New "Persephone" Update! Mmm…Chocolatey!

Mmm…Chocolatey!

By Sean HutchinsonOne thing people who know me well know about me is this…I’m koo-koo for Cocoa Puffs. Actually that isn’t entirely true, I was never allowed to get chocolate cereal as a kid, and if I had been, I would have totally gone for Count Chocula.

But it is true that I have chocolate on the brain these days, and that’s owed in no small part to the work we’ve been doing here at the shop on Mark Roush’s short film Persephone. In the free association, free range pathways of my mind, our return trip to the studio for pick up shots last month put me in mind of Goldfinger, the 1964 James Bond film in which the secretary Jill Masterson (played by Shirley Eaton) dies from “skin asphyxiation” (as explained by Sean Connery’s expository dialogue). I had heard in my youth, I’m guessing from my older brother, who as a cusp Boomer claimed knowledge of all things Sixties as his birthright, that the body double for Ms. Eaton had actually died from skin asphyxiation herself and that the famous scene of her dead on the bed was a so-called “snuff” shot. I believe I may have reported this as fact during down time on the set of Persephone. Turns out to be an urban legend.

Alex Lazar as Persephone

Irregardless, as my brother used to say, (which actually ISa word–Urban Myth #2 debunked in this post!), the synthetic chocolate skin that title actor Alex Lazar braved–lovingly applied by Christina Kortum over the course of four hours–did seem to cause a bit of a reaction from our heroine. Late in the day we were attempting to shoot some still photography to make a 3D model of Persephone. This technology requires the actress to stand perfectly still while photographs are taken in three concentric rings of varying heights. The green screen actually is an impediment to this process because the software  interprets background clutter as depth information. That’s why we dressed the set in the manner you see in the photograph to the right. After a costume change and a second series of these photographs, Alex became a little perplexed seemingly beguiled–not by this process but rather the fact that I was giving her incessant accolades for, in her words “just standing [there]“. It seems she thought, from her experience as a professional model, that kind of tireless poise was to be expected!

It wasn’t exactly “Death By Chocolate,” but maybe better described as a case of the Visual Effects Supervisor getting under her skin!