Reconstructing a wig

One thing that Charlie and I had been in agreement on from the start was that we both wanted the Hunter Orc to have a lot of matted black hair, fairly similar to the character of Lurtz in Lord of the Rings. If I had the time and patience I would have loved to have punched hair into the prosthetic, however, this process would have taken days and days and would be completely impractical for a piece meant for a long running film as 3 or 4 prosthetics would be needed for the various days of shooting and they couldn't possibly all be hand punched. It seemed logical therefore to make a wig, however, due to time constraints and my lack of experience with knotting I thought that reconstructing a pre-made wig would be the best option.

Original wig
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The wig(s) that started the process was a 'Classic Long Black' which had a centre parting, one that I was careful to ensure did not have a horrible piece of plastic running down the middle to simulate a human parting as these are a nightmare to make look presentable for film. I was aware that the wefts in this wig were very spaced apart and therefore ensured that I had a spare on standby for when extra hair would undoubtedly need sewing in to disguise any areas of netting visible beneath the hair.
I began to process of making the wig more camera ready by knotting in a more subtle hairline, beginning by sewing in a very fine piece of hair before cutting a weft out of the spare wig and using the hair to knot in the hairline. As the wig had a centre parting it was not necessary to knot all the way around the hair line as a lot of it would not be visible, only the central section. This task took me slightly longer than I had anticipated as I was a little rusty with the knotting techniques but was eventually completed to a standard that I was happy with.
The next task to tackle was to turn the hair into some rough form of dreadlocks, although I did not want the hair to look too fully formed, more just give the impression of hair that had never been taken care of. I watched a few videos on youtube on the different ways in which dreads could be made and decided not to go for any of the more specific twisting techniques as they would look too precise. One video that I saw specifically for creating synthetic dreads explained that simply heaving backcombing sections of hair over and over again would achieve the desired result and I was happy to go with this option. Dreading all of the hair took quite a few hours and was certainly a little laborious, particularly towards the end of the wig when the hair had become very knotted and matted in itself and was very difficult to separate into smaller sections. Once the main wig was completed dreaded I then moved onto the spare wig, turning a couple of wefts into dreaded sections and cutting them out from the wig. I then sewed one long weft into the back of the main wig where the netting was particularly visible but decided to leave it at that initially as the wig already had an awful lot of volume to it and I feared if many more wefts were added it would become too big and look a little ridiculous on the prosthetic. I resolved to see how it looked when it was on the actor and was styled to see if any more wefts needed to be added to cover any areas of visible netting. I then, on a recommendation of another wig maker, sprayed the entire wig with brunette dry shampoo which worked wonders at removing the nasty synthetic shine off the hair and made it look so much better. I also planned to run a little Fuller's Earth through the hair.