Mike Elizalde - Spectral Motion

I did this interview in June 2008 - Mike Elizalde is a highly respected makeup and creature effects artist, as well as a mechanical and animatronics designer. I did this one right before Hell Boy II came out.


From the outside, it would be hard to imagine that so much magic goes on inside the brown building that houses Spectral Motion, Inc.

However, once inside the building it is apparent that the company that started in 2002 is a premier creature, props, and special makeup effects establishment. Upon entering the building is a creature to the right from Hellboy in the corner, fully enhanced with separate moving tentacles and a complex eye mechanism.

Owners Mike and Mary Elizalde started the company six years ago, prior to the beginning stages of Hellboy. Mike, born in Mazatlán, Mexico, was given the nudge to open the studio with the help of Hellboy director Guillermo del Toro, who he had previously worked with on Blade II.

Spectral Motion, located in Glendale, has plenty of big motion pictures under its belt, working on films like Fantastic Four, X-Men, M. Night Shyamalan’s Lady in the Water, Blade Trinity, as well as soon to be released Hellboy II: The Golden Army (July 11).

Mike and his creative team are part of the whole process in creating the props, creatures, and special makeup effects. He talks about working on a character named Wink (named after Selma Blair’s dog) from Hellboy II, an eight-foot creature with a body that weighs over 100 pounds and a head that weighs about 20 pounds. The body suit and animatronic head is just an example of what Mike’s company is able to produce.

For a project like Wink, Spectral Motion first begins with a two-dimensional drawing of the creature. Once the drawing is approved, the creature is made into a maquette, a small-scale model, that is usually two-feet tall in size. The maquette is used so the studio is not committed to something big and able to make changes very easily.

After another approval process with the maquette, the company moves on to the full scale version, whether it be a suit, makeup effect, or whatever they are designing.

Sounds simple enough right? Not entirely. The hours that go into the design are long and hard. Wink, for example, took about seven months to develop entirely, Mike says. And another six months take up the shooting period.

“You’re married to the thing by the time it’s over,” Mike says while laughing.
Spectral Motion does everything from hair to painting the suits that they create. While working on Hellboy, Mike recalls that 60 people were laboring in one workspace for the project.

Taking a walk around Spectral Motion makes one appreciate the art and talent that it takes to create the magic we see on the big screen.

Tell me a little bit about your background...
My family immigrated to the states when I was 5 years old. I grew up around Compton, CA, all around Los Angeles, then I joined the Navy, I was in the Navy for about eight years. And during the second enlistment I was kind of scratching my head going, this isn't what I want to be doing. The first four years were really fun so I re-enlisted for a second hitch, and then I thought, I want to do something creative with my life.

So I got out of the Navy and started doing makeup effects for a living. Came to L.A. … and started working for makeup studios and over the past 20 years I developed my skills as a sculptor, makeup artist, painter, and then the last ten years of my career before we started the shop here I designed animatronics. I built the mechanisms that make the creatures move and I puppeteered on set so my performances were on film and I became a member of the Screen Actors Guild as a result of that. During one of those jobs, I was doing Blade II with Guillermo del Toro, and that’s when I met him, and we connected right away, we were just, "orale, carnal." So all of our communication from that point forward was always in Spanish and we never spoke English to each other after that and we became very good friends and then he offered me Hellboy, to do the work on the first movie, the first Hellboy movie. And that's how we opened this shop, and that was six years ago. So, since then we've been staying pretty busy the whole time and … we just wrapped up shooting Hell Boy II with del Toro. So we just wrapped our work on Hellboy II and we are currently working on a Will Ferrell movie, Land of the Lost, which is based on the TV series with Sid and Marty Krofft. So that's what we are doing right now.

How did the company start?
I used to work as an individual for people like Rick Baker. (He) is very famous, he has gotten like six Academy Awards for his work, and Stan Winston who is another very high profile makeup artist in the industry. I worked for those guys for years doing what I mentioned earlier, designing animatronics.

Just prior to 1994 I wanted to do some entrepreneurial work, so I sculpted some busts, and I sold them as an individual and we were very successful with those, so we needed some sort of umbrella to put that business under. And that is when my wife and I created Spectral Motion as a vehicle to sell these kits to people, so they could assembly them and make them. And then after that, that's when I was working for Del Toro on Blade II, that's when he said, "Hey, why don't you just find yourself a space and we'll do Hellboy and open up a shop." So that's how it started, and that was in 2002. So 2002 is when we actually opened this facility to the first Hellboy movie.

How did you get in special effects, as a kid, were you into monsters?
When I was a kid, my step dad was a huge sci-fi monster fan. So he kind of turned me onto the Universal monsters like Frankenstein, Black Lagoon, The Invisible Man, The Wolf Man, all of those movies, those are like my favorites when I was a kid. I was really geeked out on the stuff, I would watch one of these movies, Dracula you know, I would go to school and they used to have those newsprint paper that you painted on with the water-based paints. So I used to paint on these papers and I would actually paint the colors that I would need later to paint my face. So I would use yellows and greens, I would make a pallet for myself because I knew I could reconstitute the paint later with water. So I would take that home and put water on the stuff and I would start making my face up, so I've had it in my blood every since I was a kid. It's always been a real strong interest for me.

How many characters did you work on for Hellboy II?
We did probably about 15 characters and many of them were similar to this (points to creature in the corner of the front office) where it's a performer in a suit with animatronics and also makeup effects, like the makeup that Ron Perlman wears as Hellboy. So we did about 15 characters for the movie, and the first movie we did about five, I think. It was quite a bit more work we had to do. Also, we shot the movie in Budapest, Hungary, and we were there for about six months, so it was a big job.

Do you use the comics a lot to create the creatures and effects?
The source material is very important to us, as far as getting the look of the character and what that character is about. It doesn't always happen that way because sometimes the producers of the film want to make something that doesn't really resemble the source material, they want to take it away from the source material. But, generally speaking, that's the main source of our information.

Before we start on a character, like before we started working on Fantastic Four or X-Men, the guys at Marvel sent us stacks of reference material to go through and look at, and try to get the essence of the characters from that material. And with Hellboy, Mike Mignola, the creator of Hellboy, is very involved from the very beginning of the process and he gives us a lot of input along with Guillermo. Ultimately Guillermo wins the wrestling matches (laughs). There is a lot of respect for the source material there.

What types of challenges did you encounter?
The challenges were really being away from home for so long, I mean that is huge. Just you're pulled out of your roots, and your family, everything. And you're away for six months, after a couple of months you're just thinking, this is never going to end. It really just starts to feel endless. So that was one challenge, the other challenge was that with Ron Perlman I applied his makeup everyday. So my focus was really placed on getting Ron ready as Hellboy everyday, plus supervising all the other 15 characters, so that was a little bit of a challenge.

Fortunately, I have a very capable and talented crew to assist me while I was there and things went as smoothly as they could have gone for such a big job. And those are the things that challenge you, I mean the actual design and creation of the creatures is another big challenge because Guillermo is such a demanding director, he doesn't want anything in his movies that has been seen in other movies. He wants everything to be re-invented and developed specifically for the characters that he is looking for. Nothing is simple (laughs). On one of the designs that he was asking for, everything has a new, complicated assembly of some kind or a new makeup technique that we need to develop and re-invent, so it's all challenging, all of it, the whole thing.

What was one of your favorite characters to work on?
Wink was awesome because it was just so big; it was just so phenomenally large, and yet able to do action sequences where he was fighting Hellboy, throwing the suit around like it didn't weigh anything. And it was a really cool character that had a lot of personality. So Wink was really cool. I also liked the Bag Lady Troll, the one with the little tiny arms ... it was a combination of animatronics and makeup, that’s one of my favorites, I think it looks great on film. And the Angel of Death, I mean every single one of those; it's almost like asking you which of your children is your favorite (laughs). They're all very cool in their own way.

Are some of the creatures combined with computer graphics effects?
Some of them are. Actually, the way that Guillermo splits it up is he'll take a creature in his film and if he wants to add like for instance a tendon that sticks out when a creature is roaring, and then he'll do that little piece digitally, it's just subliminal stuff. And then he'll take that same creature and do something that the guy in that suit can't do, like go flying into a wall, smashing down, crumpling to the ground where you could achieve it with a stunt man in a suit but its much more dynamic if you do it digitally.

How did you get your foot in the door, how did you get into the business?
When I was still in the Navy I found this book about makeup effects and I started reading it and it outlined how to create a three-dimensional prosthetic makeup and it told you which materials to get together. So I got all the materials together, I got a couple of my friends to be guinea pigs and put the makeup on them, took pictures of that and sent that out to different studios here in L.A., just looked them up in the phone book because we didn't have internet back then (laughs).

I did it analog instead of digital, so I sent the pictures out and after I got out of the Navy I got my first job. I went to one studio, I said, "here's my resume, here's my portfolio," and they were like, "yeah, we will start you up right away." So my first job was working on a movie called Arena, very low budget film done by a very low budget shop. But as it turned out, that shop was employing some of the bigger names in the industry back then. So I got to learn from some of the real experts in the business - how to sculpt, how to paint, do that type of stuff and that's how my career got started. I was very lucky to be able to get in that quickly.

Did you have any mentors?
There were several. One of the first people who really took me on and gave me a lot of responsibility was a guy named David Miller and he was the guy who designed the first Freddy Krueger makeup. And then after that Rick Baker was somebody that I really looked up to. Stan Winston, I loved all the work that came out of his shop. So I sort of watched what these guys did and kind of tried to pattern myself a little bit along with what they were doing, and ended up with my own individual formula, like we all do.

I bet you're pretty popular during Halloween...
We try to keep a low profile (laughs).