Ed Edmunds and his wife Marsha Taub-Edmunds have been in the fright business since 1978. The heads of Distortions Unlimited, and current stars of Making Monsters on the Travel Channel, started with horror-themed masks and props, but in 1995 they designed Shake n Bake, an animatronic electric chair that was unlike anything the industry had ever seen. Shake n Bake was dark, violent, loud, and smoky; a distant departure from contemporary animatronics that were tongue-in-cheek, silly, and friendly — imagine the thematic difference had Chuck E. Cheese been an executioner, rather than the proprietor of the Pizza Time Theatre.
“We were doing props,” recalls Ed Edmunds, president of Distortions. Before Shake n Bake, “we had done everything from a severed finger, to a 16-foot queen alien, and we were stuck. What was the next thing?” After the team perfected the queen from James Cameron’s sequel, Aliens, they were skeptical of creating a high-end scare item in an industry that at the time, topped out at a couple hundred dollars per prop.
“It was a cheap, throw away industry,” Ed says. “We came up with the idea for a $3,800 electric chair and we all liked it, but I figured that if we were lucky, we’d sell six.” In the first year, Distortions sold more than 200. Shake n Bake has been credited with changing the scare industry from a charity-driven, black plastic event into big business. It may have been tough for some haunted houses and theme parks to justify the initial expense, but once the owners discovered the free press that resulted from an animatronic electric chair installation, the marketing purse strings loosened and attendance jumped dramatically.
Shake n Bake was a simple design, a motor connected to a few pulleys that made it the body thrust violently back and forth. According to Marsha, the first concept was so powerful that heads started to pop off, 100 heads in the first year, each of which had to be replaced. Considering the cost incurred by the motor and ongoing cranial replacement, Distortions required greater control at a more reasonable price point, so they made the switch from motors to pneumatics.
“To move something heavy with an air cylinder is much cheaper, plus it gives you more control,” Ed adds. For help with the design, Distortions turned to local engineering students and presented them with a challenge. “The electric chair had done so well that we needed more animatronics. We told the students ‘no computers and no air cylinders.’ [At the time], we thought they were too complicated, but that was exactly what they used, PLCs and air cylinders.”
Through the transition, Ed and Marsha worked with Mike Glover, a mechanic with a background in construction and farming. “What we do with cylinders isn’t right,” Glover states, “but it seems to work well for the application.”
After Shake n Bake’s success, the company moved away from the joys of capital punishment and on to institutionalized possession with the creation of Krazy Kristen. The new animatronic embraced the violent movement that made her predecessor such a success, but the team switched up Kristen’s components to make her movement more controlled, and her design more cost effective.
The team thinks of the type of character they want to build first, and then finds new ways to move them. With Krazy Kristen, Distortions came up with dual cylinder movement, which wound up creating a much more violent motion than a single cylinder design.
Kristen was drawn, sculpted, and molded before she was turned over to Glover to work out the movement and armature. While Ed and Marsha employed an actress to record the possessed girl’s demonic audio tracks, Mike found new ways to use and abuse Bimba cylinders. “We thrash her like crazy, so we have to engineer in ways to make that happen without bending cylinder rods,” he says.
“It’s an art to make something thrash so violently without tearing it to shreds,” Ed adds. “The answer was taking the right cylinders and valves, making a metal armature inside the character, and bracing it in a way that makes it bulletproof. If it breaks, and we have to take it back and fix it, we’ve lost our profit.”
Krazy Kristen’s violent thrashing is the result of two, 3” stroke cylinders with a ¼” bore. Watching her struggle in the straitjacket, it would seem as though the action is caused by more than two little cylinders and a pair of ¼” rods, but the team chose to use a small bore so the cylinder could move quickly. The bigger the cylinder, the harder it is to create quick, violent movements.
According to Glover, perfecting realistic movement has been the greatest challenge in using pneumatic cylinders. “A cylinder does a certain thing; it goes out and comes back. Imagine trying to engineer a ballerina with cylinders, it couldn’t be done,” he says. “Japan is doing some amazing things with robotics right now, but they’re still clunky compared to a ballerina. We have to make animatronics strong, believable, and not break the bank. It’s like a bell curve. Something may look good, but it would double the price. We go for the most bang for the buck.”
Component durability was particularly important in Krazy Kristen, because maintenance in the haunt world is non-existent. “Maintenance doesn’t happen,” Glover says. “Customers use it until it breaks. With some of our products, you can get to the pneumatic cylinders fairly easily, but most are buried under foam and latex.”
The user would have to essentially perform surgery on Kristen to replace her cylinders.
“We have a reputation for products that last many years and certainly those cylinders are a part of that, they rarely fail,” adds Marsha.
Step Over to the Dark Side
Ed and Marsha had never envisioned such a life when they started out. Ed was an art student planning a career as a teacher when he first started making masks for a local retailer in exchange for school credit. Marsha was working her way through school with a biology background when she started dabbling in the demonic. The rest is history. “It is such a unique art and business that everybody [at Distortions] has been with us many years. A lot of it is learning on the job,” says Marsha.
“There is a lot of glamour associated with it, when you’re looking at pictures or watching the show, but just like every other business, when it comes down to it, it’s just a lot of work,” adds Mike.
When it comes to building new models, Distortions still prefers old school methodology. The company invites a sculptor into the shop, he/she sculpts the design in a day, the company casts it, and arrives at a relatively inexpensive piece in two or three days. “In this era, there’s almost no excuse for calling something ‘impossible,’” says Ed. “Even though it is mechanical, and components have limitations, you can still push [animatronics] to the point where you can do amazing things. You have to throw the book out and make it happen. We didn’t have a book. We threw stuff at Mike. He would say that it wouldn’t work, to which we would respond, ‘find a way to make it happen.”
Last year marked the first time in their 35-year existence that they turned to a CNC to create a pair of characters. The creatures were so big that they would have required tons of clay and plaster.
“Unlike the film industry, the product that we make has to exist, so it is much easier to sculpt it than to try and do something on the computer and carve it out of foam, because we still have to go in with clay and tooling and fix it,” says Ed. “Unless it is very large, we still work with clay, plaster, foam, and latex, and I don’t expect that to change in the near future.”
At a time when Ed expected the sun to start setting on his career, the work load is only intensifying. “We’re all getting older and our jobs have actually gotten more complicated. It’s the wrong direction, you’re supposed to be settling down in your old age, but there is no letting up. The projects that excite us are the ones that are breaking new ground — big, amazing projects. We keep taking on projects that are hard, because they are the exciting projects, so I don’t anticipate any rest for the wicked here,” he says.
Much of the uptick in production and time commitment can be attributed to Making Monsters, the reality show that follows the small staff as they work out of their Greeley, CO-based facilities to create some of the scariest “frightronics” the haunt industry has ever seen. With the show has come a time-consuming commitment.
“When the film crew is out here, a simple thing like asking Mike a question can take 15 minutes,” says Ed. “We have to wait in the paint room while [the production crew] sets up lights, gets their cameras, finds the sound guy, and makes sure that everyone mic’d up. Then I go over, have a two minute conversation with Mike, after which they have to film close-ups.” Ed admits that while he has seen how fake reality television can be, the one thing that he loves about the show is how it captures reality. The show focuses on the real problems that he runs into without the contrived melodrama. “We don’t come in to a scene cussing and getting into a fight,” he adds. “The drama is built upon our actual mistakes.”
