FBFX

14/11/2025

Details...

Costume design for Halo season one by Giovanni Lipari.

10/10/2025

A new toy on the Christmas list! Exciting to see the Hot Toys collectable of the brown and tan Wolverine suit we made is now available.

Costume design for Deadpool and Wolverine by Graham Churchyard and Mayes C Rubeo.

22/09/2025

The Martian 10 years on...

A few photos from the vaults documenting how The Martian’s orange surface suit hardware came together!

Ridley Scott prefers to see physical examples of designs, so we milled out different helmet options with our CNC robot (📷 1). A 2/3 size prototype of the final design was then 3D printed and painted for a show and tell (📷 2 - 7).

The hardware and electronics were made using a mix of techniques that’s since become the norm at FBFX.

The helmet was fully digitally designed, and we bought our first vacuum casting machine from Germany especially to cast out helmet components (📷 8).

Front plate and backpack (📷 9) fabrication was more traditional; clay sculpted, moulded, perfected on the workbench, moulded again and sprayed out in polyurethane.

The pauldrons, elbows and knees (📷 10) were digitally modelled, 3D printed, moulded and sprayed in PU.

The wrist tech was SLA 3D printed due to time constraints, and proved a little more fragile than we’d have liked! These days, we’d vac cast them. The clear dome was outsourced as we weren’t vac casting domes just yet.

Each part was art finished by the paint team, with the dots on the helmet proving a particular headscratcher! They were finally perfected using a mix of transfers and paint.

This costume represented a big leap forward in our costume electronics (📷 11, 12), with a bespoke remote control system designed in-house to operate the lights and fans.

There was, however, an unforeseen technical difficulty. The slick magnetic connectors linking the fans and power in the backpacks to the helmets worked perfectly on mannequins, but didn’t perform quite so well on actual humans with real human bottoms. Lesson learned - always leave magnetic connectors a little loose! We fixed this on set after a fraught first day.

Costume design for The Martian was by Janty Yates. The fabric suit was made by the brilliant in-house team including Michael Mooney (📷 11, who was also behind the suit’s wonderful details), Shirley Wilson and Steve Gell.

16/09/2025

Something a little different!🐝 We worked with bee-rilliant, BAFTA-winning presenter and YouTuber Maddie Moate to create the ultimate beekeeping super suit. A fab, family-friendly watch for anyone interested in learning how superhero costumes come together - and finding out about some of the creative roles in the film industry.

Do share with any budding makers you know!

Join Maddie as she visits a WORLD LEADING costume and special FX maker to create the ULTIMATE BEEKEEPING SUPER SUIT! Thank you so much to FBFX and everyone i...

11/09/2025

Ten years of The Martian!

It’s 10 years since Ridley Scott’s sci-fi epic The Martian premiered at the 2015 Toronto International Film Festival.

FBFX was tasked with making the hardware and electronics for the spacesuits worn by Matt Damon’s Dr. Mark Watney and the heroic crew of the Ares III mission, and it’s still one of our all-time favourite jobs.

Janty Yates’s beautiful costume design for the suits was based on conversations with NASA and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The aim was to create realistic suits for a near-future mission to Mars, and innovative tech would be required to bring those visions to the screen.

FBFX worked on the helmet, backpacks, front plates and boots for the white EVA suits and orange surface suits. The fabric elements for the EVA were by the brilliant Rob Allsopp & Associates, while the surface suits were made by the in-house team including the very talented associate designer Michael Mooney with his incredible eye for detail, neoprene specialist Shirley Wilson, and dimensional printing pioneer Steve Gell.

The Martian was an important job for FBFX, accelerating a spacesuit journey that began with 1997’s Event Horizon.

We’d started building our own electronics systems and using vacuum casting to create epic domes while making the hardware for the spacesuits of 2012's Prometheus - another Ridley Scott film with Janty Yates designed costumes. Combining digital design, 3D printing, 3D scanning and vacuum casting with more traditional methods like clay sculpting and polyurethane spraying allowed us to realise increasingly ambitious designs.

Every aspect of the production was impressive and stepping onto the film’s Mars set in Budapest, made with tons and tons of desert sand, was incredible. While it’s often assumed the intense dust storm that kicks off the film’s action is VFX, it was created using huge, high-powered wind machines that could take you off your feet. Ten years on, we’ve still got toolkits full of red dust!

22/08/2025

Lighting up the Event Horizon space helmet...

It’s 28 years since Event Horizon was released in the UK, so here’s a look at one of the helmets FBFX made for the cult classic.

The Event Horizon spacesuit helmets and backpacks were one of FBFX’s first costumes incorporating electronics. Nearly 30 years on, we still think the 'buddy system' on the back looked very cool. We’re also chuffed that it still works!

Many things have changed in the way we do things since 1997. Electronics are way smaller and LED lights are far easier to work with than their hot, power-draining predecessors. These lamps took eight amps and required a large battery in the backpack - a modern costume takes up to around two amps!

We can now use vacuum casting, rather than vac forming, to create larger domes.

The electronics, however, are still custom made by electronics design engineer Simon Lawrence.

Event Horizon wasn’t a huge hit at the box office. But with star turns from Sam Neill, Laurence Fishburne, Joely Richardson and Jason Isaacs, costumes designed by the legendary John Mollo (Star Wars, Alien) and fabricated by the brilliant Kenny Crouch and his team, incredible production design and breathtaking sets, it’s been great to see the film finding an ever-expanding fanbase over the decades.

Music by our friend Spiralizer with Emma Jane - aka FBFX's very own Emma Leslie ✨!

25/07/2025

It's a year today since the UK release of Deadpool & Wolverine! An amazing project that called on the many skills of the FBFX team, with soft costume, moulding, paint, dimensional printing, digital and the workshop crew working together to help deliver some truly memorable moments.

From head-scratching moulds to innovative breakdowns, multiple mask configurations to skeleton fight maths, it was a privilege to be involved in bringing Wolverine - and his adamantium bones - to the screen.

Costume design by Mayes C Rubeo and Graham Churchyard, vis dev by Andy Park and Ryan Meinerding.

Welshpool suit manufactured by Ivo Coveney.

Watch Adam Savage's deep dive into the building of the yellow Wolverine suit via the link in our bio!