make up design development

Soap Fail Pt. 2.

This video is a montage of me attempting to sculpt and melt soap, the outcome was neither here nor there. I was very pleased to have recorded the process as it shows everything I tried to do!

Material Means

Brief: Work with a material to produce a work with stong secondary or associative qualities. This can be using a single, several or multiple elements (eg. a single chair, 500 safety pins, or 5kg of sugar). It can combine two or more types of materials . The key is the transformation, and the new reading of an otherwise familiar material.

For this project I wasnt sure of what medium to use, for inspiration I decided to go to Salvation Army. My trip was successfull as I left with two kilos of soap! My first idea was to melt the soap to create a sculpture.

To do this I put about 7 bars of soap into a bucket of hot water, added ripped tea bags and blue nail varnish. I then removed these from the bucket and put them together to create a sculpture.

They were all very gooey, and very disgusting. the photo on the left is a collage of a few different angles of the final sculpture.

The result is very organic, phallic and disgusting. I really like it!

Make-up Design

Fire Walk with me

PEEL

A few more examples, if not a bit weird,.......

Video Installation

I think this video is a perfect example of the kind of work I wa.t to produce, I might have to make the "peeling" video black and white to make it more effective. The idea of projecting film on another subject really excites me as it creates a multi-layered dream-like reality.

In this film, which I looked at last term to create one of my other films ("What is That"), a german poem is being read which I first heard of when watching Wings of Desire (1988). The poem itself is beautifully written, but it is the composition of this video which really effects me.

Aswell as the exciting visuals the audio is spine tingling due to its intimate nature. It feels like someone is nearly whispering it to you, this adds to the element of closeness and dream-world.

I havn't yet thought of the audio tracking for my project but will deal with it once I have produced the footage. I would ideally like something very contrasting. Maybe something very loud, either way it would need to be confusing

OutShell Pt. 3

This is a video I created based on the idea of rebirth and shedding old skin. To do this I covered my hands in PVA, when dried I peeled it off delicately filming the process. I edited the clips very sharply and accelerated it to accentuate the stretching/removal of the "skin" and take away the PVA effect and details. This is a successfull piece of work I think, but was quite spontaneous so the background isn't quite as good as it should be. I think if I was to re-create this piece of work better. I would record more footage and peel and stretch the PVA slower. I was initially inspired by a clip in the film Black Swan where Natalie Portman's character is shown pulling at the skin around her nails and she pulls her skin all the way up her finger, until she notices it was an illusion and she never did it at all. I liked the idea of pulling old skin away and revealing a new self. Although in Black Swan it was a lot more graphic and disgusting than I intend my work to be. Watching my video again, I feel it would work well as part of a performance. I was thinking of maybe projecting it on a screen in one of the photograhy studios and having someone re-enact some acts of the similar theme. I thought someone could either be shedding old skin byundressing

1. removing make-up
2. applying make-up
3. being trapped in a tube of fabric and breaking free

I like the fourth idea the best as I think it would work the best visually with the projection of the film.

This is photo illustrates my idea quite well. For this project I don't think the body should be clothed, but naked.

I'm unsure as to wether to use my own body for this or ask someone who is more confident in their body.

I would enjoy doing it myself, but would have to get help

from someone I trust.

I am unsure about which fabric would be best to use, so I might have to take this photo to a fabric shop and find out which would be best suited for the task.

Alternatively, this also works quite well. A minimal amount of clothing would look good, but only on a slender body.

I have also thought that maybe if the fabric was completely opaque the body shape would me just a form, which might take away from the point of someone being trapped....

I will contact Media Services and see what they ca

n do with the photography studio :)

Freud and The Psychoanalytic Unconscious

The Unconscious stores :

• Instinctual Desires
• Needs
• Psychic Actions

Past thoughts and memories may be deleted from immediate consciousness,

but they direct the thoughts and feelings of the individual from the realm of the unconscious.

The Unconscious stores:

• Unacceptable Ideas
• Wishes or Desires
• Traumatic Memories
• and Painful Emotions

put out of mind by psychological repression.

Not all unconscious contents have to be negative.

Thanks to Wikipedia.

Response

In response to my previous post I have created this short clip to illustrate my idea.

This shows what I mentioned before, the two images created a third dimension. This could also be illustrated in a painting by overlaying both images and only keeping the main features like the nose and the eyes. This is an idea that I don't think I will explore until next week.

Rose Tint my world

I created this video using two still images from a photoshoot I did two weeks ago. I was interested in looking at the way surreal make-up could shape/change/distort someone's identity. For this photoshoot I used christmas lights to add to the surreal effect of the photoshoot. The make-up was appied spontaneously, without previous planning. Looking back I wish I had put a bit of thought into it. But I also thought I wanted it to be free and not too predictable. The idea was really to explore how the medium would work and how the subject would react, explore the boundaries. The outcome was very positive, and fun. I had the idea to create this short video when going through my images with my boyfriend. I unintentionally flicked back and forth between the two images to find that it created some sort of surreal animation. The video is in no way a finished product, more of sketch for something else.

1. One way of doing it would be to recreate a similar situation but with an ordinary, plan subject. Injecting a heavy dose of surrealism into daily life could be very effective to recreate a dream-like reality. To do this I would prefer to not use a friend, but a stranger. Someone from the "real world" off the street maybe. A co-operative stranger. If this blinking sequence was played over two minutes, repeatively, at uneven sequences it could be very effective.
2. Another idea I have had is to re-create a similar effect but with two dramatically different photos, creating a third dimension between the two images. This is something I could first try with the photoshoot photos. I have tried this and it creates a third image, very surreal, with the shapes of both images, creating a kind of monster.

blink

Freud and The Psychoanalytic Unconscious

The Unconscious stores :

• Instinctual Desires
• Needs
• Psychic Actions

Past thoughts and memories may be deleted from immediate consciousness,

but they direct the thoughts and feelings of the individual from the realm of the unconscious.

The Unconscious stores:

• Unacceptable Ideas
• Wishes or Desires
• Traumatic Memories
• and Painful Emotions

put out of mind by psychological repression.

Not all unconscious contents have to be negative.

Thanks to Wikipedia.

Lawrence Weiner

Beautiful video on the artist.

Vito Acconci

"Vito Hannibal Acconci (born January 24, 1940) is a Bronx, New York-born, Brooklyn-based designer, landscape architect, performance and installation artist."

I first came across him in a lecture last week on Matthew Barney. In this lecture, looking at The Cremaster Cycle, Barney mentioned Acconci as an influence and showed a short clip. His work immediately appealed to me so I decided to do more research on him. "Undertone" was the first video of his I came across, I immediately liked the fuzzy quality and the long-haired man as soon as he spoke. The video tells a sort of narrative of a man and his masturbating fantasies. Despite the sexual undertones, there is something very gentle, caring and loving about this video. This man is trusting us with an intimate fantasy, letting us, the audience, into his subconscious and dream world. The trust between the audience and the narrator grows as he seems desperate not to be judged but just to be listened to. And with a voice like his, it's hard not to.

This video has given me various ideas for my own work, it has made me think I need to strip my work back quite a bit. I need to slow down, I am too eager to produce feature lengths films with complicated technical effects when I should be relishing the basic idea of filming: capturing an emotion, a movement, a voice.

To do this, I am going to start filming on my phone, not too sure how i am going to transfer the films but i will find a way. I want to capture daily things; toilet flushing, opening the curtains in the morning, getting into bed at night. I need to film things with just myself, no other help. See how I manage. This will be my project for next week, film as much as I can and then try and then edit it next week to create a journey of my films.

Sounds good huh?

Thanks Vito!

Bruce Nauman