NAPOLEON
For Ridley Scott’s Napoleon (director’s cut) I was asked by Charley Henley to orchestrate these two shots for the Marengo charge sequence in which Napoleon, played by Joaquin Pheonix, chops off some poor soldier’s head. The job involved creating a silicone replica of actor Joss Carter and puppeteering it so it looked appropriately ghoulish. We quickly worked out that the sequence was Ridley’s homage to 2001’s bone sequence, or at least had the same rhythm, so the two shots had to match previously filmed reference footage in lighting and style, and had to have some weight and poetry to them. What I was after from the head was a sense of ignomy. Whenever I’ve seen pictures of real severed heads (something that are plentiful in the job of make-up fx artist) it always struck me how confused the people looked, like they were caught by the camera just having woken up. So the job was to try and capture that moment of dumb realisation. A sense that maybe the head had made the wrong decision in life. To achieve this I went to master headsmith Waldo Mason, a man who specialises in this sort of macabre art. 
A rough sculpt trying to figure out how much meat to put on the head slice. Also hat.
With that aim, I asked Waldo to construct a head with a loose jaw and the floppiest silicone imaginable. As we were going to shoot in 120fps slow motion we really wanted to see the gravity affect the skin in the way that you see in slow motion videos of people getting hit. If it looked a bit silly, it didn’t matter? It would look real. Joss Carter was then headcast and the resulting clay pour resculpted byJustin Pithketly so that the eyes were open. The hair and finishing was then completed by Nikki Grimshaw. The silicone head has a detachable handle down the back so it could be slammed down onto the ground with accuracy. This was then doubled by Joss who bounced his head against the ground with aplomb. We spent a whole day filming the head, and Joss, throwing it around a field in Windsor getting bloody. Halcyon days. Joss’ eyes, blood, horses, smoke and bodies were then arranged painstakingly in Adobe After Effects, retimed and revised until Ridley was ecstatic and I was bored. Overall a resounding success!