BEHIND-THE-SCENES

very tall actors to play Hirogen hunters [#83 Hunters]

CREATING THE HIROGEN LOOK The design for the Hirogen was based on the gila monster which consisted of small beading that became consequently larger as it ran up the face toward the crown of the skull. Hirogen hunters are very tall characters, so the producers cast the largest actors they could find to play the roles, at least in the earlier Hirogen episodes; one of these actors was over 7 feet tall. This meant that the heads created by the make-up department had to be over-sized and required a new sizing of the props that the characters would carry.

Michael Westmore, the series' make-up supervisor:

The Hirogen's an interesting character, and the first person that played it was Tiny Ron. (Tiny Ron is familiar to [DS9] viewers; in that series he plays Maihardu.) Tiny Ron has a head the size of a basketball. It's huge, because Tiny is huge. It took a lot of clay. The mould weighs ("heavy" gesture)... You have to take it apart to hold it. It's huge. And my concept for the Hirogen was the gilamonster. I had a great picture of a gila monster, with all the little bumps that were all over it. So that is what we based it on, with all these fine little bumps, even down in the face and everything. When Tiny first did it, there was a helmet they had to wear, and a mask, and we sculpted those up too. Those aren't plastic. The large helmet that he had, which is again huge, is all made out of foam rubber and we metallised it with paint to make it look like it's a strong metallic material. The producers didn't like to use the gas mask too much, because you couldn't see the actor's face, you couldn't see the actor's mouth; all you're doing is hearing sound, and it was a muffled sound if they didn't go and loop it on the stage (dub or record it later on a sound stage). But we made many Hirogen heads and they were so intricately painted that we tried to re-use them as many times as we possibly could before destroying them and having to replace them, because all the little detailing, aside from the colouring, with all those little areas on the side of the head - they had little veins painted on them and everything. You get to see a tight close-up of a Hirogen head and it looks like a really beautiful paint job.

[Hunters]

David Livingston, director: "The wardrobe was interesting, but not in a good way. There were these rubber suits that were initially all one piece. Tiny Ron played one of the Hirogen in [Hunters], and he couldn't get out of the wardrobe because it would take too long to redress. I stood there watching him act with sweat dripping off. He had gloves on and was dripping from the fingertips of the wardrobe because he was sweating so much. This rubber suit he was wearing was filling up with his own sweat. I got very concerned about him. He's almost 7 foot tall. You have to pump a lot of blood if you're 7 foot. So I was concerned about him. We kept letting him sit down, had him drinking water and we tried to shoot him out quickly, but he was drenched; he was sopping wet inside. It was leaking out of him."

HIROGEN WEAPONS

"As barbaric as the Hirogen were, they were different from the Kazon because the Hirogen were trophy hunters who, although they competed with one another, were nevertheless rule-driven. There was an organization to their violence that differed from the tribalism of the Kazon. The Hirogen were very large people, overpoweringly large. In the very first episode, we hired actors that were close to seven feet and then put platforms in their boots to give them even greater height. That meant that these guys couldn't wield props built for humans; they had to be oversized props, large weapons the size of bazookas that would take two normal-sized humans to deploy. So their phaser rifles had to be huge and heavy. I got the idea from comic books and had a production company expand on the design, and it created a phaser rifle that looked like a tank killer. On the top of the weapon, I added a viewing panel that looked like a heads-up cockpit display in today's planes. This panel threw up a dot display that looked like a heat-seeking targeting system to help them identify the signatures of their prey. The weapon also had a light source to penetrate the dar areas where they hunted. It had a lot of electronics on it, different modes of activation to make it seem as if these were not just phasers but complete weapons systems that allowed the hirogen to survive and succeed in the most dangerous environments.
"We only had ten days to create this intense prop. The body of this unit was vacu-formed and then sanded and shaped and electroplated so that it had a metallic chrome, cold steel look. We then built in the electronics and the battery pack. When it was all done in the shop, I brought these two weapons onto the lot to show to the producers. They said: "It's too big." I told them: "You said you wanted this thing to be gargantuan." And when they saw it in the hands of the 7-foot-two actors they knew they had the right look."

[#84 Prey]

[#155 and #156 Flesh and Blood]

[Flesh and Blood]

illuminated sight on the hunting rifle [Flesh and Blood]