Ahh, The Golden Hornet. Much loved by many of our customers and friends, but has so far proved difficult to bring back. At the time of writing this character, I was convinced that I wanted a heroine from the Indian sub-continent. Being the ignorant spoon that I am, I was unaware of any currently in existence, and so set about righting that wrong.
Initially, instead of a toxic stinger she was to have toxic blood, a sample of which she would carry around with her. Should that supply dwindle, a blood-letting would need to take place. I decided that might be a little gruesome compared to what we had done before, so it became a stinger. However, I made this a bit of a curse for the character and something that she struggled to control, hence the need for training with Elite Force. Costume-wise we had a few designs before settling. Here are a couple:
As you can see, same design but colours swapped over – this was before she was Golden. I also imagined her a bit ‘thicker set’ at this point (I would truly love to find an actress who looks like that – I’d give her a job any day). It surprised me how difficult it was to find candidates for the role. Having lived in or around London all my life, and knowing the ethnic diversity of the place, I expected dozens if not hundreds of applications for this part, as we have had for everything else. In reality I had to actively go looking myself to flesh out the audition, but we were very pleased with who we cast and in fact those we could get to come along.
By that stage the mask had become an important factor in the storyline, but we did not yet have the one that appears in the film – instead we had a much larger one that obscured people’s faces immensely. Everyone was far too polite to complain though. For the brother/sister ‘Gemini’ combo we had a greater dilemma, as we saw several really good actors for the roles. Again we found two people who really delivered the lines well and looked conceivably like they could be related… job done!
Before the shoot we went heavily into storyboarding and shot lists, as we had felt that Episode Two had taken us too long to film and been a bit disorganised. We have since shot for much longer, been equally disorganised and grown used to it. The shoot was set for a day in late February 2010, at the same facility where we shot Episode Two. The weather forecast suggested it might be cold… and they got that one right.
Mario says:
very nice! 🙂