Makeup effects pro Mike Elizalde admits he had never heard of "Hellboy" when director Guillermo del Toro originally approached him about working on his 2004 movie based on the character. "I was not a comic book fan. I never have been," he says.
But the former Navy man -- who started in the movie business in 1987 as a sculptor, makeup artist and painter and struck up a friendship with the director while working on the 2002 vampire flick "Blade II" -- says he couldn't resist the opportunity to work on the outre project.
The sequel, "Hellboy II: The Golden Army," which opened Friday, was no less challenging for the Mazatlan, Mexico-born Elizalde, who now operates his own creature design studio, Spectral Motion, in Glendale with his wife, Mary.
"In the first movie, we ended up building five different characters, and in this we actually created 15 characters," says Elizalde, 47, whose credits also include "X-Men: The Last Stand" and both of the "Fantastic Four" films. "It is by far the most ambitious thing that we've done."
How to make a monster: The ideas for the creatures featured in "Hellboy II" originated with Del Toro. "Guillermo has these beautiful leather-bound notebooks that he carries around with him, and he inscribes all his notes and does all these drawings in the books," Elizalde says. "It's our job to take his drawing and produce an illustration that will give not only the aesthetic that he's looking for but also a mechanically sound rendering that will translate into the real world design."
A knowing wink: To create one of the new creatures, Mr. Wink, which looks a little like a ticked-off rhinoceros, Elizalde spent about six months developing and building a suit, which in the end stood nearly 8 feet tall and weighed about 130 pounds -- and that's without actor Brian Steele inside it.
"We always look to nature in creating our creatures, to bridge the gap between what you can believe and what you can't," Elizalde says, adding that extensive research was done on real-life pachyderms to develop Wink's thick skin. "You don't want to just make it look like an elephant skin, because then it sort of just becomes that. We always try to bring a new look that borrows elements of all the creatures that have a similar sort of appearance and then translate that into a new physiognomy."
The eyes have it: While Elizalde maintains that he has no favorites among his new creatures, he is quite taken with the creepy seraph called the Angel of Death, which was built to some fairly detailed specifications.
