Day of the Dead Contagium Special FX Excerpts

Gary from the official site for Day of the Dead Contagium sent me some excerpts from The FX guys.

Greg Mc Dougal, was one of the FX guys on Contagium, He Also worked along side Tom Savini for many Years. Greg Was a teacher at Tom’s Make-Up School in Pittsburgh and they are Very Good friends. Greg spent the Last third of the Shoot doing FX for Contagium.

THE ZOMBIE-LOOK - I can’t think of any other movie monster that has been done so many times before. It’s hard to come up with a zombie design that is totally new and fresh or at least isn’t already based on an existing idea. Trying to come up with something totally new just wasn’t the way to go on "Day of the Dead 2: Contagium". There just wasn’t the time and I wasn’t in charge of the makeup crew anyway.

HONORING THE ORIGINAL - I am a huge fan of the original "Day of the Dead". It’s the "Star Wars" of zombie films to me. Like Lucas’s classic, Romero’s film was made for very little money, but it was slick, entertaining, had a good story, and the artistic and technical aspects of the movie were top-notch. I always felt that Tom Savini and his crew’s work in that film were nothing less than amazing. Considering the kind of quality that fans of Romero’s zombie films have come to expect, I knew that I had to provide some good makeups for the sequel. I not only had to do some good makeups, but I had to honor the original film’s makeup achievements

WHAT GOES INTO A ZOMBIE - Zombies are movie characters and there can always be a little artistic license taken when creating them. This is the fun part. I enjoy using as many different makeup techniques as I can to create an effective zombie makeup. For DOTD2, I used tons of different ways to make zombies. There’s always the traditional foam latex route, but I also used many other techniques, too.

DIFFERENT TECHNIQUES - I made up different kinds of blood for the zombie makeups. I had the traditional "red" blood for fresh wounds, "brown" blood for coagulated blood, "dark" blood to add to the depth of wounds and for creepy effects, and finally "mouth" blood for safe use in the mouth (the other 3 kinds of blood were safe, but could not be put in the mouth due to wetting agents added to them).

INTERESTING BEHIND-THE-SCENES TID-BITS - I don’t know why, but it seems that at least half of the films I’ve worked on, I always play someone else’s hands. "DOTD2" was no exception. There are a few scenes where my hands doubled as someone else’s during the film’s goriest moments. One scene featured a head being ripped off and I happily offered to be the hand double.

REGRETS - I only regret that I wasn’t brought on the film earlier. I really enjoyed working with the crew and I hope to be more of an integral part of the next Taurus production. I also hope that zombie fans will enjoy my contributions to this film.