Angel

WWFF- What was it like to work on the set of the television show “Angel”?

AH - It was great. High production value, very tight schedule for us, however, long hours both at the shop and on set. Each episode shot for 6 days, on 35 mm with a pretty high budget. We’d do Mon-Thurs at Paramount an then Friday night we’d go out and do night exteriors on location in various places around LA, like Chinatown, Griffith Park, etc. The sets were always awesome. It was fun to inhabit that Joss Whedon world where anything could happen, and that gets really fun when they have money: these incredible sets, great physical fix people, a great digital fx team, and us with our rubber monster shop. The crew was great. The actors were pretty laid back. The creature FX did take lot of effort in the schedules and budgets, but a lot of what we did, from Season 3 to the end of the series, looks pretty good. The situation for me was, I would do a lot of shop work- making molds, making creature skins, painting things, casting actor’s heads- but then I’d end up on set for a week. I became the main trusted set guy for a while, and often they would bring me something I had no idea how to operate because I hadn’t worked on building it- and sometimes the first time I put my hands on something was moments before it was to be shot, in front of the assistant director, and producer, actors, crew, who start asking me to demonstrate how the effect works so they can shoot it- and I would figure it out on the spot- “well, its a puppet rig where we’ll take this thing here, and then this will separate like this....” and I’d have a crate containing some mechanical puppet over here, and then run over and check on the stunt guy in a monster suit over somewhere else and do art touch ups on it- like airbrushing or gluing parts of it, then I’d run over to another stage with 2nd unit to set up a fake body to get decapitated, and bowl the head across the ground for 6 or 7 takes till it hit a certain mark, then run back tithe mechanical puppet, attack an actress with it for a scene, check the stunt guy again, bargain with the production team to let the stunt guy out of his contact lenses and gloves to cool down, etc. etc. I was always psyched that this show needed such a high volume of creature FX all the time. That was great, because when we started on it, 2001, I was always wondering when they’d quit doing practical creature FX and take over with computers. When I saw Golem in Lord of the Rings, I thought - ‘that’s it. They can finally really do it.” But then I realized it took a team of 100 computer engineers and proprietary software developers and zillions of dollars, and only the top 1 percent of digital companies could pull off an entirely digital character like a human.