Saint Aquinas, Bonaventure and Catherine of Siena

The third set of episodes for the EWTN series The Doctors of the Church we had to produce dramatizations for were about Thomas Aquinas, Bonaventure and Catherine of Siena.

The theme word for all three episodes: TONSURE - and a lot of it! We had to have a special tonsure wig for Tomas Aquinas professionally made and even we attempted to make one ourselves. We had to find a number of actors who were willing to sacrifice their hair for the special haircut and a role in one of the episodes. At the end, our girls who handled the shaving even joked about opening a special hair salon for the new trend of hairstyling. Who knows, maybe some day?

We succeded in finding a girl willing to shorten her hair as well. Catherine of Siena cut her hair in order to appear less fitting for marriage in 14th century.

For Tomas Aquinas episode, we had to make him appear floating in air, that was a special task for our production design team. We designed a special kneeling-in-air device that we erased in post production and got the desired effect.

An even bigger challenge for our VFX team was making the fiery beams penetrating Saint Catherine’s hands and body in the scene where she receives her stigmata. It was also fun to make make-up prosthetics for her hand stigmata.

We overcamea number of fun challenges and gained useful new experience in the three episodes. We can’t wait to capture the life stories of many more spiritual icons that are in the group of Doctors of the Church.