CHICKEN HEAD MASK

My friend Allen is making a movie about a superhero with a chicken head for a head. He came over one day and I helped him make the mask.

(below is Mei wearing the mask. She looks better in it than Allen.)


I didn't think to start taking pictures until we'd already glued up some layers of foam. The middle layers had cutouts for a human head. Then when it was a big chunk of foam we shaped the corners round on a bandsaw. It cut pretty easily. You can squash the foam and push it through the blade with very little effort. Afterwards we hot-glued some screen door screen over the face hole.

We wanted the blackish screen to blend in a little better with the yellow foam so we spray painted the whole thing gray. It was the only color I had. White would have been ideal.

It's somewhat more blendy. The holes are for eyeballs.

To make the comb on its head we cut a rubber glove like this:

These were the eyes and beak he bought. I thought it would have been better with a hinged beak that moved but he didn't want to mess with that and prefered this store-bought Halloween kind. The eyes were gimmick rubber high-bounce balls but they looked really good.

We roughed up the bottom edge of the comb to give the glue something to grab and hot glued it into a slot in the foam.

Here's something you don't see everyday.

Allen tried the fit.

It seemed to work okay.

Allen added the feathers by himself the next day. He covered the head with spray rubber cement and then rubbed feathers all over it from a pillow he cut open. The feathers were pretty messy. Every time he moved it a few would float off. He still has more feathers so if it loses too many during filming he can always add more. The floating feathers might actually be good in action scenes.

A proud father.

It probably needs a little trimming around the eyes and beak, but for the most part it's finished.