Re: eFX ANH Vader?!?! WOW
Carsten is partly correct about the paint scheme....partly.
The left (Vader's left) side of the mouth triangle is gunmetal, at least on the Tantive IV. Earlier it may have been a darker color.
Both the right tusk tubes and triangle space between them are an off-black color, not gunmetal. Toward the tusks there is some gunmetal which is why it looks deceiving in the Tantive IV screen-caps. But you need still photo reference to pick it up properly.
Toward the rear between the tubes on the left there is a band of black paint under the gunmetal. You can see this behind the scenes when the dome comes off the mask when Prowse fights Guiness. The upper mask line should should be clear on a pull from the ILM mold, but I guess this was missed.
The crescent shape on the lower left front cheek is gunmetal, not black.
The left side of the U-shaped part of the nose is actually also gunmetal, the black doesn't extend down in that area.
About the Comic Con casting itself, and I'll confine my comments to the hand-brushed one as that seems not to be as entirely cleaned up as the idealized one, plus Art's photos are useful enough to comment on.
1. What happened to the widow's peak? The top face is reworked and from the side it looks pushed in slightly.
2. The nose bridge looks distorted...narrower on the left side. I don't know if that's just this pull or an indication of the age of the mold.
3. Trimming of the teeth gaps is pretty shoddy, mainly on account of them being cut too wide in places for some odd reason.
4. No detail on the dome...at all. It isn't just the paint, there has been significant going over on the surface and the flaring edges to smooth them out. It almost looked to me initially like a GH dome, but I know it isn't.
5. Front flaring of the dome is warped in just a bit towards the mask.
6. Tubes ends were reworked...why? They taper down way too much and the tapering is too steep as well.
7. Mouth triangle corners could be sharper, that is to say with more acute angles.
8. Just as an aside, funny how the C-scar looks right, huh guys? :rolleyes
9. The top nose slot is reworked and is at the wrong angle to the horizontal, making the left side further from the middle slot than it should be. I also notice some tying in of the left upper eyebrow to meet the left side of the top nose slot for some reason which isn't representative of how it came out of the mold.
10. And I fail to understand that if someone wanted to replicate a Tantive IV-like mask, why would they leave the tube undercut filled in? This can be a golden opportunity to correct that temporary filler, but I guess just another example of something that was overlooked.
11. I hope the lens curvature will be better than that, especially given that the master pull has the original lens reference on it. The left lens especially has flattened, irregular areas and the original lens has a nice rounded uniform curve to it.
12. The tusks are entirely inaccurate, but in fairness I understand they were obtained at the last minute, which I find strange if Gino was involved "from the beginning", which he wasn't.
13. The upper eyebrows seem thinner, as well as the outer eye corners, but will need better images to confirm.
14. If people think they are getting the mask just as it came out of the mold, they aren't. There's been more cleanup than I expected. Even if you strip down the paint, I would have expected at least something like the indentation on the right side of the mouth triangle to be visible, although to be fair it really depends on how many coats of paint were used but I would think it would be painted so as to show off detail, not conceal it.
