Nobody Cared Who I Was Until I Put On The Mask (Making The Mask)
This is the process of how I made my interpretation of Bane’s mask, and his costume that was featured in the plane scene (my favorite scene of the whole movie). Final result pictured here:
I figured the best base would be to use a painter’s respirator. I went to Home Depot, bought one, and stripped off all of the strapping and extra bits, so that it was just the face mask part.
The problem with the paint respirator is that a good portion of the front is hard plastic, which means that I wouldn’t be able to cut into it to recreate the goatse-esque look of the movie Bane’s mask. I planned as much as I could using a pen, placing marks where I’d make incisions with my x-acto knife where tubes would eventually be fit into, like so:
Once you’ve done that, go ahead and slice into where you’ve made your marks in little X’s, so that the rubber will still hold against the tube, and you can just easily slide it in and readjust.
For my head wrap part, I decided to use bicycle tubing. I slit down the middle the entire length of the tube (there’s a powdery substance on the inside of the tube, so you might want to do this over a towel or something to not make too much of a mess)
Next obvious step is rinsing the tube and giving it a wash with soap, then leave it to dry on a towel:
I decided to use 13/32″ diameter brass tubes as the tube inserts. Originally I used a coping saw to cut the tubes into 1/4″ pieces, but that was a gigantic pain in the ass and wrong. A helpful associate at Home Depot let me know that they have pipe cutting tools that would help me out. This little baby made the job 100 times easier:
Cut as many pieces as you need, and insert them into the slits in the mask. It should wind up looking like this:
Originally, I had bought aluminum tubing, which I would then have bent and inserted into those brass tubes. The aluminum pipe that I had bought fit well, but there was no way in hell I could bend it, let alone to the precise angle that I wanted, so I had to find another solution. I was originally looking for a bendable metal tube at Home Depot, but vinyl tubing seemed like a much more viable solution for the time-frame I had before Halloween. After I cut the tubing to length and started inserting the pieces into the brass tubes, this is what it wound up looking like:
The thing was pretty sturdy on its own, but I added superglue to secure the vinyl tubing to the brass tubes, as well as the brass tubes to the rubber mask piece.
Next step was to give the mask a couple of foundation layers of black spray paint. I made sure to spray paint the bicycle tubing as well. Do not do this indoors, and make sure to put something on the ground (newspaper, whatever. In this case, I used an apple box). The spray paint smell didn’t leave after a couple of days. If I had worn it in that condition, I would unquestionably got high off of spray paint fumes. I just sprayed it with some febreeze and stuck a fan in front of it – problem solved
After that, I used a metallic silver paint to paint the tubes with. Any mistakes on this could be easily sharpied or painted over, but try to be as careful as possible. A very very very tiny amount of paint should be enough to get you going. You want to retain that steel look, so only lightly brush some paint on, and let some of the black show through to make it look more like steel.
To get the head wrap together, I decided to Gorilla glue the bajeezus out of it. I folded it up and made sure that it aligned. In order for Gorilla glue to work, you have to apply some moisture and then clamp it and leave it for a couple of hours. If you wrap the bicycle tubing around each other a couple of times, and you Gorilla glue the areas that make contact, the bond will be a lot stronger and the mask will actually hold together. Do this on a covered surface.
I thought I’d be able to Gorilla glue the stray ends of the bicycle tubing to the main mask bit, but after 3 attempts, it just wasn’t working, and come Halloween morning, I was in a last minute panic as it didn’t look like the mask would be able to come together. It turns out staples work quite well, just make sure you sharpie/paint over any visible staples. There’s probably a smarter way to do this, but to make sure the wrap actually fit before I attached it to my mask, I pulled it over my face tightly, then stapled the contact points of the mask and the tubing as it was basically on my face to make sure that the fit was right. Use this time to make sure it fits over your ears well and sits at an alright angle hugging your chin line. An example of fitting the tubing:
Once you staple the ever-loving shit out of the mask to make sure that everything will hold up, go and slice up the bits that go beyond the staples, otherwise it will feel uncomfortable, and you will have no way to use your easy-access hole for straws for drinking.
When the mask is secured to the head wrap, mark in white crayon where you want to further slice/shape the tubing. I cut it so that it tapered as it got closer to my nose and I also cut out little squares on the immediate sides of the mask piece, just how Bane’s mask appears in the movie. Symmetry is key. It should wind up looking something like this, crayon marks and all:
Once all those pieces have been cut out, you’re basically good to go. Put on the rest of your Bane outfit, grab some long straws for your drinks, dust off your best Bane impression, and go to town.
Key Learnings From This Whole Process:
- Give yourself a lot more time than you think you need – there will be fuckups along the way, and having more time will give you some wiggle room to figure out solutions for problems
- Have a healthy respect for your tools and be careful. I stapled my thumb. Hurt like a motherfucker. Blood everywhere.
- I should probably have done a latex headwrap from a cast of my head. This would have prevented any fitting issues
- Even if I were to do something with a bicycle tube again, I would probably secure the bits to the mask first, then Gorilla glue the pieces on the back of my head at the end. This way it would have been a truer fit to my head.
- Needs more goatse
I had a lot of fun making this costume and spending a night just being Bane. This whole process inspired me to attempt some more epic costumes for future Halloweens/parties.
Becoming Bane 
Looks good man, thanks for posting this! We all have to work to get those ridiculously large Bane muscles though