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Bigfoot Costume
How to make a Bigfoot costume:
Here's how we made our bigfoot costume and got into a little trouble. We don't recommend
doing this, as you will anger quite a few people.
Making a bigfoot costume is actually not extremely hard, you just need the right materials. I
started out by finding a decent gorilla suit. There’s two ways you can do this. One way is to
purchase it off the inter-net, or you can buy it at a local Halloween or costume store. You
may find that with some costume stores will have to order it for you, but this also works. I
personally bought it at a local store that just so happened to have one in stock.
Once we procured our gorilla costume, we found a beard of the same color in the same
store where we found our gorilla suit. This is important: when you pick out your beard and
gorilla costume, make sure they are the same color so you don’t end up with an odd-
looking, mutant bigfoot. Especially try to find a beard with hair that will blend in with your
mask. Next we took the beard and carefully sewed it onto the face of the gorilla. Think of a
gorilla with a beard...sort of Chewbacca in appearance, but cool. After we were done
altering the gorilla mask, it was simply a matter of fitting the costume to the person
underneath. We taped towels around our "actor" to make him look strong and muscular.
Tape the towels around your main muscles: biceps, shoulders, stomach, back, thighs,
and lower legs. This creates a sturdy looking Bigfoot with mass and muscle. The towels
around the neck and on top of the shoulders made him also appear much taller.
Next we put black make-up around our actor's eyes, so you could not detect any skin color.
Otherwise, a close up view will show a human behind the bigfoot costume. Use cosmetic
black make-up, which is easily obtainable at any costume shop, to hide any skin color
elsewhere, too (think neck, hands, eyelids, etc). We also took liberty with black paint and
permanent black marker to improve colorization on some parts of the mask and hands.
We used a pair of gorilla hands to make our bigfoot costume look better, The hair on the
suit had to be combed down over the hands to look right.
If your bigfoot costume does not have gloves (gorilla hands), or if it does not have gorilla
feet, you can use black gloves and black boots by attaching extra hair (buy an extra beard or
two, cut pieces and glue them onto the gloves and boots). You can also try to find hairy
gloves and hairy feet at that same costume shop. Optionally, additional hair can be added
to the feet, arms, eyebrows and beard. This may cost you a bit more than ours (we had
about $100 in it).
The bigfoot suit you have made may get extremely hot ,so don’t dress too warm if you are
inside it. Try to wear a t-shirt and shorts, because it gets really hot. If you are going to film
your bigfoot costume, make sure that you comb the hair over any zippers or seams, such as
where the mask goes over the suit or where the bigfoot costume meets the gloves. When
you are walking in the bigfoot costume, make sure that you sway your arms and have a little
bit of a hunch-back to give the effect of part gorilla and part man. This is what most films
with bigfoot look like. Look straight ahead and not down, so you don’t look non-realistic.
You don;t want to look like a person trying to see through a costume; you want to look
natural. This also means our actor did not try and look at the video camera, otherwise he
would appear non-realistic to the viewer. The bigfoot actor should take firm steps, because
bigfoot is supposed to be a heavy beast, and not a wimpy monkey. We tried not to get the
whole body of bigfoot when we made our original bigfoot videos that got us into trouble,
otherwise it woulf have been very easier to determine that our bigfoot was not real. We shot
a lot of footage and then edited it, because sometimes it was hard to get the right angle of
our bigfoot’s body. All of these same suggestions applied to taking pictures of our bigfoot,
too.
There are other ways to make a bigfoot costume. Some people in the past used an animal
pelt to get a more realistic effect of an animal. They used buffalo, bear and other dark
brown or black pelts. They also painted there faces and eyes black to make themselves
look like bigfoot. This gave them the effect of having gorilla hands, but they made sure they
had all of their skin pigment covered to create a realistic effect. Other people have made
bigfoot costumes by painstakingly gluing hair, pieces of wigs and costume appliances to
their skin and clothing. Another tactic people have incorporated into their bigfoot costume
was the addition of shorter dry-walling stilts, to make bigfoot tall and less human in
appearance.
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