens. She ascends from a flying saucer, and she winds up stripping naked and has sex with Ari… as they raise upward into the spaceship floating in a beam of light in a sexual embrace. Later she’ll be sucking his blood through a tube as their hybrid alien love baby is being cradled by her. Pure genius and fun.
Spookies was the first movie worked on, and in it there was this cool spider creature. I thought the alien for this project should be akin to the spider monster I created from that 80s film. I wound up working and sculpting on a stop-motion version for it back then, and also one of its final stage transformation heads when I was in my 20’s on that film, so I figured, “Let’s do an homage to the guy I worked for who designed it – make-up artist and sculptor John Dods, who started my career.”
The aliens in this segment are a love letter to him and that film. The designs are so off the wall I felt it would be perfect for this spot with Ari and director Jeff Tomsic, whom I worked with on the first season. They let us fly and I basically could do whatever I wanted.
I had a great crew on these seasons. Key artists and sculptors Josh Wasylink and Jeff Farley, who killed it on the aliens, really got into it. And I had some amazing back-up too with some on-set application help from the amazing Mike Smithson, who helped me on set for the alien segment. Also kudos to Jon Cody Fasano for being an amazing on-set person, as well as the rest of the team who rounded out this crazy job. They are Cody J. Wilkins, Carlos Vasquez, Tommy Cassidy, and designer Josh Crockett.
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