CR 055: Eddie Yang on Movies, Monsters, and Heavy Metal Masks
The entertainment industry veteran discusses his work on Hollywood’s biggest hits, his thoughts on AI, and his most memorable projects.
Over the past 40 years, Eddie Yang has worked on some of Hollywood’s biggest hits, providing makeup effects, creature design, prop creation, and production design for films such as Men in Black, Men in Black II, Avatar, Iron Man, The Dark Knight Rises, and Fantastic Four, among many other titles. As founder of the entertainment design and build studio Deity Creative, he and his team also work with a wide range of clients, creating everything from costumes for Shakira’s robot dancers and the headgear for Static-X’s lead singer, Xer0, to 12-foot-tall figurines promoting the Overwatch video game.
And despite his many years in the industry, Yang says he still loves the work. “At this stage, I feel like there's almost nothing we can't make,” he says. “That's what I love about this. It's the constant challenge. The famous quote is, ‘Make it kind of like the Predator, but it’s never [been] seen before.’ There's that challenge of making something so unique and original, and then there's the challenge of the engineering. That combination, there's no other feeling like it.”
Yang and I recently talked over Zoom about his early days working for legendary special effects artist Rick Baker, his most memorable project, and how it all started with a book he got in second grade.
SANDRA EBEJER: You have such an interesting job. How did you get started in this line of work?
EDDIE YANG: Basically watching horror movies as a kid. I saw stuff like Frankenstein with Boris Karloff, Wolf Man with Lon Chaney Jr., Creature from the Black Lagoon, The Incredible Hulk with Lou Ferrigno. Back then, there was no internet. You had to think of things to do to entertain yourself. So in second grade, a classmate gave me this book called Movie Monsters by Alan Ormsby. It taught you how to make yourself up as the monsters. You know, go to your mom's makeup kit, get eyeliner, and pencil in a widow's peak for Dracula. It talked about making a Frankenstein headpiece out of paper mâché. I thought it was the coolest thing. I was obsessed with that book. That's how it started. Then, as I grew older, my parents were like, “You're gonna be a doctor.” They had everything planned out. I started taking piano lessons at seven so that I could become proficient enough to teach other kids how to play piano to make money for medical school. That's how planned out it was. And here I only finished a semester of college because my passion was this stuff.
When I look at photos of your work, it looks like a really interesting balance of art and science.
Yeah. I just realized at this age that I'm kind of an engineer, I suppose. I’m figuring out how things go together, figuring out the comfort of the performer, figuring out all this stuff, which is not necessarily the fun stuff, although in my older age now, it's kind of fun and challenging. But in my younger years, it was all about the art. And when I say art, it was heavily based on feeling. I didn't go to school for art, but I would study Michelangelo sculptures. He knew anatomy. My mentors or coworkers, we would share anatomy books. We knew anatomy possibly better than first-year med students because we were so obsessed with it. It made our art look better and more realistic. I wasn't into cartoony, exaggerated features; I was into hyper-realistic-looking things that could scare people.
I think as a child, that's your first instinct—controlling the reactions. I noticed if I put a little makeup on as a kid, people would laugh. But when I poured blood all over my face, it was, "Oh my God!" Totally different reaction. I was like, “Oh! That's the reaction I want!” As you get older, it's more difficult and you have to learn how to finesse it and how to sculpt and create. What are the features that make it look realistic and not cartoony? So that when somebody sees it, they get scared of your creature, your creation, whatever it is.
You mentioned you didn't go to art school. So how did you find your way into this professionally? What was your entrance into this world?
I was a weird kid. I learned the materials [to make masks]. I ordered the materials through the mail. It would take forever to get here. I’d make stuff and every morning I couldn't wait to wake up and pull a rubber mask out of a mold because it would take all night to dry. I was obsessive, and I think those kind of people find each other.
I looked in a phone book to visit some studios near me. There's Don Post, who made Halloween masks, and down the street from him was a place called Makeup Effects Lab, which had these guys who were rock stars to me at that time—Doug White, Al Apone. My dad dropped me and my friend off in North Hollywood and we walked to these studios. In Makeup Effects Lab, there was a guy named Howard Berger, who now owns the studio KNB, and they're famous for doing The Walking Dead series. He was the first guy I met. Super wonderful, nice, humble, down-to-earth. I told him, “I've never even touched foam rubber.” Foam rubber was, at the time, what you made prosthetics out of and glued to people's faces. And he's like, “Oh, here's a prosthetic appliance.” And he showed me around Makeup Effects Lab. He was leaving to do another movie, but he said, “Go see my friend around the corner, Bob Kurtzman.” He's the K in KNB. I spent all summer with him learning techniques. That's where the networking started, meeting people that were like-minded in the industry.
Early in your career, you worked with Rick Baker and Stan Winston, who are legends in the special effects field. What did you learn from working with them?
They're very different people. Stan, technically, I worked for first. But I was still in high school, so it was during Christmas vacation. I only got to work there for two weeks during Christmas vacation, but it was on a movie called Predator, which became one of the biggest creature films. I didn't get to interact with Stan that much.
When I graduated high school, there was an opportunity at Rick Baker's studio. He was my Michael Jordan. He was my idol. Of course, I jumped at the opportunity. I couldn't believe I was working with him. What he taught me was basically the importance of art and being flexible about it. I was an A-type personality, and things had to be a certain way. He taught me how to be more relaxed. He let me manage projects, too, as I got older, and he was not very hands-on. He would let you grow on your own. I took off and started doing what I thought was right, and really got to learn my own technique, my own style, and he let that emerge. He lets everybody do what they want, if he feels they're capable of taking it to a different place. I never saw him get upset. He’d deal with problems as they come. He was so good about telling A-list stars—in an industry where you have producers that are scared to tell stars what they actually feel—to their face, “You’ve got to get rid of your ego. Yes, I’ve got to glue this on your face for 90 days of shooting. I know it's uncomfortable, but I've done it myself. I've worn it. It's not that bad.” Just so many lessons from him. Those are some of the major ones that I take from him now that I have my own studio.
You’ve done so much in special effects, character design, visual effects, production design, and costume design. What do you love most about your job?
I love the creative aspect of it. People say, “If you do what you love, you never work a day in your life,” and that's how I feel. It's almost effortless. And what does take effort is still fun, because it's like a math problem. It's like, “I gotta solve aesthetically what the client is asking me to make, whether it's supposed to scare his audience or thrill his audience or make them laugh.” And then there's the left-brain side of, how do we do this? How do we build it so it doesn't fall apart? How do we build it so it can be shipped? How do we build it so the person is comfortable inside? That's a totally different challenge that I love. It's problem solving and I love problem solving. A famous thing I heard Stan Winston used to say [about] Jurassic Park: “Yeah, 20-foot dinosaurs. Yeah, we can do that. Yeah, yeah." He gets off the phone: “Okay. How are we going to do this?” [Laughs] I love that brash courage. That’s what I got from Stan, too—just, you'll figure it out.
Thinking specifically of the Xer0 headgear for Static-X, what is it like to create something that looks very robotic, but is actually worn by a performer? What do you have to take into consideration when creating something that somebody's going to wear onstage for an extended period of time?
I always tell my clients number one is aesthetics. I'm not going to make something that looks bad, cheesy, comical when it's not supposed to because there's too much at stake. Heavy metal fans are completely loyal with the band they support. So if you mess up that image... But I wasn't thinking of all this at the time. I was just like, “I know what to do.”
Secondary is the client's comfort. We try to make it as comfortable as possible. So the number one [question] was, what does it have to do? Because being metal, I'm sure he had to headbang, as they call it, and I didn't want to break his neck. So, weight [was a factor]. I told him, “It's going to be sweaty. It's going to be so hot under there. Are you playing guitar? Yes? You gotta be able to see where your fingers are going.” And I know they use in-ears [monitors], so how are we going to get access to that? That all factored into the design. So this part [points to sides of head] is flexible rubber, so you can lift it up, put the in-ears in. We designed it so it goes around his mouth, because is he singing? Yes, he is. Let's make the mask go like this [over the top lip], and then it doesn't interfere with his jaw. We can have a separate chin piece, so it all factors in. Everything has to be taken into consideration.
Right after the aesthetics, after he signs off on the design, the engineering begins. We design in 3D using computers. Back in the ’80s, like Robocop, all that stuff was sculpted out of clay. But the human hand in clay is not as perfect as a computer and you don't get the symmetry. In this day and age, we're lucky to have computers. Anything that's robotic, we usually design digitally. So his mask was designed in the computer, which gives you those perfect lines, planes, symmetry, which will help you with the robotic look, basically. But that's a good example of showing you how the comfort, aesthetics, and making something look robotic come together.
When you look back on your career, are there any projects that stand out as being particularly memorable?
The Overwatch project for Blizzard. I was with another partnership at the time, and we had a studio called Alliance. My former partner, Steve Wang, had made contacts with the video game industry. Overwatch is this game that was going to be released by Blizzard. They were doing a multimillion-dollar campaign and an ad agency in New York called Droga was in charge of it. They contacted me, and the idea was that it was going to be three of their video game characters presented in a toy box that you would see at a toy store. It had the clear plastic on it, and you could push a button, it would make sounds, and had all these accessories and guns with it. They were 16-foot boxes and the figures [would be] 12 feet tall. I thought it was just the coolest idea. That was my Jurassic Park moment. I'm like, “Yeah, we can absolutely do it. No problem.” And then it was like, “Okay. How are we going to do this?”
I loved the challenge of it. When you're given parameters, like “we need this in four months,” that's an issue. I always know a lot of the problems come from the front end—getting the money, getting it through whoever needs to sign off on it, writing the check. Just delays and delays. I also knew that changes from clients [add] delay, delay, delay, and then you're stuck with this much time to build it in. I tried to, as a good project manager, stop that immediately. I was working with another person at Droga, and she was amazing. I told her, “If we're going to accomplish this, you’ve got to get us the money ASAP. We have a good relationship with Blizzard, [so] no comments. You just gotta trust us.”
The next problem was, how do we make something in that time frame? 3D printing. I said, “We've never printed anything this big. I don't think anything has ever been printed this big. I don't know if there's that much resin to print in Los Angeles.” I immediately started calling vendors and I said, “I don't want to point the finger at anybody. Prints fail. And at this scale, they could take weeks to print, and if you have a failure of a print, then either it's trashed, or we’ve got to fix it.” I lined up four different vendors, and I was very transparent with them. I said, “Look, if your part fails or you can't get it going, or your other in-house projects delays it, it's going to the next vendor because we cannot afford to have any mistakes.” I was proud of myself for all the knowledge I'd gained over the years on how to cut off any potential problems so that we had a clear path to create and do it the way we wanted to.
That was by far my proudest project. That used every ounce of knowledge and skill that I had learned up to that point. And then watching logistics take over—Droga had contracted N/A Collective. They were responsible for logistics. [The characters] were supposed to magically appear overnight in Los Angeles, Paris, and Busan, Korea, all at the same time. So they needed a truck. They needed two forklifts per statue in each city with extended forks on them. They needed a crane to lift the boxes out. And then once you got all these boxes out, we had eight hours to assemble. So we had a dress rehearsal to see how long it took with all this equipment. We staged it in Las Vegas. We would finish the figure, ship it to Las Vegas, and there they would be assembled into their toy boxes, and that would be the only city where you see all three of them at the same time completed, and then they would fly out from Las Vegas to their respective cities. So all of that planning, the epicness of the project—that has to be the one I'm most proud of, because it was just huge. And we did it all within five months, with one month of it going to transport to all the different cities. This is also one of the smoothest projects I had ever done, and it's because of all the planning and thinking and obsessing over, how do we do this?
You’ve been doing this work for a long time. Something you didn’t have to deal with earlier in your career is AI, which is now infiltrating our lives. What are your thoughts on AI as it relates to your work?
I treat it pretty much like I treat any other problem or issue that we're challenged with in life. I was sculpting in clay, as I said, before computers. I'd never touched a computer. I didn't know what a mouse was. I didn't know what any of this stuff was. Jurassic Park came out, and all of us were like, “Oh my God. What are we going to do?” There's another friend of mine—we were both working at Rick Baker's studio—and he started teaching himself Photoshop. Then he got a 3D program and started learning 3D animation, modeling, all that stuff. I said, “You know what? This is something I just gotta do.” So I bought a computer. I would go over to his house two, three times a week and just practice and learn. I didn't know what I was doing. I didn't know where I saved my files. I didn't know anything. It was such a horrible experience. [Laughs] But I said, “You know what? I gotta treat it like going to the gym. Just 30 minutes a day.”
Anyways, one day it clicked. I thought the computer was like a sculpting program, and what I was using was a 3D animation program. I'm like, “What is this?” It was a camera. I'd never explored that. So I clicked on it, and a camera appears virtually. This is a movie studio, it's not sculpting software! That day was the epiphany for me. I took to the computer, was obsessed with it since that day. I eventually got a job doing digital. Went back to Stan Winston Studios because Stan had adopted the computer. Everything was being designed digitally. And they said, “Eddie's a hybrid artist. He can sculpt and do digital.” So Stan Winston Studios was my house for five, six years. That's where I worked on Iron Man, Avatar, War of the Worlds. And that's when they were starting to 3D print stuff. So basically, I wouldn't have a career today if I'd never adopted digital and forced myself to learn it.
It's a long way of saying that I embrace technology and I like seeing where it's going. As soon as I heard about the AI stuff, I tried it out, tested it. That was like two years ago. My wife got me a MasterClass video, and they had an AI class. I learned some stuff from that. Long story short, I love it. I am not fearful of it. I'd like to see where it's taking us. I'm always trying to think of what AI is going to do and how they're going to use it. And I truly believe the next multi-billionaire is in a college dorm somewhere [and is] going to come up with how to integrate AI and make it truly useful in our lives.
Who are your influences? Who or what do you turn to for inspiration?
Other artists, actually. With social media, it's so easy to see other artists’ artwork and what they come up with. I'm still constantly inspired. Being where I am and doing it for as long as I have, you think you've seen everything under the sun. Then some kid does something, it's like, “Oh my God! That's really cool!” That inspires me and pushes me further. It goes back to when I was a kid and I saw something and I just wanted to replicate it. Now it inspires me to do something unique. But I've discovered that in so many different mediums. Like, I think I've heard all the metal bands, but then some band will pop up. It's like, “Wow. They're not screaming. They sound more like Led Zeppelin or something.” That's fascinating to me, too. I’m really into cooking. It's the same thing, seeing what chefs do. I do Brazilian jiu-jitsu, and there's some young kid, again, that'll come up with some weird move and be tapping out a 200-pound muscle man that's been doing it for decades. Human ingenuity and the ability to constantly create and do something new just fascinates me and inspires me daily.
To learn more about Eddie Yang, find him on Instagram.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
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