Ghost Horse Muramasa!
by furtech
Our masquerade group (AGSMA) performed at the ComiCon International (SDCC) 2010 masquerade this year. Muramasa is a video game set in an ancient, fantastical Asian world. At one point our heroes encounter a demon warrioress mounted on a ghostly skeletal horse. My job was to create that horse.
I was very excited at the prospect of making a life-size, skeletal horse. The challenges it offered were many-fold: sculpting all the bones, the engineering to design the horse so that it could be "ridden" by an adult female and the need for this to look other-worldly.
I bought a "Visible Horse" model and used that skeleton to carve the bones from. This project used more math than any I've ever done in order to scale-up the tiny skeleton model into a full-sized horse. The bones are carved out of styrofoam (a drywall saw was used for 90% of the carving) and covered with "Fantasy Film", an amazing material from Art Glitter:
www.artglitter.com/retail/filmfiber.htm
They were -really- nice to me and I highly recommend this material to anyone needing a semi-rigid, irridescent material. Fantasy Film starts off as a flimsy mylar-like sheet. You cover the item (or create a frame for fairy wings) and use a heat gun to heat the material. The FF then shinks and stretches and the colors explode. I used primarily opalescent, greens and blues, but they have all the colors you could want (yellows, reds, etc.). Check them out!
I'll make a post about how this beast was constructed, but here's the final result! I'm pretty happy with him: we operated him Bunraku-style (Japanese puppetry) and I got the hoped-for effect from the spot-lights hitting the Fantasy Film: the demon horse looked like it was a skeleton made from opal.
Oh, and I love how he travels: I got the entire horse skeleton and supporting structures into my Prius!
