Meet Irene, our monstrous Minions creation

Irene is the giant orange monster that caused chaos in Illumination's Minions & Monsters, the latest adventure in the popular Despicable Me series.

On screen, Irene is a wobbling mountain of jelly with 39 watchful eyes, who terrorises Minions. But recreating her in the Plunge workshop was a very different challenge, demanding equal parts engineering, craftsmanship and creativity.

Every successful creature build starts with a solid foundation, and Irene was no exception. The first stage was constructing a carefully engineered hollow wooden core, designed to provide strength, keep the overall weight manageable and create secure fixing points for everything that followed. 

Around the wooden skeleton, we carved huge sections of polystyrene to create Irene's distinctive shape. Polystyrene is perfect for large-scale sculpting, allowing us to carve the creature's sweeping curves and oversized features with incredible precision while keeping the sculpture lightweight enough to handle.

To stop Irene looking like a solid carved object, we then added a layer of upholstery foam over the polystyrene. This softened the sharper edges, introduced subtle organic contours and gave her the squishy, jelly-like appearance that made her feel less like a sculpture and more like a living creature.

With the form complete, it was time to bring Irene to life. After painting her with the unmistakable vibrant orange, we applied several coats of silicone. 

Thinned with isopropanol so it could be brushed on smoothly and evenly, the silicone created a flexible outer skin, and as each coat cured, it developed a beautifully glossy finish, giving Irene the wet, translucent sheen of a giant blob of jelly. 

It was this final layer that transformed her from a carefully carved foam sculpture into a monster that looked ready to wobble off the workshop floor and straight onto the big screen.

Of course, no monster is complete without a few eyes and Irene had 39 of them! 

Each eye was carefully fabricated, painted and finished by hand to achieve a rich brown iris and convincing glass-like shine, creating a striking contrast against Irene's vivid orange skin.

But not all of Irene's eyes were created equal. While most were fixed wide open to give her that unmistakable all-seeing stare, a handful hid clever mechanisms that allowed them to blink independently. It's a tiny detail, but one that makes an enormous difference, transforming Irene from an impressive prop to a creature with real personality. 

Irene wasn't the only star to leave our workshop. We also created James the Minion, using a very different set of skills. Starting with a detailed 3D model, our makers then meticulously sanded and refined the printed surface to remove layer lines and achieve the smooth, characterful finish everyone expects from a Minion. 

Mounted on a robust steel base for stability, James may be considerably smaller than Irene, but he demanded the same attention to detail, precision and craftsmanship to transform a digital model into a screen-ready character.

Seeing Irene and James leave the workshop together for their starring roles was a proud moment. We just hope James had a slightly less eventful journey with Irene than he does in the film.