#6: Animated Rotting Scarecrow
Maker: Brian Hunter
Welcome haunters! Every week we share a look behind one home haunter’s inspirational build and how it came together.
Let’s dig into this week’s build!
A police officer in Plainfield, IL by day, Brian Hunter is a dad, husband, and monster maker the rest of the time.
He started building Halloween props and monsters with his mom growing up because Halloween was celebrated bigger and better than any other Holiday. In 2018, his mom sadly passed but he inherited her past creations, and Pumpkin Riot was born.
After beginning to build his own creations for the haunt, he dove into sculpting clay and molding his own masks and prop heads.
One of the latest projects finished for this year’s haunt is his take on a scarecrow pumpkin animatronic that he calls Rotten Rick!
Keep reading for details about this build. To see more monsters and props Brian’s creating you can follow Pumpkin Riot on Instagram, Facebook, and Tiktok.
Inside Brian’s Build
Build Items:
Rotten Rick prop head is a multiple-step process.
It first starts with an armature that gets oil-based clay stacked onto it. The clay is hand-sculpted into the pumpkin and face which takes months depending on the sculpture.
The final sculpt gets a wall built around half of it using white clay to pour plaster onto it. He also uses burlap to make the mold stronger by placing layers of it as the plaster is poured.
After one side sets, he repeats the process on the other. When both sides are cured, he very carefully pries both halves apart and takes out the clay to reveal the negative mold. He can then pour latex in and make his mask with both halves back together.
After the latex is dry, he pours foam in to make a prop head out of the mold. When the pieces are pried back apart what’s left is a full-size replica of his original sculpt.
The body of Rotten Rick is made up of a large 4x4 wood beam and plywood base. He used an armature from an old animatronic he scrapped for parts and attached a wiper motor with some other bracket parts to mount everything onto the wood beam.
Once the spacing is right with a test of the wiper motor, he uses light materials like chicken wire and spray foam to make the body. He even added real pumpkin seeds and old pumpkin stems to make up the torso of the body and the chest.
Q&A
What inspired the build?
This year we wanted to get into building our own animatronics and I want to keep pushing what I can do. The Rotten Rick pumpkin is one of my favorite sculptures I’ve done and wanted to do something really different when it came time to build it a body.
What techniques and products were used?
I use monster clay for design and sculpture. I use ultra cal plaster for mold and the body is made up of PVC, metal, and wood base.
What was the trickiest part of the build? How’d you solve it?
Most difficult part was keeping the body light so the motor could move the torso. Used a lot of lightweight materials like spray foam, chicken wire, and creepy cloth. Also used bendable artificial tree limbs I found on Amazon to give the body some texture and design without too much weight added.
What would you do differently?
I would like to sculpt a whole torso out of clay and mold and use a latex cast to place over the metal frame. It would have been more detailed and very light.
Any other ideas pop up while using the techniques to build this?
With any build, you always think of what you should or could have done. Always learning and acquiring new methods and techniques as I build. The more fun I have and try to not overthink it when building I seem to come up with better ways to build.
What sites, people, etc. helped as you tackled this?
Shout out to Pale Night Productions. They make great products for haunts and prop making. I used their pumpkin guts to cover the torso of the Rotten Rick.
Where do you go for general inspiration?
I have more ideas than I know what to do with. If I get an idea I'll sketch it out and stare at it for a while. I'm at a point where my next prop is from an idea I had made an old prop. Everything just feeds off the next now whereas before it was a bit harder.
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Thanks for reading about this week’s build! If you’ve built something or know someone we should include in a future release, email us at hey@hauntmakers.xyz.
Wow,fantastic build! Love the design. Great job!