Grant McKee is in the werewolf business -- among other things.
He and his brother Morgan are building a second shop on property in the southeast industrial park in Olds in order to make his creations.
Construction began last week. The second floor will serve as his home so he can look after the property. McKee says it should be "functional" by late fall.
Earlier this year, they completed another shop on the same property for things like welding, brake and steel work.
Stilts for werewolf costumes are among Grant's products. They enable the wearer to walk like the werewolves in the Harry Potter films.
"I've had a lot of interest in those all over the States, all over Canada," he said during an interview with the Albertan. "There's a costume designer that I'm working with in Vancouver right now to build these large werewolves."
"Werewolves walk in a way -- it's called digitigraded," he says. "We're plantigrade because we walk on our heels; werewolves walk on their toes.
"So there's a couple of things the stilts do. One, they increase your height, so they make you a lot more intimidating. I'm six feet tall. But if I'm a seven-foot-tall werewolf and I'm kinda hunched over ... It changes the shape of the leg. It makes you look less human, more like a werewolf."
McKee says they could be used in movies or plays or just for fun.
"I've always liked building costumes and other things. And I've gone to a lot of comic expos and seen amazing costumes and suits and things that people have built," McKee says.
"I literally started from the ground up, wanting to build my own suit, my own kind of armour. I thought, well, the first thing I'd like to do is have a digitigraded stilt to walk on".
He's seen a few models elsewhere in the world.
"I kind of looked at what they had done and I go, 'I can do a lot better than that,'" McKee says.
"Theirs were (made out of) steel. They're really heavy and they only offer them in certain sizes. Plus they're really spotty about availability, so I was like, 'I think I can engineer something better than that.' So that's what I've been doing.
"And every time I show them to people that have seen both, they're just, like, 'yours are so much better. They're lighter, more comfortable.' Plus, there'll be a zipper out the back so you just step out of them out the back.
"The other ones, you have to have a zipper at the front and straighten your leg to get out of them. So they're not really designed to be in a suit very easily, whereas the ones I'm designing are.
"I've designed them to be covered with fur or scales or whatever you want to cover them with," he says.
"Not actually looking for customers yet; just focused on making the best digitigrade stilts I can design. I have a list of people to contact for the first run."
Werewolf stilts are just one of McKee's products or ideas.
"I've done a lot of other things, like I 3D-printed ski masks," he says."This is another thing I might do is contact the manufacturer of ski masks, because it has a face mask that flips into the helmet.
"This is part of a lion's skull that I just 3D-printed," he says, showing a photo. "I get a lot of comments on that at the ski hill."
Another project, in conjunction with a Calgary artist, involves creating 22-foot-tall steel pillars that look like trees.
"There's going to be 10 of them, arranged in kind of a circle pattern," McKee says. "This is going up in Fort McMurray. It's actually a memorial art project for the fires. They're trees, they won't burn. They're LED lights.
"There'll be a commemorative plaque too. And hopefully it can control the trees. I'm hoping that I can put four switches in there, so we can get spring, summer, fall, winter -- all the four seasons."
The McKee brothers relocated from Red Deer a couple of years ago because of escalating property taxes there. Their sister lives in this area too.
"The property taxes kept going up and up and up every year -- to the point where it was really unsustainable to have a shop there. So we knew for years that we were going to have to move. It was just getting too expensive to have a shop there," McKee says.
"Out of all the industrial lots we looked at, Olds came on to the radar as a smaller industrial lot along the Highway 2 corridor. So the location was good. I liked the fast Internet -- that was another bonus.
Olds is undergoing a kind of boom as several cannabis production companies and others set up shop here.
McKee was asked if he fears that will result in property taxes rising, forcing the brothers to relocate to another town again.
"I'm not too concerned," he says. "In Red Deer one of the reasons our property taxes were so high was it was five acres. As property taxes go around, this is less than one quarter the size, so that'll help.
"And (it's) a smaller town, too. Even if property taxes did go up, I don't think they'd go up fast enough that we'd be in trouble. So I think we're OK for five, 10 years."
