You’d never guess from the exterior that a world of magic exists behind a Los Osos garage door. Inside, an array of tools, 3D printers, and the ingenious creativity of self-described “foamfabber” Ted Haines constitute a workplace where common upholstery foam, latex, and fiber combine to make incredible movie props, costumes, and creature effects. Haines shares the space with his wife, Ilona, who’s also in the biz.
Follow him on Instagram
Ted Haines regularly posts images of his ongoing work on his Instagram page, revealing the process and progress of fabrications that will make it into movies, be sold to collectors, or turned into 3D printed models he sells to people who want to paint their own versions of his designs. Find him at instagram.com/thefoamfabber. He also explains his process on YouTube, @monstermaker40.
They met at Legacy Effects, and after COVID, they moved to Ilona’s childhood home in Los Osos when it became clear they didn’t need to live in Hollywood to work in the industry.
“I was at Legacy Effects for 16 years. She was there for about five,” Haines explained. “I worked on all the Iron Man movies, all the Marvel stuff, Captain America—that kind of stuff. I was in the fabrication department doing specialty costumes, a lot of sewing, a lot of fabrication, doing muscle suits for Captain America to wear.”
These were big collaborative efforts on blockbuster films.
“All these different people are putting together Iron Man suits that are all tethered. That’s not just me. That’s a group of 30 fabricators doing multiple suits, and then you’ve got another 30 mold makers that are in the mold shops. You’ve got artists and digital artists.
“I worked doing muscle suits and fat suits and all that kind of stuff. If you see films with gorillas or creatures or monsters—big hairy stuff—but they’ve got all these muscles and mass underneath. That’s what I do.”
Today Haines is an independent running his own shop, but getting to that level was a journey. His creativity started early, drawing and making stuff in the basement of his parents’ Wisconsin Rapids home.
“I was always an illustrator,” he explained. “First it was crayons, then it was pencils—like any kid. And then Star Wars came out in ’77 when I was 9. It was like a light bulb. ‘I know what I want to do!’ I knew I wanted to do something that had to do with making something like that, whether it was model building, set building, creature effects, special effects.”
Soon he was making his own masks and building miniatures and models. He got a Super 8 camera, and he and two buddies who also had Super 8s began making movies.
“All throughout our teens, through junior high and high school, we were making horror films and sci-fi films,” Haines recalled.
He developed skills on his own, essentially in a vacuum and largely through trial and error, re-creating things he’d seen in the sci-fi magazine Starlog and the horror magazine Fangoria.
“That was it. Those two magazines, that’s all there was,” he said. “I was just looking at pictures or reading the articles. I had to make it up, you know? Like, ‘I wonder if this paint will work? I wonder if this foam will work?’ I didn’t know specifically what they were using, so it was all trial and error. I had nobody showing me how.”
He also developed his foam fabrication techniques in his youth.
“I would go to our local upholstery place in my town in Wisconsin and beg them for scraps, chunks, 1-inch sheets—stuff like that. And I would cut it and snip it because that’s the way they did monsters on Lost in Space, Star Trek, Voyage to Bottom of the Sea—all that stuff was fabricated. And so, I just kind of picked up doing that. Plus, it’s a really cheap way of doing things.”
‘Then Star Wars came out in ’77 when I was 9. It was like a light bulb. “I know what I want to do!” I knew I wanted to do something that had to do with making something like that, whether it was model building, set building, creature effects, special effects.’
—Ted Haines, visual effects creator
He eventually found himself in Hollywood trying to figure out the next step.
“I was just so green, and I thought, ‘I’ve got to learn more. I need to know more before I get in.’ There was a school down in LA, right across the street from Universal Studios on Cahuenga. A fellow there taught glamour makeup, theater makeup, and prosthetic film makeup. I had done all of that.”
Still, he decided to take the five-and-a-half-month course but quickly realized he wasn’t learning anything new.
“My parents were both schoolteachers, so of course I couldn’t drop out. I got two job offers while I was going to school there, but the guy wouldn’t let me out [of the course]. I can’t quit, so I just kept doing it. Finally got out, and I got a job the first day out.”
He was in!
“It was a company called MMI, Magical Media Industries,” Haines recalled. “A guy named John Buechler owned it, and I knew he worked on Land of the Lost and Jason of Star Command—Saturday morning type stuff.”
The company also made horror props, and Haines was soon fabricating pieces for films being produced by a small company called Full Moon.
“It was all super low-budget—a $300,000 budget and we’d shoot one movie in two or three weeks. Then we started going to Romania and shooting films there, and we’d be there for a month and a half or two months. You could make $300,000 look like $2 million because it was right after the revolution, so they just opened their country and let us in.”
In addition to special effects, he’s also done puppetry, costuming, and makeup on films like The Faculty, Pulp Fiction, From Dusk to Dawn, Scream, A Simple Plan, and many more.
Though he’s worked on big-budget films, Haines credits low-budget pictures for really improving his artistry.
“Low-budget shops don’t do it the way the big-budget shops do. Big-budget shops have a fiberglass mannequin of the actor. They sculpt it in clay. They do fiberglass molds, inject foam latex. It’s a big thing. ‘Oh no, we can’t afford that. We’re making out of foam.’ It was like, ‘OK, so I hone my skills even more doing low-budget stuff.’”
Though now independent these days, Haines stays busy. If he’s not building something for a film, he’s making something for himself or to sell. He’s also gearing up for the annual Monsterpalooza (May 29 to 31 in the Pasadena Convention Cener), where he sets up a booth to exhibit his skills. If you stop by, he’ll tell you all about his latest creature, and you can bet it will be something weird. ∆
Contact Arts Editor Glen Starkey at gstarkey@newtimesslo.com.
This article appears in Weddings 2026.