The Relic "Kothoga" Movie Prop

[kgosselinart]

Hey guys, new member here.
I have a client who has been dying to get a relic movie prop made for years. My work is mostly in making custom toys which is how my client and I met. He thought I would be perfect to make this prop and I jumped at the chance because I'd rather be doing more detailed stuff. I'm posting it here to showcase to an audience that might appreciate it.

I'll be posting pics of the process I went about to make this piece. It's about 14 inches tall which in fact in about half the size it appears in the movie. I chose to make it out of super sculpey which is not ideal but the client wanted the original. I needed a material though I could use as a finished product but also allow me the time to do the detective work I needed for this piece. For anyone who's seen the movie, you'll know the the prop is only shown in a couple scenes. The best shot of it is during a 180 degree sweep around the piece but in very poor lighting. Half the piece of one side is in near black and of course with only 180 degrees, the entire left hand side of the relic is never seen. I was able to take stills from the movie and overexpose them in photoshop giving me wonderful amounts of information. I'll post pics of that too.

The client wanted the original and cast. Today I'm molding it. I'll posts pics of that process as well.

For now, here's the final piece.

 

[Crank729]

Beautiful. I've never seen the movie but I LOVE the book. Great work!

 

[kgosselinart]

Here's a shot of the Kothoga relic from the movie. It's a still from the 180 degree sweep that I've overexposed

 

[kgosselinart]

Beautiful. I've never seen the movie but I LOVE the book. Great work!

Yeah, read the first couple books from the series when researching the project and I actually liked them a lot. And the movie was decent too.

 

[adamata]

that is 8 shades of awesome!

Ok, so 2 questions.

1.) How are your casting it? roto-cast hollow? and then maybe filling it with foam?
2.) what price range are you looking at? I really want one!

 

[hydin]

Now that is cool.

I think this might be the first finished piece of this that I have seen.

Love it

Chris

 

[Howlrunner]

Love it, looks great! :thumbsup I have always wanted this prop.

So this is 14 inches tall and that's about half the size of the prop in the movie? I don't remember the statue being nearly as big as 28 inches tall. 14 inches sounds more like the correct movie size from what I recall.

EDIT:

Just popped the DVD in - yeah, the statue is much bigger than I remembered. I guess it's because the full statue is never seen in relation to anything else to compare size - it's always shown in close up by itself. The only time you really see anything of it that's recogniseable with something else in the frame for size reference is in this (very brief) shot:

That said, I think 14" is a far more manageable and practical size for this prop than 28".

Did you manage to find any pics of the prop that show the skull base (I've not seen any) or did you go with your own rendition based on the line ".... sitting on the skulls of his victims"?

Really looking forward to seeing it cast and painted.

 

[allosaur176]

its about time someone tackled this!! I've been looking for one of these for years now

 

[kgosselinart]

That said, I think 14" is a far more manageable and practical size for this prop than 28".

yeah, there's another shot I used of the restorer holding the piece, that shows the thumb holding it and clearly it's much bigger, no way to be sure, but at least twice the size of what I did, but as you said, much more practical to have it smaller as I doubt there are many people who have the space for a 2 1/2 foot tall relic like this.

 

[kgosselinart]

that is 8 shades of awesome!

Ok, so 2 questions.

1.) How are your casting it? roto-cast hollow? and then maybe filling it with foam?
2.) what price range are you looking at? I really want one!

I was intending to do a roto, but a tech provider at my smooth-on distributor suggested doing a push mold, so I'm going to try that first

the mold will be big enough to get my hands in so I'll take some free form epoxy putty and push it into the mold, never did this and I have my doubts but I'll give it a shot before trying to hand roto a very heavy mold
I've also never roto cast either so this sculpt is providing fun new challenges for me

as for question number two, I'm a newbie to the forum and I've been told this is a no no so please no questions about sales

 

[kgosselinart]

Did you manage to find any pics of the prop that show the skull base (I've not seen any) or did you go with your own rendition based on the line ".... sitting on the skulls of his victims"?

as for the skulls, this was the hardest part

there's only two shots of the base, see below and that's it
the only other resource is the 1 inch model piece that comes with the pegasus resin kit, which is very cool and was a help in some ways, but it's not entirely true to the movie based on the stills, I can only imagine it's due to scale. the kothoga monster has amazing detail in the kit so it's not that the artist couldn't have been 100% accurate, and it makes me wonder if they had information directly from the original artists, either way, I decided to take what I saw in the movie and made sure that was accurate and then I took artistic licence, so I added bones underneath to fill it in a bit and make the base a little sturdier, had I followed the kit piece I feel the base would have cause instability

 

[kgosselinart]

So this week I made the silicone mold using Smooth-on's Rebound 25. I really like the product but I it's very time consuming. I'm used to Oomoo and Mold Star and just pouring the mold and leaving it in the pressure pot. Having to brush on coat after coat after coat really took patience for me. However the finished product seems very durable.

Here's a few shots of the process

here I'm brushing on the 2nd coat, I've tinted it with blue Silc-pig

2nd coat complete

and here is the final coat back in the normal color, this was done to be sure I had proper coverage​

 

[kgosselinart]

Early in the week I had to do a very similar project using all the same materials, rebound 25 and then for mother mold I used plasti paste

I liked the plasti paste for the mother mold but I ran out for this project and didn't feel like waiting for more to be shipped, so I used another product that I had plenty of, Free Form Earth.

My tech rep with the distributor I use had suggested free form and I got a gallon of it. It's a 2 part 1A 1B epoxy clay similar to Magic Sculpt but it's not as good in my opinion, so I decided to use it instead. The process was much longer to complete but I really like the result. Plasti paste is very rough as a finished product and I imagine I'd have to use gloves when trying to rotocast it. With the free form epoxy I was able to create a very smooth mother mold that was extremely durable. It is slightly heavier than the plasti paste but not by too much.

Here's the finished mold assembled. I drilled some holes so I could easily bolt the two pieces in place. It also has a plexi-glass piece fastened to the bottom.

 

[kgosselinart]

so I finished the mold yesterday and tried my hand at my first rotocast. I have to say I was very intimidated at this process. But I found that aside from the physical stress of rotating a large awkward shape 20lb object in front of myself for about 7-8 minutes it was a piece of cake. I was able to create 5 casts in the last 24 hours. My first was a bit weak in some areas so I'll not be using it as a finished product and on my third I encountered a common problem I had heard about where the resin balls up inside. It really caused no problem as the resin is just a twisted abstract shape stuck on the inside so I continued with more layers and the cast is good. That's it.

So here's my 5 casts. I intend to fill them with polyurethane foam tomorrow to support them and give them just a little more weight. Then it'll be off to painting.

 

[Spellbot5000]

Very cool! I really loved this movie when I younger, and I never thought it got the attention it deserved. Nice to see someone making a really killer prop from the film!

 

[kgosselinart]

thanks
I had never seen this movie, somehow missed it, decent flick and this is definitely a cool prop that I was surprised nobody had made yet, was happy to take the job

 

[Howlrunner]

Looks great! :thumbsup

 

[kgosselinart]

Ok, so I've got some time today to post some of the pics of my process. Store closed and can't buy the foam I need, progress will have to wait until tomorrow.

Anyways...

So as I was saying before this project was a bit of a challenge as there's not much reference in the movie and what's available is poor. I rented the movie and screen captured all of it and then brought it into Photoshop and was super happy and surprised with the results.

Here's basically what I had to work with.

Here's the first still in the 180 pan around the relic

and here's what I got after overexposing in Photoshop

Clearly I got a lot more info but it's very degraded

Here's the profile

After Photoshop

And finally the front view

After Phtoshop

There were a bunch of in between stills and by working back and worth between them all I was able to come up with my best guess.

more to come, I gotta wrangle my photos from camera and phone, will be back with WIP pics from beginning to end

 

[kgosselinart]

well, these are the best I have, always get into projects and forget to take pics

I used sculpey for this project cause the client wanted to keep the original, and as I didn't want to invest in a ton of sculpey, I built it up using a new product suggested by a guy at the art store, big mistake

I used cellu clay and it never really dried out on me causing steam and expansion when I baked the sculpey which led to having to repair some cracks
won't use again

after a few hours I've pretty much got the sculpt blocked in, I had created a cardboard guide for both the profile and the front view allowing me to adhere to the proper form

here I played around with texture to get an idea of the finished product, way ahead of myself but sometimes I just want to know

in this shot you can see that I've turned off the studio lights and I'm using a spot light to give me sharp contrast, trying to mimic the movie lighting and get the form down

here I've pretty much got the entire piece done less the skull base
there's little reference for the skulls so I was avoiding it

I didn't feel I had enough space to work with so I ripped off the clay and extended the armature to give me about an inch more to work with

blocking in the skulls

and of course the final piece

 

[Alan Castillo]

This is such a unique piece and beautifully executed !

Such an under-rated movie when it first came out, but I love it !