BILLINGSHURST .- Summers Place Auctions will be holding its next sealed bid auction on the 28th September and among the highlights is a collection of monumental sculptures based on TV and film props created by Rod and Louis Vass, who set up Armordillo Ltd, a company specialising in designing and creating sculptural props for films, shows and events. During his long career Rod worked for the BBC (on such classics as Doctor Who and Black Adder) and for Warner Bros, Disney, Marvel and DC. Over the last decade he has been joined by his son Louis, who has added his sophisticated digital sculpting skills to Armordillo's portfolio.
Among the sculptural props are three monumental polyurethane resin heads, which were made for the TV series Beowulf. They are each almost two and a half metres high and are estimated at £3,000 - £5,000 each, one of the heads has been designed to fit around a tree.
Rod remembers: "The heads were originally made for the high budget TV series Beowulf. The series was filmed in Northumberland in some of the most beautiful locations for ITV with some very impressive building works, there was even an Anglo Saxon-style hall built by a lake. The heads were positioned all around the hills and landscape in Northumberland and their last usage was as part of a bridge in a remote location."
Other sculptural props include a monumental hand (est. £2,000 - £4,000), an almost 3 metre high Cobra, created for an Indian circus (est. £3,000 - £5,000) and another head in three sections and with wall hanging features, which is 185cm high and estimated to fetch £2,500 - £4,000. It was made for a music video and shows a Black King's head. It was one of Rod's favourite projects: "I am keen on African history and I based this sculpture on the 14th-century Mali King Mansa Musa, who was the first king of Timbuktu. He is considered to be one of the richest people to have ever lived, but he was certainly the richest man of his day. There is a famous portrait of him on a map in the Catalan Atlas, which had been published in 1375, and I took that as inspiration and used his features when I created the head."
Designed for the film Tomb Raider, a horse head (almost one metre high) is expected to fetch £500 - £800, while a 2.3 metre long and equally high resin stallion on an iron frame base carries an estimate of £2,000 - £4,000. "The Cradle of Life was a great film to work on," reminiscents Rod, "we built a big temple, a leaning temple (by about 15 degrees) and we also designed and build an extraordinary statue of Alexander the Great, which was so big, it couldn't be stored anywhere and sadly its head was stolen from the film set. There were various horses, but this stallion is one of the four horses pulling chariots."
Props from a more recent film are the trees from the World War One battle scenes of Tolkien, giving them a particularly bleak and dramatic look. The set of four is estimated to sell for £2,000 - £4,000.
Rod Vass started his company when he created 650 suits of armour for Ridley Scott's film Gladiator - over 20 years on, his focus is less on film props, but more on general prop designs as the relatively light, but sturdy and waterproof material is so versatile it opens a whole new market.
