I know its been a while since my last blog, and the reason is simple, sometimes there are not enough hours in the day. Anyone who has worked in film knows how schedules can be all consuming, you hours, meals, sleep, all sacrificed for the good of the film. Well in my next few blogs I will be updating you on my activities that have kept me off the grid.

Starting last Sept. I started work on 2 life size mechanical sharks. These were indeed more difficult than it sounded, and I now have a new appreciation for the guys who built ‘Jaws’. Not only was this a monumental task, it was one that needed to be completed in just 4 weeks, with an additional week to get NAUI certified as a SCUBA diver. This is part of the reason I like working in entertainment, you never know where it will take you.

So in addition to our crazy work schedule and meticulous planning of our next 4 weeks, I had to put aside my well placed fear of real sharks, and start my SCUBA training. This was more difficult than it sounds, up early, after late planning sessions for pool training, then back to the shop sourcing and planning again, and even more time spent in the classroom. There is an enormous amount of information you need to learn in order to dive. Not only for your safety, but for those around you. And to top it all off, we had to dive safely while operating 2 air power shark puppets.

After all of this was settled and done, the work started on the sharks. My job was to head the team that would sculpt, mold, and eventually paint the shark . Once the sculpt was approved, we had to make the mold. Considering the sharks were 9’ and 7’4” respectively, you can imagine how large the mold were, and we were doing all this work, outside in CA during the month of Sept, it was hot to say the least. Once those were done, we had to make the shark cores, these are reinforced fiberglass forms which were the sent to the mechanical dept to be cut up and made into what is essentially the sharks skeletons. These were then actuated by the mechanical team to be run off of an onboard air supply, as pneumatic systems are corrosion resistant, and we would have to film these in sea water as well as tanks.

Materials have come a long way since JAWS, then they had to use foam latex, which is a natural product and very prone to water logging and disintegration. To solve this problem we decided to use a platinum cure silicone, this material has been around for a long time, but only recently has it become cheaper and easier to use. Although its actually about 3 times as expensive as latex, its darn near indestructible. Now to pour the skins we bolt the mold around our master cores and make sure to seal all place that could possibly leak silicone. Then we proceeded to pour the skins, between the two sharks the skins took 20 gallons of silicone, this was intrinsically tinted with a base color, and copious amounts of cotton flocking. This is necessary as the silicone is clear and translucent out of the can.

The last step in this process was to paint the sharks using lots of reference from live sharks.

This was accomplished using a thinned down version of platinum silicone tinted in various colors. Although its process is time consuming its necessary due to the fact that nothing sticks to platinum silicone except platinum silicone itself, so you can not use typical painting methods or products. Another particular rule for silicones in general is do not let it come in contact with water, so when spraying the paint we had to ensure that no water vapor got into the air line, by using a moisture trap.

Why am I telling you all of this, well as filmmakers we rarely get to do something so ambitious, let alone in only four weeks. Maybe this will shed some light as to just what you might be getting into with a similar project and how difficult it was for a team of guys with over 20 years experience to pull it off in such a small period of time. Not only that, but now you know just what goes into something that on screen might not seem that hard to pull off. See theres an old saying in the art side of the industry, if we do our jobs right, you wont even know we were there.

Thanks for listening folks, next time I will tell the tale of the filming of said sharks and things to remember as filmmakers when filming in water. And in the blogs to come, I will tell all about my adventure moving out of LA and into other filmmaking markets in America today.