Makeup Effects Archive: Dog Soldiers (2002)

Neil Marshall, director of Dog Soldiers, made the film for simple reasons. 'I just thought werewolves were a really cool monster that were underrepresented in movies. There was so many vampire movies out there, but not nearly as many werewolf movies. Having done (a werewolf movie), now I know the reason for that. It's because they're really hard to do!'

When it came to how the creatures in his own film should act and look, Marshall was influenced by his reservations with earlier werewolf films.. 'I absolutely love horror movies but it's also the genre I'm least satisfied with. (...) I adore An American Werewolf in London. It's scary, it's funny and it features the best transformation scene ever. Yet the actual werewolf itself is a bit of a dog. Take The Howling too. It's great and the werewolves are spectacular - except you hardly see them! So I wanted to make a werewolf picture that didn't fall short in any area, and that's why I came up with the idea for Dog Soldiers.'

Marshall also was determined to use practical effects from the start. 'The industry has never been able to get hair or fur right, and everything from Anaconda to The Mummy looks too much like a videogame cartoon. What most people haven't realized is that animatronics have made a major quantum leap over the past few years, but because everyone has been so caught up in the CGI frenzy, it has gone by virtually unnoticed. I wanted my werewolves in the same frame as the actors to convey the physical terror of their presence.'

Bob Keen's Image FX (formerly Image Animation) contributed the special makeup effects for Dog Soldiers. Keen was happy to finally be working on a 'proper' werewolf film. 'Neil Marshall had this wonderful 'enemy at the door' script. It could have been the Vietcong, it could have been zombies, but god bless Neil, he made it big, kick-arse werewolves!

I'd done werewolves before, on Waxwork and Nightbreed, but I'd never got to do a *werewolf movie*. So when we got the job, I was like, six werewolves! Huge creatures that can stand up seven to eight feet tall! I was in heaven!'

Bob Keen next to Dave Bonneywell's initial werewolf maquette.

Bob Keen's Dog Soldiers team was supervised by Dave Bonneywell, and included Peter Hawkins, Mat O'Toole, Justin Pitkethly, Anthony Parker among its number. It was Bonneywell who came up with the final werewolf design, according to Keen. 'Bonneywell worked with Neil, and then come back to me, and we would refine the design together. It was always Bonneywell's design from the beginning. He, like all of us, wanted to do a werewolf movie! It was Dog Soldiers that showed me what a supurb creative he was.'

The body and head sculpt of the werewolves was done by Mat O'Toole. O'Toole explained, 'At the start of the job, we was going through all the things that needed to be made, starting with the main sculpt of the wolf. Dave, I thought, was the natural fit as he was the supervisor and good at everything, but I remember him pulling me aside and saying I’m gonna give you sculpting job, I’ll be too busy running the shop. I was super flattered and pleased, we life cast the performer (...) who was tall, thin but muscular. Perfect for what we needed.

Got a fibre glass cast of him, then Pete (Hawkins) welded up a box frame armature/stand that we attached it to, ready for sculpting. Justin (Pitkethly) helped me out with the sculpting duties, it was a lot of fun (...) I remember enjoying sculpting the body more than the head weirdly'.

Keen explained the design process behind the werewolves, 'We were talking with Neil for 18 months before the film started shooting and that long preproduction period meant we could watch earlier werewolf movies to see what we liked and didn't like, and we eventually arrived at a shaggy, dirtied-down design we all thought was cool. The werewolves are based on the animal kingdom fact, rather than anything too fantasy-oriented, to keep them as realistic as possible. It was important for Neil that the werewolves looked like bloodthirsty creatures that could tear you apart. He knew that approach would really get under the audience's skin.'

The focal point of the werewolf design was the heads, which were fitted with animatronic mechanisms. Keen explained, 'The mechanical people that we had on board, which were too many to mention, they did a wonderful job as well! The insides of these things look as fantastic as they do on the outside! They never let us down, during the shoot!

We had to replace servos, but they were built so well and sturdy, in comparison to a lot of the stuff that we threw together for earlier films. Nightbreed or Hellraiser had animatronics in them, but apart from Baphomet (in Nightbreed) they were really just junky stuff, whereas (Dog Soldiers' werewolf heads) were crafted by people who had done a lot of work at Jim Henson's Creature Shop and were really very sophisticated creatures.'

Anthony Parker described how he fabricated the werewolf heads that went over the animatronics. 'There were hero animatronic heads for each wolf and stunt heads too. Foam latex skins were cast out of the mould of the sculpt and these had to be painted and then covered in fur and painted realistically to give each wolf their individual look.

There was also a lot of hair work. As part of a team along with Tacy Kneale, Bobbi Roberts and Shirley Sweeney, I designed how the fake fur was going to be pieced together on the heads and also how they were going to be painted. The heads were furred using a technique called fur replacement. Fake fur comes on a roll with a material backing.

In fur replacement, the material backing is shaved away from the fur and replaced with a glue. It is then transferred to the foam skin. The fur was painted using inks that are used in taxidermy. They were airbrushed using these colours.

The most fun and challenging aspect was helping to come up with the different colour markings for each wolf. I remember I had a book of wolves that I had marked and labelled the photos of wolves I thought had interesting colours and markings, to use as reference for the different wolves in the film. They all had their own distinct look.'

For certain shots, the stunt heads could be used like hand puppets, and were operated in certain scenes by Bonneywell and O'Toole. According to Bonneywell, 'We'd be making wolf chomping noises as we puppeteered, so each take ended in a fit of the giggles'.

Marshall was insistent that the werewolves would be tall and lanky. 'I didn't want muscled men to play the werewolves, I specifically recruited dancers because I wanted them to have an elegance about them. I wanted them to move with grace, and kind of wolf-like. (...) We got these amazing dancers to play the werewolves, some of them were 6ft 5', if not taller, and then in stilts they were 7ft tall by the end of it. They were impressive!'

The werewolf feet extensions.

Keen described how they saved on production time when it came to making the suits. 'We did a lifecast of one of the dancers, and then altered the cast for different bodyshapes so that we didn't have to lifecast them all.

Monster suits were always grueling for whoever was wearing them, and Dog Soldiers was no different as Bonneywell remembered. 'The most difficult thing was the werewolves themselves. We had them up on these little stilts. Most of the time, with (monster suit) performers on stilts, they have a rig connected to a flying wire so that they're supported. We knew we couldn't do that. It's expensive, it takes a much bigger crew to do that, and we're gonna be shooting on sets that we can't get a big rig behind them to fly them on.

So we wanted our werewolf stilts to be completely self-contained, and we rehearsed with the performers until they could run and jump and do everything they had to do. The problem was, we always rehearsed without the werewolf heads on. As soon as you put the werewolf heads on, you have no peripheral vision at all.

It's fine if you're a solo performer, but there was scenes where we had all three werewolf performers moving in a very closed environment, and after one or two steps they just lose sight of each other. So our biggest problem was werewolves colliding with each other and toppling down from these stilts they were on, with very expensive mechanical heads on them!'

Bob Keen described how taxing the Dog Soldiers shoot was, on top of the work of making the suits. 'Twelve weeks (making the suits) passed very quickly, and then everything had to be taken to Luxemburg. We tested it all out and perfected it, and then put it in a truck that drove off from Pinewood Studios off to Luxemburg.

And then we unpacked it all (in Luxembourg), checked if it was still working, and then did our final fitting with the last three dancers. We had to alter the suits that we had made to fit them more accurately, with a bit of cutting, padding and 'surgery' going on. And *then* there was the absolutely grueling schedule for shooting! It went so quickly thanks to the money restraints. (...) It was like boot camp, for all of us!'

Justin Pitkethly said about the shoot, 'Full foam latex creature suits don’t always come out of the oven perfectly every time! Everything we make is usually a custom one off and a lot of time and effort goes into each thing. It’s a great job but it’s also really challenging.

Once it’s been made and is being shot, trying to get every effect to work is the challenge, and we are always under pressure to get it right first time. When filming has finished for the day the shooting crew would have been continuously repairing damaged suits and making them look good for the next day - it is hard work'.

(The suits were reused in a series of promotional Youtube shorts to drum up interest in a Dog Soldiers sequel, which is where some of the below images are from.)

Naturally a werewolf film needs gore, which Image FX provided. Bonneywell remembered one amusing incident related to the gore effects. 'There's a scene where Kevin McKidd has a sword and hacks an arm off one of the werewolves reaching through the window. I was wearing the rig, which was a fake arm rigged to break off, with blood tubing over my shirt. On the first take, all the blood tubing burst next to my face, with hilarious results!'

Severed head prop supplied by Image FX.

A cow corpse prop supplied by Image FX.

One especially grisly setpiece, where Darren Morfitt's squaddie is torn in half by the werewolves, never made it into the final film. Justin Pitkethly recalled, 'I remember working on Spoon’s death. I made a severed torso that we tested out by having Pete Hawkins poking his head, shoulders and arms through a piece of fake wall we made.

We attached the torso to Pete’s shoulders and hid the join with clothing. So it basically looked as though Pete had been chopped in half and his top half was stuck against the wall. We also had a hole in the wall just above the line of where the torso ended so that we could drop the famous sausage skin guts out of.

The shot was going to be (Morfitt) pinned against the wall by a werewolf while coughing up blood and as the camera pans down we see he is missing his lower half and werewolves were devouring what was left. But this sequence didn’t end up that way in the film sadly.'

The aforementioned 'sausage skin guts' were so-called because they really were made out from sausage skins and butcher shop leftovers! The guts were attached to wound prosthetics, such as Sean Pertwee's slashed stomach. Pertwee remembered a disgusting detail,

'They actually used sausage skin and detritus rather, to stick into these sausage skins that doubled rather neatly as my guts, and they went off. I had all my guts and they had to devise this way because my stomach was hanging out for about a week. So they devised a way of cupping my innards into this gaffer taped vessel thing, and so I walked around with my guts, walking round for about a week before they went off. Then they had to reinvent them and make them out of silicon or something ridiculous like that.'