Episode 1: “Of Tales, Tails, and Trails” is almost here! While we finish editing out nose hairs, here’s a little peek behind the scenes of our favourite game masters: The disembodied heads of Xurr, Yurr and Zeke.
“The heads are designed to look like progressive stages of the same thing. Whoever reanimated them got better with each iteration. It’s funny because it kind of reflects my actual process.”
– Tommy from Widescreen
All three heads were cast from the same mould, and then fitted with animatronic parts to make them lipsync to Alexander Cuenin’s vocal performance.
Alex did all three. He’s great. But he’s a fast talker. I had to play his lines at half the speed and then speed the footage back up, cause the servos just couldn’t keep up.
The heads’ speech, which totals less than one minute of screentime, was filmed over one night and took almost six hours from start to finish. Several rounds of test footage were shot beforehand to ensure everything worked just right.
There’s like three or four versions of this scene, some of them are on location, one’s just on a random table somewhere. The thing is, I could have had a billion references and it still would’ve taken ages to film. You’re trying to cue the animatronics with one hand and do the camerawork with the other, and then at some point in the process you decide you’re gonna make one of the lights flicker, which you also have to do yourself. I genuinely love it.
Although Xurr, Yurr and Zeke’s part in the episode is small, their unsettling charm makes them total show stealers. But some of the production pictures look straight out of a horror movie, revealing just how scary they could have gotten. When you put it like that, it’s almost a relief they didn’t stay for too long!
