Face Time & Skinless People! Mostly Skinless People...

Here's another entry being written on a plane to be eventually transcribed once I'm settled on terra firma. I'm leaving the US today, the very evening as it cruelly turns out that Maria Bamford, one of my favourite women in the world is going to be in New York. All in all though I couldn't have asked for a better first experience of the city, and by a miraculous feat of willpower I was able to stick to the work hours in the hotel room and am still on schedule. I can't say I was able to stick to a diet that suggested any modicum of self-respect, there being about a billion Dunkin' Donuts scattered around the island. But screw it, something had to give.

This morning before I headed on down to Newark airport I decided to crowbar in one last jaunt down at the seaport and see the current exhibition being held there. While the supposed intent of 'Bodies' is to document the more urgent functions of all our lovely gooey inside-bits - along with the numerous ways each organ can get messed-up and kill you - my fascination stemmed less from an eagerness to learn than a childhood awe of the visceral...viscera...and such. I recall vividly how alarming yet strangely compelling the visual of a skinless body was when leafing through one of the most potentially-traumatising pop-up books a six-year-old child could receive:

"The Human Body" Produced by Intervisual Communications, Inc. Published by Jonathan Cape Ltd, 1983

Years later, perhaps my favourite movie as a pre-adolescent was Clive Barker's Hellraiser, which featured a typical love-triangle premise - the wife, the cuckold and the brother-in-law - with a typically Barkerian twist of making the latter party a reanimated, skinless zombie.

Hellraiser: I know what you're thinking. Those oversized star earrings really are horrifying...

In it's first* sequel Hellbound one scene which carried particular resonance depicted a morbidly obsessed doctor at a loss for words as to a similarly revived woman's appearance. "Strange?" She offers, "Surreal? Nightmarish?"

At twelve I found all terms to be apt, so in seeing an exhibit of genuine (if preserved to the point of resembling sculptures constructed of wax and smoked meat) flayed cadavers at twenty-four, I found this morbid curiosity reignited. I have been meaning to take up life-drawing as by all accounts it is an ideal and essential supplemental skill to have as an animator. But beyond nudity, the full glory of human anatomy and weight could surely be studied to a greater and more beneficial degree with these as subjects? If it's common practice I have never encountered it, though procuring the corpses would be tricky...
This entry has so far been a little detached from 'House Guest', although it's strangely coincidental that the focus of the last week's work has been on a scene in which the zombified Hunter is in a not dissimilar state of excoriation. In the spirit of the previous 'Face Time' posts, albeit with a slightly macabre twist, here are some pencil tests for the final scene's expression changes.

In fairness my cartoonist license allowed for tenuous (at best) fidelity to actual human anatomy. Or, come to think of it, duck anatomy for that matter:

*They ended up making eight Hellraisers in the end. I'm not kidding. Each godawful straight-to-DVD sequel crushes my precious childhood affection for the original anew.