Last year at San Diego Comic-Con there was one fan-made costume that everyone couldn’t stop talking about – this amazing Rancor cosplay. The official Star Wars website has posted an article placing the spotlight on creator Jeremy Fisher that provides us with details on how this costume progressed from concept to completion.
So what’s next for Fisher after this Rancor masterpiece? How about a life-size K-2SO from Rogue One that will be heading to Celebration Orlando 2017.
Check out a few paragraphs from the article below and be sure to take the supplied source link for the full read including a few making-of photos.
The scenes from Jabba’s palace in Return of the Jedi had always been among his favorites and he knew the creative team had settled on using a puppet in the film only after playing around with an actor in a suit. Could he succeed at the task himself? “This would be so cool to see this life size,” he thought. “You get this idea and you can’t let go of it.”
Using Phil Tippet and Dennis Murex’s design as an inspiration, he got to work logging hours of research, studying other big costumes cosplayers had produced for tips on engineering something of this magnitude that would also be wearable, breathable, and light enough to walk around in. He took courses at Stan Winston School of Character Arts and got some guidance from Frank Ippolito, the famed props master who debuted his own rancor costume in 2015 just as Fisher was working on his own.
Fisher’s rancor took him a year and $2,000 worth of the “cheapest, safest, easiest to work with materials” to complete. Sometimes it also left him questioning his sanity. “This is taking up my whole studio space. It’s one thing to draw pictures but to actually start pulling this together…This arm is as tall as me if not taller!” he thought. “What am I doing?”
Fisher, standing 5’7”, fashioned a PVC pipe skeleton with a metal army backpack frame to support the head and shoulders hovering over his own. A series of about a dozen pieces created from different types of foam — EVA used for floor tiles as the base muscles, thin rolls of cushion padding for the wrinkled skin, and expanding spray foam used for insulation to create the warts — join together to fully encase him in the beast.
