Haven't updated in awhile, been too busy.

Finished the Film shoot with Ania and Nichola. They hired me to do prosthetics for a short film where Shawn (the actor) unzips his stomach and washes his intestines in the sink. Its pretty looking, can't wait to see the final film. It's a short of course.

I made a zipper prosthetic, intestines, as well as a full fake chest for close ups.

I'll add a full portfolio entry with more photos later at some point when I get more photos back. Till then, teaser.

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Oh, and I also wrote a full image upload system for my site from scratch. No more opening photoshop, doing a crop, etc, uploading via ftp.. coded a nice little upload system that does all the work for me. Makes journal entries a lot easier!! ;) Just click the images above to enlarge.

The music video shoot with the animatronic hearts went great. I was there just to make sure nothing went wrong, and surprisingly, nothing did. They survived being thrown, dropped, everything.

Summary.
Jeff got me to do 3 oversized (elephant size?) hearts for him and he needed them to:
1) Pump blood out of them
2) Be fully self contained. No tubes, no wires coming out.

How I made them.
The core component of the units is a 12volt DC pump. A magically strong pump that uses very little energy for what it is. Thus I was able to power it through 8 x AA batteries. Nice for filming as that way if the batteries happened to run out (it was a winter shoot) we could just go buy more at a corner store.

Then I just rigged up some tubing, and a powerade bottle in each heart. The pump was insanely high powered and could go through a bottle of water or blood in under 20 seconds, so I limited it a bit with thinner tubes, and stoppers near the tips to control the spray and drip action.

How it looked.

They looked pretty good but not perfect at first. I'm a perfectionist and the oversize made them seem not totally believable, but those were my constraints.
THEN we got BLOOD on them. It was night and day, they came alive. I’m not one to toot my own horn, but damn, they looked like fresh cow hearts, bloody and dripping, you could have almost fooled me.

And we fooled a lot of people, there were ladies that screamed as we were filming, (we were in public places) and EVERYONE slowed, got wide eyed, and stared. Which surprised me. In Toronto people never look, ESPECIALLY if you have cameras, but they sure did today.
Can’t complain and Jeff (director) was overly pleased, thus I am too.

** Thank you Crystal Pallister for painting them. We all know how Mr. partly colour-blind shys away from colour.

I’ll try to get some early video stills, but it’ll prob be a month or so.

Originally it was going to have full control by a microchip, and I had designed and built the 2 circuits, but the night before I ripped them out and switched to a simple push button trigger. It made more sense to give the actors complete control over the mechanism so that the hearts could bleed on cue at the directors discretion.

Overall, we only had to refill the blood sacks twice, and the batteries lasted for a full week of testing + 1 day shoot in the cold. I designed it around AA’s so that we could replace them if they ran out at any corner store, but it wasn’t needed at all.

Early still footage (Notice the spray)

Angela shot her film (not video) this weekend. I got there Sunday morning 11:20, left Monday night. 40 hours no sleep. Inanity. But so fun! And the film will look SO great! Everyone was so inspiring. Such talent.

I did the prosthetic neck wound, which was my first time doing prosthetics and would have been happier with a budget and specially fitting it to the actor, but crap happens, and it worked out anyways. Learned a lot. The tube still wasn’t wide enough, but we got blood and a great shot of it bleeding anyways. Spent the entire weekend playing with fake blood. Simple stuff was most fun. Making Kyle’s head pool blood ruled (he got his head smashed into the door. Crystal and Kyle made it so freaking believable…).

The genpet creature mould took forever, and was a lengthy process, as I haven’t made a mould (a serious one) for a while. But this one is definitely my best.

It’s 4 parts. 2 plaster, 2 silicon rubber housed within (the plaster is a shell that keeps the flexible rubber in place).

When I poured the first part of silicon (3rd step) I eyeballed the set-up, and figured I’d probably be wrong. Well, I wasn’t. I got the mix right within 3grams! I used 447 grams exactly. And it was a perfect pour. Forgive me for being proud, and shocked, but without a scale, I doubt there are many pros out there that could do as well.
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Me and V also had an interesting conversation the other day revolving around my limits. She wonders if I’ll ever be able to not be a perfectionist, and worries it will ultimately get in my way of actually completing things on time when needed. I’ll may not be able to just say, it’s good enough.

This worries me as she’s right, and I dunno if I’ll get over it or not.

whenever I doubt what I do, there’s always a voice deep down that says the same thing, and it always says it with an unwavering compassion and determination, Whenever I look in the mirror, it’s there even in my eyes.

I’d rather give my best and fail, than give into mediocrity. It’s that simple.

This is how I live my life as of late, and it’s the driving force not just behind each individual piece of art I do, but why I am an artist. Being “just good enough” would never make me happy. I could finish this project and have time to drink every night and party and watch movies and hang out. But I’d rather not be social at all, and be insane by spending every waking moment I have and skipping sleep when needed, to make this thing as great as possible.

I must always push to be one step better than I was the moment before.

This is what I do, I do not expect my friends to understand, and while they will all be making $50k+ salaries while I am just getting by, living off macaroni, I’m sure I will be the butt of many jokes. But it's what I love.

Went to R Hiscotts and bought some cold cast polyurathane foam today. (chemical isntead of heat..) $64 and hopefully worth it. It’s a 2 part mix that reacts and expands so I won’t have to bake it in my oven, which means I can use silicon moulds instead of plaster. Yippie!! Ah, the small things in life that make me happy. It was also a beautiful day today, so like any art fag, I hid from the sun and threw on my aviators.
In other news, I got Internet TV running on my XBOX! So now in the morning I can watch BBC news while drinking my coffee. Pay for TV? Screw you Rogers, I have an XBOX. Xbox + Internet connection = everything I could ever hope and dream. When gutted, the plastic casing can also make a very good kitchen sink.

No really. I’m not kidding. It’s lined with metal and the xbox logo on the top centre is round and drain sized. In the least, one could fill it with holy water and use it as a wash basin.
I’m not fanatical, just religious (about my xbox).

Met Nigel tonight and he explained a lot about latex, and stores etc. he volunteers in SFX houses at CBC or something. After talking to him and hearing about what working in shops is like, I’d rather do Art, creepy toys, and Halloween/horror house supplies. Oh, I’ll take what I can get, but I know what I’m aiming for now.

It doesn’t sound like I’d get all that much experience by working in a shop either, seems to be so frelling competitive people don’t share knowledge. I’ve encountered that a lot already, but all I can do is not let it effect me. I believe in sharing knowledge and open source art.

My problems with liquid latex seem to be mostly from the fact it’s a crappy volatile material. Cheap, but low shelf life. And ocad’s latex is 3 years old.

I’ll be switching to foam latex and possibly dragon skin by smooth-on. There’s some experimentation ahead but this solves the problems I was having with casting in latex. This info was incredibly useful to me. Beyond setting me up for thesis, I’ll be able to go into my latex toy series full tilt this summer with nothing holding me back but cost. Moulds + expandable foam rubber + airbrushing = fast, mass produced toys. All I need now are tags for them.

I’ll also be able to create V2.0 of my Nike skin shoe. I’ll be redoing the circuitry/robotics/ colouring / latex. I’ll most likely create some generic silicon skin moulds and then create a series of 10 very different shoes.

I know, I’ve been neglecting the site. I’ve just been working on personal projects as well as school projects, as well as OTHER PEOPLES school projects. *cough*. Maybe one day I’ll update the portfolio with my new stuff… one day..

Also! Sorry to my friends, I know I’ve been neglecting you all as of late, declining party requests and hang outs, especially joni (sorry) I’m just busy…


(Very_slop py_image of what I envision for thesis. See Oct 13th for text)

//V didn’t come this weekend as planned. I was sad. She thought she’d get more work done without me distracting her. Hah. She was wrong.

Servo programming. I like doing things with ghetto electronics. But servos have their purpose and have more torque than what I’m used to using. Enough to move latex skins. Let’s all breath in a sigh of relief.

Research. Been in research mode and I’ve been researching latex, latex moulding and a lot of other things to do with sculpture and the SFX industry. It’s amazing how much you can find online if you look. Lucky me.

Thus, solved some problems with latex shrinkage and slush casting. Yay for that one! About freakin time.

I’ve been reading a lot of stuff on the FX industry. It just comes as a side effect of looking through THEIR specific moulding practices. I cam across this, which confirmed to me something I’ve been suspecting.

LMC: How is CGI affecting the creature shops?

VH: In the last couple of years CG has really taken a bite out of what FX shops used to do. I think CG will take care of more of the creature stuff now. FX shops won’t be doing as many creatures as they used to (i.e. suits and puppets). I don’t think makeups on actors will be affected for a while, but who knows…? This past year and a half has been the worst ever for makeup effects. There’s very little work out there. Lots of people have been out of work for a long, long time.…

This is mostly why I want to do creepy sculpture for more commercial purposes, such as creepy toys and Halloween gear. Halloween stuff will never go out, and it’s still undominated. What’s out there right now isn’t too impressive as the best of the best are too busy working for Hollywood and wouldn’t drop to that level.

You’ll be hearing more opinions about this later, but talk is cheap, so I can bore you to death, and you can roll your eyes and think to yourself I have crazy ideas, or I can just build my own massive company and smile to myself.

The shoe is definitely my favourite project of this year. I learned a lot form it and it actually turned out EXACTLY the way I wanted it too.

>The only difference is that I originally planned for it to have 4, not three motors, but their physically wasn’t room for the 4th. Also, I have to modify it to use an AC adaptor, as it drains the internal 9v battery in 35 minutes! Didn’t see that one coming…

Everyone loved it, even people in the halls.
Every time someone got closer they’d just say “wow it looks even better – Oh my god is that hair? It has Hair?!”

Or people would just think it was a real shoe. Which is an even better complement (an old shoe.. obviously, but a real one).

>> Learned a lot from the various stages of production.

// Mechanical, electrical, moulding, latex casting, pattern design, hair application.

What it does.
The shoe is stitched together with multiple pieces of Latex rubber cast out of moulds made from my own skin. It occasionally vibrates/pulsates, and twitches on the floor as if it were still alive.

How it works
The shoe uses a circuit to interpret signals sent out from an MP3 Player (Rio PMP 300), and converts them into on/off commands which it sends to the motors. The circuit works the same way the VU analyser on a stereo works (the lights that bounce up and down when a song plays). It uses a hv3915 chip but instead of outputting to lights, the signal is converted from a negative pulse, to a positive one, boosted and then sent to the motors. This gives the appearance of random movement with no need for programming as highs and lows in the song will determine when and how the shoe moves.