Haze/Mantel Character Costume

## Text from Universal Designs

Planning and engineering the costume began once we received the Haze Mantel Trooper artwork. These beautiful designs lent themselves to several different possibilities in seeing the costumes come to life. The most obvious would be that of individual hard armor parts mounted onto a fabric type undersuit. Judging from the Trooper artwork, that’s the look needed...but what if we obtained that in a different way?

A fabric undersuit would need the armor parts fitted to it so that they wouldn't slide out of place or fall off. Not to mention that different body types would be wearing these, so how do we consistently maintain that impressive ‘super soldier’ look to the costume without ending up with an obvious or predictable looking end result? ….and making them as user friendly as possible?

We discussed all these concerns at great length with the client, and came to the conclusion that sculpting it all as a singular piece would yield the desired result each and every time we made this costume for them. Cast up as full rubber suits, but detailed to seem like individual parts could be removed from the costume made the most sense for all of the above reasons. Once the costumes were detailed and painted, that ‘not too distant futuristic’ look became evident.

The entire costume from the torso, legs and helmet was sculpted in Chavant NSP Soft Clay and was done in approximately 200 hours. Below you can see the organic and natural flow to the sculpted fabric parts, as well as the hexagon textured ‘hard’ armor parts of the costume.

We sculpted and fabricated 2 different helmets. To the right you can see finished sculptures of the first helmet. Beautifully detailed, but proved too large in proportion to the costumes themselves, so a second smaller and more streamlined helmet was made.

To the right we have the second helmet sculpture. We maintained the exact same visor area from the first helmet but sculpted an entirely new helmet around it. The yellow visor part shown was vac formed for a good solid air tight fit to the final resin cast helmet. Below we have David with the first complete suit fresh from the molds. At this point all elements are trimmed and ready for paint. If you click on the second image you can see how well all the sculpture details, buckles and straps were translated to the cast rubber piece.

Here we see David airbrushing the torso. At this stage the goal is to make all the details ‘pop’ and seem separate from the surrounding elements. Fabric needs to look like fabric, wrinkles must look believable and the armor needs to look hard and rigid.

When painting silicone Universal Designs uses Fuse FX and Psycho Paint.

To the right we see the finished costume.

All elements seem real and believable from the grey fabric areas so the simulated leather. The armor plates also seem real.

The costumes were ultimately detailed with 4 belt pouches, one gun holster, military gloves and very high end customized motorcycle boots. These were all off the shelf items.

Below are a series of test photos we took before shipping out the finished suits. As you can see, movement and visibility are not at all a concern. The extremely tight deadline did prove challenging but the overall end result seen here was worth every sleepless night spent working on the costumes. The gun and rifle seen in the images were customized Nerf toys and only used for these test photos.

## Images

Most images of the suit have been lost, here are all the available ones.

## References

1. https://web.archive.org/web/20080330035636/http://www.universaldesigns.ca/custom/haze.htm