Half-Life: Raise The Bar Short
Creature Design & Fabrication
Machinema 2013
When director Joe Miale asked me to create a Headcrab puppet that could attack someone's face, I said, "yes...if I can do the attacking."
Working Backwards: Digital to Practical...
The video game crowd is notoriously fickle so the last thing I wanted was to misrepresent one of the game's chief villians; the headcrab. Since headcrabs are made up, no one has ever seen one in the wild. My primary reference from the game left a little to the imagination. I had some (imaginary) biology to brush up on.
Puppets have a way of looking like puppets on camera so I set my sights on giving the ole girl a flexible armature with springy joints. The mouth tendrils allowed the actor's hand to control them inside a glove, giving the tiny creature a big range of motion.
