An unbending love of his craft
Chris Gilman
Founder of Global Effects Inc., a North Hollywood-based company that designs, manufactures and provides specialty wardrobe and props to films, TV and commercials
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Current assignment: The customized spacesuit for “Zathura: A Space Adventure.”
Previous credits: “Deep Impact,” “Space Cowboys,” “Mr. & Mrs. Smith,” “Serenity.”
Awards: Received a 1992 Technical Achievement Award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for his development of an “actor climate system/cool suit.”
Trivia: Auditioned for the 1980 “The Blue Lagoon” but lost the male lead to Christopher Atkins.
Age: 44
Residence: Sun Valley
Union or guild: Doesn’t belong to a union.
Well suited: “My father was in the aerospace business in New England. His company did subcontracting work for major aerospace companies and projects, including the Apollo space program and the shuttle. On weekends and weekdays when I wasn’t in school, I would go to the shop and run the welder and make knives.
“My mother was a librarian. We were always encouraged to ask questions, and we would go to museums and crafts fairs. Because my parents’ hobby was professional auto racing, [my two older brothers and I] got pulled around to a lot of the races on the East Coast.
“All of their friends were craftsmen or engineers, so this is the environment I grew up in.
“I was interested in illusionary art, and any sort of craft thing interested me as well.”
Diving in: “When I got out here, I didn’t know if I wanted to do special effects, makeup or stunt work. My older brother, Kerry, and I started to work at the Hand Prop Room, which is a movie company. In 1986, I finally went out on my own. I was too frustrated working with somebody else. When the company started, we were doing on-set special effects.”
A nonfolding niche: “A friend of mine put it perfectly -- most costumers are afraid of anything that doesn’t fold. I realized that when a costumer is designing, most of the jobs are uniforms, street clothes, high-end fashion. It is all traditionally learned items. But all of a sudden when they have to deal with something that involves plastic, metal or rubber, they don’t have experience in that. They can be very, very intimidated by it. I realized that these poor costumers were now in an area where they didn’t know right from wrong, or options.
“They needed a company who understood fiberglass, metal forming and cast rubber and foam rubber, as well as a shop that could do really beautiful garments.
“One of my hobbies was medieval history and arms and armor and doing reenactment stuff. I had gotten exposed to do really high-end clothing in the form of period garments like cavalier pieces. So we sort of transitioned out of doing props in strictly prop form and transitioned out of doing on-set special effects and started concentrating on specialty wardrobe.”
Outer space: “I have a huge reference library on medieval arms and armor as well as spacesuit history. Because the replicas on “From the Earth to the Moon” were so accurate, back in 1999 to 2000 I was contracted by NASA to redesign the upper torso of the space shuttle suit to fit women.”
“Zathura”: “Laura Jean Shannon, the costume designer of ‘Zathura,’ came in and said, ‘I have been told you are the guy for spacesuits.’ She gave me the script, and I read it.
I told her you could go completely fantasy or you can ground it in reality. She said, ‘We don’t want to make it too real, but [director] Jon Favreau doesn’t like stuff that’s completely a nonsensical thing.’ What I was able to do with the experience of what we have done here and our research was expand her palette of choices.
“With the spacesuit stuff that we have, I could lay all of these different histories out and explain, ‘This one is used for this, this one is used for that.’
“For Laura Jean, we created a board of items and came up with some sketches.... We worked on colors and styles. We had samples of materials; we picked a color palette and then started producing parts.”
-- Susan King
