COSTUMES FOR BIGFOOT
I guess one reason to question Bigfoot’s authenticity is the fact that movies about the strange creature feature actors wearing Bigfoot costumes. A man in Henderson makes them.
When Travis Driver was growing up, he hung out at his grandfather’s upholstery shop in Kilgore. “I would dream up something I wanted to make,” says Travis, “and my paw-paw would facilitate that.”
Travis attended kindergarten in Overton. “The day that we had to stand up before the class and say what we wanted to do I said I wanted to be a special effects artist. That was in 1981 or so and people around Overton kept asking ‘what is a special effects artist?’ I had an opportunity to study that at a school in Denver but money ran short and I had to put that dream of making monsters for movies on hold.”
Travis kept doing artistic projects like painting murals and working in civic theater where he directed and acted in plays, built sets and props, did makeup and all sorts of things. “Then in 2014 I got a Facebook message from a guy I did not know. He was going to be shooting a movie around Jefferson and it was to be a Bigfoot movie and he needed a creature suit for the film. He asked me to do it because he had met someone on a film shoot and told him I was the man who could do the job. I spent a lot of time doing research and making the costume and the guy didn’t see the finished product until I showed up on the movie set with it. I guess they were pleased because when they saw it they changed the script so they could show more of Bigfoot.”
The area around Jefferson is a great place to shoot a scary movie. The overhanging moss on trees and shallow Caddo Lake with tall cypress trees sticking out of the water is an eerie sight. And besides that the city has some haunted buildings. The movie’s title is SOMETHING IN THE WOODS and is now on digital platforms. Travis ended up having a small part in the movie. Posters for it are all over Jefferson and feature a silhouette of the creature. The word got out on Facebook about Travis’s work and another movie company, this one in Washington State, called him. Then another, the last one being a major studio with big name stars. They all wanted Bigfoot creature suits. Each one is different. Along with the suit, Travis did the head, face, hands and feet. Bigfoot is a hairy thing and all the hairs are individually punched with a needle. Travis does every bit of that including the sculpting, casting with silicone, the painting and of course the muscle suit with foam rubber inside and covered with fur on the outside. Knowing how to sew comes in real handy.
At the premier of one of the Bigfoot movies, a question and answer period followed and Travis did some of the answering. “Someone asked me if I had created the costume based on an encounter. I was very sad to say that I didn’t base it on an encounter but you can take what other people have described and what you can envision and imagine yourself.” Travis works for the school system in Henderson, but when he gets a call for a creature suit, he’ll make it.