Redfield Arts

Show Me the Monster!

A life cast is made of Mark Redfield

In the stage version, Redfield was able to use little (if any, in most scenes) make-up to create the personage of Edward Hyde. Through vocalization and body language, he could successfully convey the illusion of becoming someone else. (And it didn't hurt that theater audiences come willing to suspend their disbelief; enormously helpful for the actor!)

But this was a movie, and as a horror movie fan himself, Redfield knew that the audience, sooner or later, wants to see the monster. Thus began the torturous process of coming up with

Yoho prepares Redfield for his transformation

a design that was simple, yet somehow right for a creature that Stevenson alternately describes as "pale and dwarfish", "troglodytic", and "ape-like"!

Redfield met with several make-up designers. He found it difficult to find someone whose work was subtle and realistic enough. Then he remembered speaking to someone a few years earlier about an age make-up for a project that had fallen through. For many make-up artists in the Baltimore-Washington-Virginia area, there is only one name that that comes to mind when top quality, attention to detail and complicated prosthetics are involved: Robert Yoho. Yoho and Redfield sat down and poured over Redfleld's conceptual sketches and immediately the collaboration took fire. Robert Yoho began the casting and sculpting process that would turn Redfield's Jekyll into the three stages of Hyde that would be needed in the film.

Make-up designer Robert Yoho

The other compositing and effects shots were handled the old fashioned way. In the earliest days of the cinema, the cameraman was always responsible for the film's trick shots. Karl DeVos, Jekyll and Hyde's Director of Photography, created the composite shots that appear in the film. He supervised the shooting of the miniatures as well.