Creature Suit Analysis - Part 2 - Under the Fur

[Bill]

Creature Suits Analysis - Part Two Under The Fur

UNDERLYING MUSCLE SUITS

It seems you've all heard about muscle suits under fur suits, and have debated endlessly if that's what Patty has. But the various comments suggest you really don't know the realities of such muscle suits (not a criticism here. Hardly anybody in the world really does, except the people who build them). So here goes:

First, the very term "muscle suit" is a vague and misleading generic term that actually should be retired, because there are two types of suit structures which could be called a muscle suit, and they are entirely different things.

One is a Muscle Padding Suit, which uses foam structures to create a form resembling the generic muscle mass beneath the fur, in a neutral posture.

The other is a Muscle Dynamic Simulation Suit, which uses physical or mechanical dynamics to actually replicate the elongation and contraction of muscles, with accompanying changes in the muscle shape.

The first is relatively easy to fabricate and commonly used. The second is nearly impossible to make and has little, if any, actual documented successful use. One muscle suit cannot do both.

Muscle-shaped padding can easily be achieved by one of three ways:

1. You can sculpt the full musclature the way a taxidermist sculpts a body manniken, and cast the whole mass in flexible foam, around an inner armiture taken from the mime's body cast, to produce a foam muscle mass the mime can wear and the fur can be attached to.

2. You can fashion each muscle out of foam (sculpting and casting, or just scissor-cutting blocks of flexible sheet foam) and sheath the foam muscle in a mesh or spandex sleave, and then build up each muscle onto the body cast of the mime, to create an assembly of foam muscles that resemble the real muscles.

3. You can just scissor cut sheet foam into pieces which are built up, tailored and glued together to make a muscle-mass padding.

Any of the above should give you a nice Muscle Padding Suit on which to build the final fur covering. None of them will move like real muscles, because they are made of foam, and foam's one most dynamic characteristic is it's capacity for compression.

To review the essence of foamed plastics:

They have a solid resin structure intermixed with air bubbles or air channels. The air bubbles or channels make the foam light, and give the foam resin part somewhere to compress into. The density of foam is a generalized ratio of resin solid to air spaces, a high density foam having smaller air spaces and more weight, while a lighter foam has more air spaces and less weight.

Flexible foam bends, twists, and elongates (stretches) somewhat, but what it does best is compress into a smaller volumetric space. And a simulation of a real muscle must not compress. Indeed, it must resist compression and forcefully push outward the skin/fur above it. And that is the fundamental reason why a Muscle Padding Suit cannot effectively be a Muscle Dynamics Simulation Suit.

So my first recommendation to all interested in this subject, is to retire the term "Muscle Suit" and instead distinguish whether you are talking about just padding (a Muscle Padding Suit) or the actual simulation of muscle extension and contraction (a Muscle Dynamics Simulation Suit)

Now consider the dynamic between the suit beneath and the fur structure on top.

A muscle padding suit is pretty worthless for anything but a shaped padding if the fur is rigidly backed (like real fur pelts or standard old artificial fur used by the garment industry for fake fur coats). The rigid backing will not allow any movement realistically resembling the shifting and swelling of musculature, regardless of what you build beneath it. From 1967 (when I started) to the mid 80's, every makeup effects artist I knew and chatted with loved to debate the wonderful day when somebody would really make a breakthrough and allow muscle padding suits (common even then) to become muscle dynamic simulation suits.

What stopped us then was not the mechanical or engineering capacity to envision a device simulating muscle contractions. We were stopped by the simple fact that a rigid-backed fur wants to do things it's way, bending, rippling, folding in or pouching out according to its physical dynamics, not the dynamics of any structure beneath. Who wins this battle of the wills? The rigid fur cloth wins about 95% or better of the arguments and does it the cloth way. Any muscle dynamic simulation suit just gets to look good when the fur suit doesn't cover it.

That's the reality of 1967, before and on to the mid 80's.

But even when Naional Hair Tech (now I believe called National Fibre Technology) finally started weaving really great all-way stretch spandex backed fur, the muscule dynamic simulation suit thing never really got wonderful, as far as I'm concerned. The artists fabricating them tried using the individual muscle shapes in sleaved sheaths, and the results looked great in the Cinefex article that inevitably accompanied the release of the film the suit was used for, and gave the suit a nice muscular physique, but I never saw one really move like real muscles. The problem goes back to the above described conflict of dynamics. Foam compresses wonderfully, and a muscle dynamic simulation design can't have it's parts compressing or collapsing.

Now I've already stated they didn't have stretch fur back in 1967, but a ventilated suit or wefted hair sewn on an elastic cloth could have been sort of stretchy (although the hair wouldn't match the PG figure), but allow me to go through the muscle suit under stretch fur to once and for all clear the air with all bases covered.

Stretch fur comes in a static or relaxed size, and you can tailor it in it's relaxed state and it will stretch wonderfully. But it won't compress wonderfully. It still folds and buckles. So to get wonderful compression as well as elongation, you need to stretch the fur for the "neutral" or mid-position posture of the suit. So when it's elongated, it's stretched even more, and when the body movement allows for compression, the spandex "relaxes" to it's original smaller dimensions, appearing to compress. So the fur is either "relaxed", or stretched slightly for the neutral position, or stretched alot for the extended position.

Now you put a muscle mass under that, hoping it will move like a real creature's muscles. Let's just take the upper arm as an example. You want a bicep to swell if the forarm bends at the elbow, and the bicep to relax and the tricep to swell if the arn extends straight. If the foam padding forming the muscle mass in the arm under the fur is shaped when the arm is fully straight, with a swelling tricep, the bicep part will not swell up when you bend the arm. It will just compress smaller, if it's foam.

If it's a solid mass like some of the fat suit gels and can't compress, it may try to swell but it will take the line of least resistance as to the swelling direction. It won't go outward, because you've got fur stretched over it and the elastic tension of the spandex inhibits the swelling outward of the bicep mass. The gel mass trying to be a bicep will likely swell sideways, or even inward to put more pressure on the mime inside the suit.

And if is swells inward, it can put pressure on the mime's true muscles and veins, and can even cut off circulation (like a blood pressure reading cuff). How do you guarantee it only swells outward to create the tensed bicep look? I've never seen it done well yet, because the physics don't match real muscle physics where you have an insertion and and origin of the muscle, and the tensing focuses all the muscle mass on pulling those two points closer and pulling all the muscle mass into that zone. And if you use a solid gel mass for the muscles, you add substantial weight to the suit, and further burden the poor mime inside. And if you pack an underlying rigid shell beneath the muscle so it won't swell inward, that's another layer of weight and an obstruction inhibiting the mime's movement. It works for some robotics, but not people in suits.

So if you go with light weight foamed muscles, to keep the weight from killing the mime, you get foam compression instead of bulging muscles in most instances. Or you design each foam muscle tensed, so it's normal shape is the "bulging" form, but then you have more effort on the mime's part just stretching all these tensed foam muscles to elongate and look relaxed. Your mime will probably be exhausted in a few minutes, because you've made every movement harder.

Now take everything I said above, and multiply it by 10 to get the dismal prospect of any underlying muscle suit showing through rigid backed fur instead of stretch fur. So while a muscle suit under stretch fur may have some small prospect of actually looking like real muscles, the prospect under rigid backed fur is just about zero. All you have is foam pading in a generally muscular shape. But the rigid furcloth is still going to move it's way, not the muscle suit's way.

I did reaseach back in 81 on the closest thing science has devised yet to try and replicate real muscle physics, and it's called ferro-fluidics, the NASA sponsored technology of using a magnetic liquid in an elongated sleave, and it balled up like a tensed bicep when an electric current stimulated the magnatized fliud. They had intended to use it as a valve, so relaxed it was long and slender and allowed other fluids to pass it in a tube, but electrified, it balled up and formed a stopper shutting the tube. But no studio employer was willing to fund an R&D phase of a suit so I could test the fesability of incorporating that into a suit, and I suspect if they did, the result would be a dismal failure because of the weight issue and the electrical voltage needed to be plugged into the suit.

So the end result is that however impressive a muscle padding suit looks in a photo before the fur is put on, the actual motion of the fur when the mime is fully dressed isn't as anatomically real as the PR industy hype might lead you to believe. And there's no point in somebody showing you a photo of a foam sculpted or tailored foam suit, even showing how it moves with the person wearing it, if you can't show what it does (or fails to do) when you put the fur on top and close up the suit. Without the fur, a muscle padding suit is just incomplete and useless for any discussion about the figure in the PG film.

How about air bladders in the suit? Forget it if the fur has a rigid backing. The bladder will just expand inward and cut off the mime's circulation whereever the swelling inward occurs. Not to mention the compressor air hose coming down out of the leg of the suit, to power the bladder inflation, and the vacuum pump hose needed to rapidly deflate the baldder for the "contraction" phase. I did this in "The Beastmaster" for an opening sequence of a woman's baby being magically "stolen" from her womb, and the belly prosthetic had to rapidly swell and deflate. Total nightmare just trying to coordinate the valve from the air compressor with the valve for the vacuum pump. We had to shoot at 12 fps and then let the speeded up 24 fps projection make it look faster.

So it is my recommendation that generally, if you want to argue for a suit used for a hoax, please don't try to imply that the "muscle suit" inside actually provides any motion or animation effect even remotely resembling real muscle motion, unless you're prepared to document the engineering that was used. Absent such documentation, all presumption of regularity must rest with the assumption that all you have is padding inside, plain and simple, and it won't make the furcloth do anything the furcloth doesn't want to do.

And I will re-afirm my recommendation here that the term "muscle suit" be phased out, and any discussion clearly identify either "Muscle Padding Suit" or "Muscle Dynamic Sumilaution Suit" because of the ambiguity of the term "muscle suit" and the fact that the two real alternatives are essentially incompatible.

For those who may share my idea of clarifying this issue in the future, for simplicity, we can use the abreviations MPS - muscle padding suit and MDSS - muscle dynamics simulation suit in subsequent postings.

BREAST COMMENTS

The usual simple way of making a suit with full breasts would be to start with a base form, resembling the chest shape of the torso padding. Then sculpt on it the breast shapes. Make a plaster mold of the sculpture, then latex can be brushed into the mold surface, and flexible polyureathane foam can then be introduced into the mold. The back side the torso shaped section is pressed into the mold (in essence, a two piece mold really) and clamped so the expanding foam doesn't push the mold pieces apart. Once the foam cures, you remove the piece and have a light, pliable cast resembling the breasts that were sculpted. But it won't move in any fluid way when the person wearing the suit walks. The foam's strength to hold it's molded form is greater than the weight of it affected by gravity. So it has no "bounce".

To get a fluid bounce, you'd need an outer skin, such as 1/4" cast foam latex shaping the outer form of the breast, and an inner pouch holding a fluid sack, and then a back section shaped like the chest wall, which both the fluid sack and foam skin attach to. The trick is there's no formula of how thick the foam latex outer skin is and how much fluid mass can be put inside. It would either be a guess, or some R&D to test several varying thicknesses of each. And foam latex fabrication wasn't a common skill for anybody but makeup artists. Plus you need the curing oven to bake the foam latex to cure it. So I think we can safely say if it's a hoax, Patterson didn't do this in his garage, didn't do it himself. He had a professional suitmaker, which brings back budget to pay somebody skillful and expensive.

I do recall back in 1969, when I was starting at Universal Studios and developing my prosthetic skills, the idea of a gel-enclosed appliance or body prosthetic was much debated by the makeup people I knew. It had occasionally been tried but there was not a single "proven" use of it in the makeup business I recall. So I find it hard to believe that here we have one of the most impressive examples of a fluid-filled body prosthetic for the time, being done on a secret side job for a situation the artist could never take credit for or put on his resume. I also find it hard to believe a hoaxer could afford to pay a professional artist an R&D budget to experiment to get it right. It would have been so much easier to just leave off the breasts, and ignore the issue of gender for the suit figure, or do a straight up latex/polyfoamed breast piece with no "bounce" and no hassle.

BUTT PADDING

The Butt padding - I believe it was in a post by Chris Walas from 2004 that I read where he mentioned about the old trick of padding the butt to make the legs look shorter, more apelike. This is correct. Great apes have longer backs and shorter legs (and longer arms) than humans. And it is done in gorilla suits to similarly give the illusion of longer backs and shorter legs.

So one could argue that Patty has that odd butt mass because the suit maker was trying to make the body more apelike. If so, this suitmaker, who obviously knows a thing or two about ape vs human anatomy, should have also known that female great apes do not have breasts like human females. So we have the intriguing contridiction that one aspect of apelike anatomy (the lowered butt, and shorter leg illusion) was added to give a more apelike appearance, while another aspect of anatomy (the breasts) were added which emphatically are not apelike at all. Does this suitmaker have a split personality, on the one hand trying to be anatomically responsible to apelike forms, while on the other hand being completely and conspicuously irresponsible in adding a totally non-apelike feature?

If it's a suit, you really have to wonder if the fabricator was completely deranged, or just an incredibly determined to create a paradox. The contridictions really don't add up.

I continue to look at it and keep asking:

Why an ape butt but human breasts?

Why apelike body and humanoid face?

Frankly, I find the breasts a rather convincing suggestion that the PG figure has ancestoral links to an early hominid, such as A. Boisei or A. aethiopicus instead of Giganto. Just a thought.

Another contridiction I saw in some of the enhanced footage was the contridiction that the pelvic area has what appear to be seams exactly as I'd expect to tailor flat furcloth or real fur around the compound curves from waist to top of the thigh. But the back flowing up to the neck and arms should have as many tailoring seams and it's flawless by comparison.

Makes me wonder if a true master suit maker worked the long day making the back/neck/arms near perfect, and then at night, drunken elves broke into the shop and did the pelvis section. I still haven't made any conclusion about this discrepancy, one of the main reason's I'm still "undecided".

More to Come (and soon to be posted):

Creature Suits Analysis - Part Three The Mime inside

Creature Suits Analysis - Part Four Rebuilding Patty

[wiiawiwb]

Fascinating Bill, fascinating.

[Guest CrimsonGoblin]

Excellent work Bill.

What about the possibility of Patterson having "beginners luck". Patterson, not having the learned skills of costume design and fabrication just wings it without following the established protocol and lucks out with a combination of materials that renders a suit that when filmed gives us the most famous home video of all time.

btw, I lead towards the film being of an authentic

[Guest OklahomaSquatch]

As a hobbyist interested in sculpting, molding, and casting on a very amateur basis, I find your postings extremely interesting and informative, even if I wasn't interested in the Bigfoot phenomenon. I'd love to pick your brain sometime, but seeing how this is a Bigfoot forum, I'll try to stay on topic.

So far everything you've said has made complete sense. I'd consider myself to have just a hair above average knowledge of special effects and make-up techniques, but even without that prior understanding, you have made your case extremely clear and easy to understand. Too bad this wasn't done years ago. Unfortunately the damage has already been done in regards to the public sector, regardless of what transpires in the confines of the Bigfoot internet community. It has been proposed that you take it a step farther and publish some sort of scientific journal of sorts. I know you want to get this out of the way, and I'm sure as you write your postings even new thoughts will come to mind, but if I may make a suggestion to store away in the back of your mind. Perhaps your knowledge on this subject would have an even greater impact if you didn't take the entire burden on yourself. Your piece is part of a much larger puzzle, and if you were to decide going farther with this, I would suggest maybe partnering up with some other experts and professionals from other fields and organizing a group effort for a published paper. While the individual arguments alone may not be enough to sway the opinions of the scientific community, perhaps a combined effort would have more of an impact. Just an idea.

Now to play the role of devil's advocate. You mentioned the contradictions apparent in the subject if it were in fat constructed by a suit maker. Such as the ape like buttocks, and the human like breasts. The keen attention to detail and structure of the back and neck area in relation to the head, and then the total absence of such detail in the pelvic area, if what we were seeing was in fact seams of some sort. Would the seam work have any bearing on the ability of the mime's mobility? For instance if the mime was shorter than the actual suit itself, would the seam work possibly reflect a construction to allow for this, or give the mime greater ability of movement and control? As far as the part ape and part human design, could that be due to limited knowledge of the time, and what would possibly be the result of trying to construct an "ape-man" suit? The designer may have done their best at creating what they felt a cross between a human and an ape would appear like, having parts of both mixed into one design, as opposed to trying to create an even blend of the various parts. One more question, is there any circumstance where the breasts may have played a role as a functional necessity and not simply cosmetic, thus giving them a reason to add breasts to the suit. Such as to conceal some flaw or add space for some type of mechanics. Please don't take this as arguing against the points you have made, I'm simply just trying to cover all the bases. Thanks again.

Matt K.

[Guest yetifan]

Bill, many thanks for your input here, great to read.

You wrote:

So one could argue that Patty has that odd butt mass because the suit maker was trying to make the body more apelike. If so, this suitmaker, who obviously knows a thing or two about ape vs human anatomy, should have also known that female great apes do not have breasts like human females. So we have the intriguing contridiction that one aspect of apelike anatomy (the lowered butt, and shorter leg illusion) was added to give a more apelike appearance, while another aspect of anatomy (the breasts) were added which emphatically are not apelike at all. Does this suitmaker have a split personality, on the one hand trying to be anatomically responsible to apelike forms, while on the other hand being completely and conspicuously irresponsible in adding a totally non-apelike feature?

If it was a hoax perpetrated by Patterson (either commissioned or done with help) he was well aware (in fact he mentions it in the book he published the year before the PGF was shot) that alleged sightings of female Bigfeet involved protruding breasts like humans. Specifically, he mentions the story told by William Roe. Below is the drawing Roe's daughter did based on her father's story. Patterson also sketched (or perhaps traced) a picture in his book (pg. 91), representing Roe's telling, of a Bigfoot with humanlike breasts. Patterson was also aware that your average Bigfoot sighting of apparent males involved, on average, a bigger being than your average female sighting. Isn't it plausible that a hoaxer would plan that if you have an approx. 6 ft. tall man in a suit, that he would be closer in stature to an averaged sized female Bigfoot than a male one?

[Guest Texas Bigfoot]

If the seam is in the back, and that is largely what is visible throughout the video, what would keep the seam hidden? (If it were a suit)

[Bill]

wiiawiwb

Sometimes, when you clear away the smoke and mirrers, the view is fascinating, I agree.

:blowkiss:

CrimsonGoblin

candidly, I do seriously wonder about "beginner's luck" and haven't yet figured out how to discount it. Once in awhile, a "beginner" actually does succeed in doing what established "pros" think can't be done. I've done it myself, inventing things veteran pros of the fied told me was impossible.

But I see elements I can't comprehend any amateur doing, meaning, I can't see Patterson doing it alone, or even with a few other "beginners".

But as I've noted before in other threads, I still haven't seen the full PG footage at it's very best, or been able to do hi resolution frame studies. Such might give me something to more confidently discount "beginner's luck".

OklahomaSquatch

On the matter of the frequently suggested "scientific paper", actually I would agree with your observation that it should (if indeed it is done) be a broader work authored by several people. That's one of the reasons for my obvious hesitancy to jump into it. It would need to be a more "cross-discipline" effort of several experts, and as yet, I don't know exactly which other disciplines that should be, to weave the effort into one focused whole. So we'll just let that idea rest for while, to gestate, so to speak.

As for playing the devil's advocate, a perfectly respectable role to play, indeed vital to any serious study. Assuming it is a suit, for the moment, seams (both closure seams and tailoring seams) are the most likely cause of any flaw in the fur continuity. Seam placement as affecting mobility tends to be most critical when the furcloth is formfitting to the mime and rigid backed. Furcloth fitted around a heavily padded undersuit is more forgiving in terms of mime mobility, because the furcloth has more option to compress into the foam padding than if it were compressing into the mime and cutting off circulation. So a furcloth suit around heavy padding doesn't interfer with the mime's mobility, even if the seaming placement is not ideal for mobility.

Generally, when a designer chooses to create something "ficticious", the designer tends to focus on one natural source of reference or inspiration, as I did with Giganto, as being like known asian apes. When you borrow a little from here and a little from there (varied sources), your fictious creation tends to become more obviously ficticious. If that's your goal, fine, take all the parts you like from anything you like. But if you want to create a ficticious thing and make people believe it's something real, a wise designer would more likely try to pick one source real creature as the main reference, and not mix & match without some very well described explanation. That's why the "ape butt" and human breasts is a paradox to me. One show's a high level of primate anatomy knowledge and the two on the same creature shows ignorance of primate anatomy.

No, the breasts would not be added to conceal anything. A regular ape chest would work just fine. Nothing there a suitmaker puts.

Your interest in "covering all the bases" is appreciated. Ask more as you like.

Yetifan

Your point is well taken. But there are two more-or-less equal ways to look at it. The figure on film looks like Roe's drawing because the suitmakers copied it deliberately, or the figure in the film looks like the drawing because that's what real ones look like. In the rules of logic, either point of view is supported by the occurance.

And you can argue that if a mature male creature is known to reach 7' but you have only a 6' tall man for your suit, just make it a juvenile male, not matured to full stature.

If it's a fabricated suit, the fabricators made conscious choices about how it should look. Why they (if there are fabricators) made the choices they did, I suppose we will never know. That's why I tend to look back at "presumptions of regularity" in a professional suitmaker's or amateur suitmaker's mindset. And what I see does not follow the presumption of regularity in either instance.

Texas bigfoot

If the seam's down the back, standard position, nothing would have likely kept it as smooth as what you see on the PG film. Not with hair that short and dense. You'd have to break with tradition and put the seam somewhere else.

Bill

[Guest Hominid,WA]

If it was a hoax perpetrated by Patterson (either commissioned or done with help) he was well aware (in fact he mentions it in the book he published the year before the PGF was shot) that alleged sightings of female Bigfeet involved protruding breasts like humans.

IMO, Patterson could have had "Bigfoot breasts" on his mind from there to eternity, however the question is, could he or anyone for that matter, have created such breasts as viewed in the 1967 PGF?

I do recall back in 1969, when I was starting at Universal Studios and developing my prosthetic skills, the idea of a gel-enclosed appliance or body prosthetic was much debated by the makeup people I knew. It had occasionally been tried but there was not a single "proven" use of it in the makeup business I recall. So I find it hard to believe that here we have one of the most impressive examples of a fluid-filled body prosthetic for the time, being done on a secret side job for a situation the artist could never take credit for or put on his resume. I also find it hard to believe a hoaxer could afford to pay a professional artist an R&D budget to experiment to get it right. It would have been so much easier to just leave off the breasts, and ignore the issue of gender for the suit figure, or do a straight up latex/polyfoamed breast piece with no "bounce" and no hassle.

Edited January 7, 2008 by Hominid,WA

[Bill]

Hominid:

Anther thought inspired by your comment: Stuart Freeborn, who did the 2001 apes for the Dawn of Man sequence, is reported to have built into one of the female suits a milk sac so the baby chimp playing the baby hominid could actually nurse from the breast of the mother suit. Stuart is generally regarded now as one of the certifiable geniuses of the time in makeup effects, and he is doing hominids, not apes, so putting larger pliable breasts on the females with gel sacs to allow them to be held by the baby chimp's hands while nursing would have been very reasonable, from a nature standpoint. Yet even he, the genius of the time, didn't try larger fluid-filled breasts in the suit, and he was pushing the envelope on suit structure, mask animation engineering, everything. Makes you wonder.

:blowkiss:

Bill

[Guest]

While you briefly touched on muscle movement in part 1 you certainly covered it throughly in part 2, as I thought you would. Thanks so much.

By the way, I read somewhere (I've read so many sites that I don't remember where now) that the muscle movements "could" have been done using bladders with interconnecting tubes to the feet so, for example left foot down forces fluid into the right side leg muscle bladder. Sounded pretty far fetched to me since I don't think that the fluid would react that fast especially on the return flow - however have you known of any experiments like this?

Once again you have covered second base extremely well. Reading your information is like watching the world series while those who claim to be the one in "the suit" give descriptions at the T-ball level. :blowkiss:

[Guest Lyndon]

Good stuff again Bill. Nothing to question or debate right now, just avidly reading your posts. :blowkiss:

[Bill]

urbanshaman

When "The Howling" came out (1980), everybody in the business was trying to do everything with bladders, every producer wanted them (bragging rights), and nobody ever got anything working well with fluid bladders, just air bladders. It's the flow rate through a tube, plus tube length. We did a lot of blood tube stuff for bleeding wounds, cut veins "spurting" blood, etc. at the time.

You couldn't put a very big fluid resivoir in the foot to step on,and it would have to be shaped like a rigid hydraulic cylinder, not just a loose pouch or bag, because you must guarantee the fluid, once "stepped on" would flow only into the tube, not just expand the bag in a sideways direction in the shoe, the tube up to the "muscle" would slows down the reactive time (internal friction in the tube), and the rigid fur would overpower the fluid pressure, so the bladder would expand sideways or down back toward the mime's body, not outward. Bladders of any kind only worked well under thin foam latex prosthetics, because the foam has great elasticity and stretched so easily, so the bladder could expand it. No such luck for the fur areas.

Other than that, it probably would work perfectly.

And the whole bladder thing really didn't start until mid 70's. I believe **** Smith was the one really doing the R&D on them then, passed the info on to Rick Baker, who guided Rob Bottin on the Howling, so 1967, no bladders I know of.

Lyndon

Enjoy the read.

:blowkiss:

Bill

[Guest rolando]

I just wanted to thank you Bill for sharing your expert analysis with this forum. Your posts are written clearly and thoroughly and have a good balance.

Also, I want to comment that something seemingly simple like, "getting something to look right" is usually quite difficult in the end. The eyes and sense of sight of people is actually really really excellent at detecting minor flaws. For instance, most people can make a painting hanging on a wall perfectly level just by eye. I work in the boatbuilding business and know that, again, most people can detect changes in curvature of a smooth surface that are +- .5mm or less, relatively easily.

[Guest longtabber PE]

I did reaseach back in 81 on the closest thing science has devised yet to try and replicate real muscle physics, and it's called ferro-fluidics, the NASA sponsored technology of using a magnetic liquid in an elongated sleave, and it balled up like a tensed bicep when an electric current stimulated the magnatized fliud. They had intended to use it as a valve, so relaxed it was long and slender and allowed other fluids to pass it in a tube, but electrified, it balled up and formed a stopper shutting the tube. But no studio employer was willing to fund an R&D phase of a suit so I could test the fesability of incorporating that into a suit, and I suspect if they did, the result would be a dismal failure because of the weight issue and the electrical voltage needed to be plugged into the suit.

Another contridiction I saw in some of the enhanced footage was the contridiction that the pelvic area has what appear to be seams exactly as I'd expect to tailor flat furcloth or real fur around the compound curves from waist to top of the thigh. But the back flowing up to the neck and arms should have as many tailoring seams and it's flawless by comparison.

Makes me wonder if a true master suit maker worked the long day making the back/neck/arms near perfect, and then at night, drunken elves broke into the shop and did the pelvis section. I still haven't made any conclusion about this discrepancy, one of the main reason's I'm still "undecided".

More to Come (and soon to be posted):

Bill, I have to say, as an engineer- your level of detail and thought describing the processes used and the cause/effect is impressive. You are certainly a master at your craft and I salute you.

>>>I did reaseach back in 81 on the closest thing science has devised yet to try and replicate real muscle physics, and it's called ferro-fluidics, the NASA sponsored technology of using a magnetic liquid in an elongated sleave, and it balled up like a tensed bicep when an electric current stimulated the magnatized fliud. They had intended to use it as a valve, so relaxed it was long and slender and allowed other fluids to pass it in a tube, but electrified, it balled up and formed a stopper shutting the tube. But no studio employer was willing to fund an R&D phase of a suit so I could test the fesability of incorporating that into a suit, and I suspect if they did, the result would be a dismal failure because of the weight issue and the electrical voltage needed to be plugged into the suit.

This one I can comment on a bit. This technology is much more advanced now to include pump applications and there is also work being done with bands that contract ( simulating muscle) for various applications including body armor and prosthetics. They bare still noyt advanced enough to be man portable yet.

>>>Another contridiction I saw in some of the enhanced footage was the contridiction that the pelvic area has what appear to be seams exactly as I'd expect to tailor flat furcloth or real fur around the compound curves from waist to top of the thigh. But the back flowing up to the neck and arms should have as many tailoring seams and it's flawless by comparison.

I had a discussion years ago in NC with some FX guys who were doing work on one of the tennage mutant ninja movies. One of them had the thought that this suit could have been a "right hand" suit and that would allow it to look real for a camera but be loose enough to move with more freedom.

Does such a thing as a right hand costume ( or I guess left hand too) type costume exist? If so, what exactly are they?

[Guest Hominid,WA]

Makes you wonder.

Bill

That it does. :blowkiss: