A Living Doll

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Mon, 01/25/2016 - 15:19 -- Nick Dager

MastersFX created the living doll in the horror film The Boy.Character FX artists from MastersFX have created the featured creepy doll Brahms, the title character starring in Lakeshore Entertainment and STX Entertainment’s horror film, The Boy. For The Boy, which opened January 22, MastersFX’s Vancouver Studio created the title character – a four-foot tall doll that seems to rule the household of a remote manor. In the film, a young American woman, Greta, (Lauren Cohan of AMC’s The Walking Dead), takes a job as a live-in nanny in rural England. She comes to find out that the child she was hired to care for is not an actual eight-year-old boy, but instead, a life-sized porcelain doll named Brahms.

Company president Todd Masters said, “We have a long-standing relationship with our friends at Lakeshore Entertainment, usually making vampires and werewolves for their Underworld films. But this time, creating Brahms, was a completely different challenge.”

Brahms“We knew that this Brahms doll needed to be more like a supporting cast member for Lauren Cohan to play against, rather than just serve as her prop,” Masters added, “So we added all sorts of weird little forms and details within his features. We wanted to depict a good deal of realism with his appearance, even by his ability to make a simple turn of his head. Adding in cinematographer Daniel Pearl’s (Texas Chainsaw Massacre) incredible lighting, he, director William Brent Bell, and especially producer Richard Wright were instrumental in helping us to present Brahms’ simple, downplayed, yet truly bizarre features.”

MastersFX’s Vancouver Studio created several Brahams dolls to accommodate the needs of various stages of the production. MFX’s Lead Artist Yukiyo Okajima sculpted Brahms delicate features, and finished each life-like doll with her special touch. “This was tough in some ways, as sometimes subtle nuances can be more painstaking, than, say creating a Lycan – where we have fur and slime to help us hide some of our FX tricks. But with The Boy, our team has really outdone themselves by creating a truly ‘creepy doll’ for the movie ages,” Masters concludes.

Working on-set, MastersFX artist Tannis Hegan operated and maintained each of the Brahms dolls to ensure that each dolls’ features would reflect the proper emotion and tone. Each doll was articulated as though a large stop-motion armature was inside it. In this manner, Hegan could allow Brahms to make the slightest of head turns, or move into a body pose that would convincingly portray the appropriate character’s emotion as each scene required.

The Boy is a haunting thriller, filled with more than meets the eye, from director William Brent Bell (The Devil Inside.)

In addition to the company’s work on The Boy, MastersFX also recently completed its special makeup FX contributions to Underworld: Next Generation, for Lakeshore Entertainment, the fifth installment in the successful action sci-fi franchise, starring Kate Beckinsale. MastersFX has once again provided the practical, on-set Lycan characters for this film, which recently completed principal photography in Prague. Anna Foerster directs Underworld: Next Generation, which Sony Pictures Entertainment will release.

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