‘They sent us a barbecued rat in a box. Yep, somebody actually barbecued a rat, and we had to make replicas’
INSIDE THE WORKSHOPS of Shadow Creations, the scene is mundane. Two men manipulate a piece of timber; another walks through the warehouse with a length of steel. The only suggestion that they might not be making fitted kitchens or conservatories comes in the form of the largest block of polystyrene I have ever seen. It’s the same stuff used to package fridges and computers, but in a solid loaf, four feet high by 15 feet long. “We do a lot of work with this stuff,” says the manager, Tim Cains. “The last thing we did was that pig. We built a giant pig.”
Shadow Creations makes props for films and TV series, as well as building the sets you see on RTÉ every night, and maintaining a useful sideline in promotional items. (The giant pig, it emerges, was part of a campaign for Concern.) They’ve worked on everyone from King Arthur to Ryan Tubridy. In one room, the giant backdrop images for the new round of GAA coverage are in the middle of emerging from the printer; in the next, the Eircom mouse is slumped miserably in a cardboard box. “He’s about to go in the bin,” says Tim’s partner in Shadow, Kevin Murphy. “He’s well finished.” Near the remains of the ill-fated rodent are a series of fibreglass casts labelled “Wayne” and “José”. “These are puppet heads for Setanta Sports,” says Murphy. “José Mourinho and Wayne Rooney.”
Next to me, Cains is holding up a pair of eyeballs, which he swivels back and forth disconcertingly with a wire. “You can blink the eyelids too,” he says. Do you make the whole puppet, I ask. “Yep,” says Cains. “Costumes and everything. But with these, they were wearing suits, so we’d just go and buy kids’ suits.”
Shadow Creations is nine years old. “We’re going since 1999,” says Cains. “We started in my mum’s front room. We both went to college in Dún Laoghaire, studying model-making and special effects, the first year [the course] was on. Then we worked together on The Mystic Knights [of Tir Na nÓg], which was a kids’ Power Rangers-type thing. Then that got cancelled. And when that finished we were just doing our own little bits and pieces, and we got tired of that after a while and thought we’d get together. And the jobs got bigger and bigger.” On the computer, they show me a vast portfolio of photographs of their work.
A lot of it is stage sets, and there are numerous variations on the sofas-and-backdrop theme beloved of RTÉ producers. Their most recent project was Tubridy Tonight. “That’s all steel, in about six sections,” says Murphy. “The largest section’s about the size of a double-decker bus,” Cains adds.
“And it’s all on wheels. Wheel it in, wheel it out.” So their job is sort of building an illusion. “It is a bit, yeah”, says Cains. “If you go behind the set” – he holds his finger and thumb about an inch apart – “nothing’s thicker than that.” There is also a bewildering range of props and models. I see spaceships, fossils and medieval weapons. There are several photos of a gruesomely burnt body. “That was from that magic show,” says Murphy. “It’s just latex and upholstery foam.”
Have they ever had any really odd commissions? “There were barbecued rats,” says Cains. “They sent us a barbecued rat, in a box.” A real barbecued rat? “Yep, somebody actually barbecued a rat, and we had to make replicas.”
“And sheeps’ heads,” adds Murphy. “For Angela’s Ashes, they needed a boiled sheep head. So they sent over a real sheep’s head, in a bag.” Prop-making, it seems, is a little like being on the wrong side of the Mafia.
They go on. “There was a house out in Carrickmines,” says Cains, “that we had to burn down and then put back exactly the way it was.” Put it back how it was? “Yeah,” says Murphy. “It’s like, on Reign of Fire” – the movie about dragons – “they had all these Hummers and troop carriers and that. And they were like, ‘We’re shooting a scene and all these vehicles get destroyed. So we need to destroy them, but then we need to give them back perfect, the way they were.’ There’s a lot of that.” So how did you do it? “We stripped it all down. We took everything off them, and took everything apart, and then we laid on that stuff that you saw, the finish on the burnt carcass. We did that to tanks, double-decker buses, everything. Then we put everything back again.”
“But it’s not all like that,” adds Cains. “The RTÉ stuff, such as Fair City – they like us because we do nice realistic stuff. Things look used. Like, we did a staircase, and I had to spend a day rubbing wallpaper – wearing it in where it would get rubbed. And grubby finger-marks around light switches, that sort of thing. It sounds really dull, but if it wasn’t there it would look a bit odd.” The pleasure that Cains and Murphy take in their workmanship is obvious. At one stage, they show me a booklet of specialised laser-etching materials with evident pride. “I know it’s a bit nerdy”, says Murphy, “but, you know . . .” He trails off.
So when does the job satisfaction come? Is it when you see your prop on the TV? Cains answers. “It’s when you stand back and go, ‘That looks real’,” he says. But Murphy disagrees. “It’s when you see it in the bin,” he says. In the bin? “Everything you make, no matter how long you work on it, goes in the bin. And once you see it in the bin, you know that it’s job done, everything worked, that was fine. It did exactly what it was needed to do, there were no problems, and now it’s in the bin. It’s like the completion of it.”
See shadowcreations.ie.