Mark Rappaport (creature effects artist)

Mark Rappaport (born 1954) is an American special make-up effects artist.

Working in film and theater, Rappaport and his company Creature Effects, Inc specialize in creating hyper-realistic make-up effects and animatronic animals, including the horse rode by Tom Cruise in The Last Samurai, and prosthetic makeup effects for 300 and I Am Legend.

Rappaport was born in Yokohama, Japan. At the age of three, his family moved to the Napa Valley in northern California. He graduated high school in Napa and attended San Diego State University where he earned a Bachelor of Science Degree. Upon graduation, he returned to Northern California and worked in law enforcement before meeting and working with Bob Hartman, a San Francisco puppeteer and street performer. His work with Hartman sparked an interest in creating effects for the entertainment industry and he pursued employment at Industrial Light & Magic. At ILM he worked on feature film projects, including Innerspace and Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home. From ILM, Rappaport went to work with Chris Walas and created effects for films including The Fly II and Child's Play.

The production of The Last Samurai required an animatronic horse capable of performing stunt sequences that would put a real horse and rider at risk of great injury. Rappaport was commissioned to build a horse that could seamlessly replace Tom Cruise' real horse for those scenes. Rappaport said "It's probably the most sophisticated horse or animatronic creature ever made for film. It cost $1.5 million to make. It gallops in place. It reared up. It fell over. And it looks completely real."

Rappaport (creature effects supervisor) and Shaun Smith (makeup effects supervisor) teamed up to create the world of effects for 300. This extensive body of work included prosthetic makeups, animatronic animals, props, weaponry and costume elements. In addition to the amazingly lifelike horse effects for this film, Rappaport created an animatronic wolf puppet for scenes where young Leonidas faces off with the predatory animal. "The filmmakers shot interactions of the practical puppet attacking young Leonidas in a narrow rock crevice. Veteran creature effects supervisor Mark Rappaport and his team mechanized the puppet with: eye-blinks; head, neck, brow, jaw and tongue movement; saliva tubes and glowing eyes."

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