Jaws 3D par Romain Néophyte

Dernière partie de notre dossier consacré à l’artiste Mike Schultz au sujet de sa collection 2012 qui contiendra, comme vous le savez, une version NTT de notre Bruce III préféré! Bien évidemment, www.jaws-3D.com suivra de très près la conception et la réalisation du monstre tout au long de ces prochains mois. En dehors d’ un potentiel Blu-ray, le Bruce III NTT est à coup sûr l’ évènement de 2012! Quoi qu’il en soit, je viens de récupérer de nombreux articles assez rares qui devraient nous aider à patienter jusque là… Restez nombreux à soutenir ce site!

In your opinion what really differentiates Bruce 3D from Bruce and Brucette?

**This is a VERY rich area for discussion!
In my opinion the Brucette from Jaws 2 is VERY close to how the full-scale Bruce 3D shark appeared on film in many ways. I am not saying they are the same, I am saying that they are far more alike than they are different!
Much of this goes back to how a skin is framed and padded out. I know from all the mechanical dinosaurs and the 7 different mechanical sharks I have make in the last 30 years. You can take the exact same skin and stretch it on a different frame, or pad it different and you will have both looking as unique and individual from each other as the Tow Sled Shark was from the Platform Sharks from the first movie!
In fact, the head that is blown up at the end of the first movie was from the same molds but not stretched out at all, but rather just hung on a lose framework; it looks nothing like any of the Bruces’ that any of us would recognize.

Many people get into trouble when they attempt to model a Bruce by using Junkyard Bruce materials.
It may have been made directly from the original molds, but it was never stretched on any animatronics style framework. Like 2 different sized people trying on the same small shirt; one person fat and the other skinny; you will have two very different ‘looks’ when compared together at the end…

The same for the Bruce 3D and the Brucette from the 2nd movies. They have very intense similarities.
I can tell screen-grabs and behind the scenes material apart at a glance due to memory. But recently new photos appeared of the Brucette without teeth, and the coloring and off-angle pose made them look almost a dead-ringer for the Bruce 3D for me. The differences are that subtle when key features like the lower lip and scars are hidden from view!
Of course we can all tell from the big things like the burn-scars, or the overly jutted lower jaw. The teeth and inner-mouth are a dead give-away as well. But it is that triangle of eye to snout to nostril that is nearly identical, and measures nearly the same as well for the 2nd and third sequel Bruce’s.

In my conversations with Mr. Alves he has greatly detailed for me how they made changes to the Bruce mold to achieve what they did with Brucette for the second film. The upper skull area is the same. Everything both below the cheek-bone area and behind are different, including of course the neck and gills. So, in a few scenes here and there you can see the original beloved Bruce in Brucette very clearly.

Interestingly enough, in the first movie you can also see some of Brucette in Bruce!
When Bruce’s mouth is nearly closed and the upper skull is lowered and the jowls are hidden then it is clearly exactly like Brucette for that upper head area.
It’s in how they made the shark’s carry themselves on-screen as well though.
Bruce nearly always had his mouth wide open and his upper skull raised high and agape. Brucette nearly always had its mouth nearly closed and upper-skull lowered like a cruising White shark.

Similarly the Jaws 3 Bruce was most like the Brucette in its standard pose, with the upper-skull lowered.
This gave it the same look of it’s eye being higher in plane than the snout-tip. Both of these sharks also featured extremely weak looking jowl-muscle areas.
In trying to back away from the tiger-shark or catfish style jowls of the first Bruce I believe that they became unbalanced and went overboard in losing that look and made their sharks look VERY weak-jawed.

Both of these sequel sharks featured similar pinched-style hinging at the cheek corners to help defer the bulging and bowing as the mouth’s flexed. I too fought these same problems as a teen making my first set of mechanical sharks. If you don’t design this area right then the entire head balloons or draws thin as the mouth operates, no matter how you frame and pad the skins out.

Of course the mouths and teeth and gills are entirely different as well. The first Bruce was truly the slimmest of all the sharks. Brucette used the same frame as the original, but that frame was heavily modified and larger. This is also made reference to in the Jaws 2 Log. After Bruce, the following sharks became much fatter and roomier on the inside. The throats also began to become less deep as additional room was taken up with ballast or floatation aiding gear.

Now if you want to talk bodies I am currently still crunching numbers on the Bruce 3D shark. But so far I can tell for certain that the Bruce and Brucette used the same body molds. But in order to maintain screen-used accuracy for my Brucette I will have to alter the fatness of the body and trim the dorsal and tail fins differently.
Simply put they used the Bruce body molds over a fatter frame and trimmed the fins differently,
so I will have to make an entirely new body mold for our Brucette as well.
So far the Bruce 3D body seems to be the same as the Brucette body but it was framed and padded differently as well. So I will also have to make an entirely new body for the Bruce 3D as well in order to make it accurate.
Once discerning fas have their entire Bruce NTT Shark Collector’s Set in front of them on the shelf then they will see and understand and appreciate all these nuances and unique features themselves. And I honestly do believe that we will continue to receive ‘Thank you’ letters for many years to come for doing our due-diligence[s] in honoring exactly what these sharks really were both for the camera, and behind the scenes; instead of just trying to let talent and guesswork roll the dice like most other artists have done all these years.

Romain, I sure do thank you for your time, and for asking me to be a part of your efforts at Jaws 3D.
If you want I would love to keep you and your readers in the loop about us at SCO and our efforts. I may not have the armchair-general knowledge memorized verbatim like so many seem to rattle off on forums so often.
But I do have over 30 years of making these sharks in various forms, as well as the Dinosaurs to be able to place a practical and experienced base edge to my writings. I am open to whatever you or your readers may want us to provide.
Please keep us and www.sharkcityozark.com in mind. Our chief goal is to get our Sharks professionally mass produced by one of the great companies out there like Toynami or Hot Toys. We simply cannot survive forever trying to put a Shark on every shelf all by ourselves.

There is plenty any friend of SCO can do to help out. Feel free to send photos of our SCO sharks and an email to ANY toy or collectibles manufacturer and ask them to pick us up and produce some one or all of our sharks!
* Make and keep your favorite site current with our products, photos or art-work.
** The more that the right people, the Big-Players hear about www.sharkcityozark.com or Mike Schultz the Shark Guy
then the more open they will be to utilize us and or our materials.
Besides, If our Sharks get mass produced by the right people than they will be FAR More Affordable for everyone!