Rich Cacioppos'

JASON'S DUEL WITH THE SKELETONS

DIORAMA

Rich's diorama was based on a sequence from the classic Ray Harryhausen feature, Jason and the Argonauts (1963).  It received the "GRAND POO-PAH Award" from  Producer Kevin Clement at the 2009 Chiller Theatre Model Contest on October 31.  Here are Rich's comments on how he created this piece:

The only purchased products were the Jason resin figure and the skeletons.  There are five of them, each with separate parts for arms, hands and legs, and a movable jaw.  The skeletons' original design was created to be set up in only a few standard poses.  So I went to town, as I often do, and continued to cut apart all of the joints in the anatomy, giving me liberty to re-pose them into whatever action direction I deemed useful to the scene.  It was a real gas doing it.

Unfortunately, all I can tell you about who made the figures and their scale is that I purchased them from the Monsters in Motion (MIM) people.  The size of the resin products was is about 7 inches in height.  One thing about the seller is that they give little or no credit to either the sculptor, the scale, or the original manufacturer of the products being sold. Since they don't carry them anymore, I'm out of luck.  Even after carefully doing a search for the models on the web, I came up empty, for who sculpted the wonderful figures used in the diorama.  Sorry for that lack of info there.

 
As for the balance of the diorama, it is about a 50/50 scratch built in total.  The trees and shrubbery were purchased from my local hobby shop; this scenery is usually used for train sets and so is the gravel.  But everything else is carved out of wood using a Dremel tool, and foam board was used to create the cinematic background. Oh, and the backdrop is a poster - one of three that I thought might be appropriate for the scene.  The rats were my little creation, sculpted for the piece from a Sculpy product.  The platform and the overall build, and all its components (outside rock work and so on) are carved from wood and painted to simulate stone.  I loved doing the rats and posing them in various positions, giving them an almost comical character and mannerisms of their very own.
 
As time went forward in the piece, I decided it would be great fun to add crows, sculpted by me and a statues Roman look features to the foreground in the piece.  The crows I would set up on thin vinyl string, some flying some cawing at another or at a skeleton in a duel.  Some of  the skeletons are posed with that same string, pulling them into the direction most dramatic for their pose.  These items have yet to be realized, and for now they remain as a future venture to be added when time permits.  Ha, fat chance baby, but I still call the piece finished and well as it is, as I move to others creations and artwork to be done and in the works, on the table and stewing in my head.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

   

 

  You can learn more about Rich's Jason's Duel with the Skeletons diorama by visiting his web page: http://themadmonstermaker.com/JasonSkelatons.html.