First Look Inside the Effects of Boggy Creek

Debi Moore |

May 10, 2010

First Look Inside the Effects of Boggy Creek Boggy Creek‘s writer/producer/director Brian T. Jaynes has released some photos of the Facades FX creature shop in action on the upcoming film – a whole gallery’s worth in fact!

Facades FX designed, fabricated, and created all the creature suits, prosthetics, special make-up effects, and gore rigs for the new Boggy Creek. The Facades FX crew on-set were Phil Nichols and Melissa Nichols, and Phil provided us with the following overview:

For the Swamp Creature FX:
We created three suits. These suits were built on standard under-garment supports with sculpted and molded chest, back, and shoulder enhancements attached and painted in the creature’s flesh color paint scheme. Then a special hand-blended synthetic hair mix was painstakingly pasted on the suits in a realistic growth pattern. A lot of hard work went into making these suits. Once the hair was attached, the suits were distressed with local mud and Spanish moss for that lived-in look. The suits were all fabricated on location from components made in our Houston studio.

For the creature’s face standard foam latex facial appliances were sculpted, molded, and fabricated in our Houston studio as well as the dental plates of the creature’s teeth. The prosthetics were pre-painted as much as possible in Houston before everything was trucked to Uncertain, Texas, where the on-location part of the shoot was happening. In Uncertain, Facades FX was given access to the town’s unused grocery store to convert into a makeshift FX studio. The building worked out great for us.

The movie didn’t have much pre-production time, and we lost one week of the three weeks we had when they called us up early to location… so we were building as we went while shooting was happening. We kept pace with them pretty well; only one time in the last week did they have to reschedule things for us to finish an effect rig. In fact the day we arrived on location, we went right to work without even unpacking our gear! That’s the way it was up there. We had to get it done. It was hot, humid, wet, nasty, with mosquitoes the size of humming birds, alligators, water moccasins, all kinds of nasty stuff around — a very “Skull Island” type location and perfect for the movie’s setting.

For the Make-Up FX:
The kills in the script were for the most pretty generic, but there were two that were fully described, and we delivered on them big time! We packed every gore rig, every bag of bones, body parts, wound prosthetics, and chunks of flesh bits we had in our studio and loaded it all up and took it with us. We were able to create some on-the-spot spectacular carnage for the production. While I was finishing the creature suits, Melissa was prepping and pre-painting the entrails and various gore rigs.

The way a kill would be created started about four hours before a shoot with Brian Jaynes, the director, and sometimes François Frizat, the cinematographer, coming into the shop and saying, “What can we do here?” We’d go over the things we had, he’d pick what he liked, and we’d get it ready to shoot. Wham bam quick as you please, but we delivered every time on every kill.

Boggy Creek centers around a story of five young kids who get caught out in a swamp in Boggy Creek, Texas. They end up crossing paths with an ancient evil creature that lives in the swamp. It’s loosely based on the old Bigfoot or Sasquatch legends, combining that with some ancient Caddo Indian mysticism and mythology.

To see more of the behind-the-scenes effects work, be sure to visit our Boggy Creek gallery, and keep it here for updates on Boggy Creek as they come.