Cradle of Filth - Dark Horses and Forces Tour 2022

A chance meeting with Dani Filth while building scenery for a historical action movie led to us getting the gig designing their Europe tour. The brief was something like “lots of tentacles” + “10’ tall alien skeletons” + “highly fire retardant”. We took that to mean a 90% fibreglass and foam job, with a lot of sculpting, laminating, thermoforming, and some life-cast elements. To be honest, having flown out to join them at various stages of the tour, rock and roll is somewhat more fun than film and TV, especially if you get a client who wants to push the envelope a bit in terms of the density of designed elements in a touring show. It also has its own challenges, in that it all needs to be set and struck at high speed multiple times a week. Really sound clients who were a joy to work with. To say thanks for the opportunity to sculpt cool stuff, we cast them some tour mementos from the original sculpts. Live performance photo credits to original photographer. Our initial design from the client’s key reference image included early in the gallery.

World Gone Mad Promo - Life Of Agony / Firebelly Films

Fun one close to home (well, in the Bardulf Workshop doubling up as a soundstage) for old friends Firebelly Films. Director Leigh Brooks got in touch with a concept, we fleshed it out, drew him up a cool little set and some creature concepts, a week later the band had signed it off and we were shooting it, filling the workshop with black goo. Set was designed at roughly 3/4 scale to make the demon a little uncanny.

Tornado GR1 cockpits for Lifecast Ltd

Our old pal and colleague John Schoonraad over at Lifecast needed help building a split pair of GR1 cockpits, initially taken as a mould from the real jet front end, but we resculpted a lot of it, vac-formed the cockpit windows, and fabricated the unmouldable details, cannons etc. We then split the sections and painted one up in Gulf War colours and decals, the other a more Cold War era paint scheme. Loads of fun and lots of crunchy research involved. I think we also threw in a scratch-built Lewis gun for the client, an aviation museum.

Timber-framed American home model - HGTV ad

We designed a run of 3-4 ads/spot for HGTV via Scripps Network, which comprised 4 full size sets, but also this 4’x4’ miniature/bigature. It was probably something like 1:28 scale. We machined down all of the timber in it from stock, without recourse to architectural model supplies, so the bulk of the cost was in design, superglue, and the deeply zen act of US style timber-framing in miniature. It was shot and comped into a building plot/construction site wide shot and worked rather well.

The client liked it so much they asked for it to be pallet shipped to their HQ for permanent display in their lobby.

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