Atlantis Photographs

Just a sneaky peak at some of the photos of my Final major project... More to come :)

Invisible

I was called in at the last minute to be an art director on the short film Invisible, written by Jeremy Carr and produced by Gregg Masuak. The narrative is of a woman- Big Fat Sue- who is sick of being ignored by males and decides to take drastic measures. She steals a substantial amount of money and approaches a surgeon about plastic sugary, he is dubious about what he can do to sort her out but when he sees how much she is willing to pay, agrees to the operation. The script goes into great detail about how the fat is sucked out of her using a Henry Hoover and her boobs get 'inflated'. At the end of it all she is gutted to find out that men still don't want her. Poor Sue.

It was my first time being on a professional set and it was my job to set dress and create several of the effects. We had to create an office scene and an operating theatre for which I provided most of the props and also the scrubs for the surgeons.

Set dressing the consultation office:

Setting up the operating room- Special thanks to Incus Surgical for the medical tools and equipment.

               














We used animal fat to resemble the fat that had been removed from the patient.

Photoshoot

22/05/13 Was the big day, everything that I had been working on for the last few months all came together to produce some amazing characters and images!

Make-up artist Helena Card did a superb job with both models hair and make-up, Helena curled, dyed and styled model Satomi's hair and worked onto her face with green and purple contouring which looked fabulous.

Helena erased model Rob's tattoo's and also air brushed him with a mottled green effect before working into the skin with dirty down paints.

Once they were all set and in costume we headed over to the photography studio where Claudiu Berechet took some stunning photographs of the project. The photos are still in the editing stages but they will be posted on here asap!

Atlantis- The production

The construction of the designs featured below began in early February 2013, it really did take up every minute of my time- hence why I haven't posted until now when its all finished!

I started by constructing and dyeing the costumes, a bodysuit for the female character- The Priestess and a Greek style tabard for the male- The Priesthood.

 A big part of my design influence was the beauty of mushrooms, because of this I decided to include foam latex embellishments:

Moulding different mushroom types.

Examples of some of the finished foam latex mushrooms once they had been painted:

The spiral/shell headpiece:

Firstly I had to sculpt the headpiece - half life size to save time and materials

I then took a pattern of the shape, transferred it into flat and enlarged it.

I cut the pattern pieces out of Plastezote and glued them back into their 3d form using Evo-stick and a heat gun. The final process was to cover the piece to match the costumes.

The Jellyfish!

The base for the jellyfish is an acrylic dome on which I applied layers of Platgel Silicone to make it a realistic jellyfish texture. 

I imbedded oil paints in between the layers of silicone to make it look more natural. 

It was necessary to create a custom-made skull cap to fit the model exactly, I attached this too the piece using silicone sealant. 

The final touches were the tentacles for which I gathered strips of organza and attached El wire so that they lit up.

Barnacle Prosthetics:

I sculpted the pieces out of chavant with lots of detail.

I moulded the sculpts in platgel silicone and cast in the same using deadener. 

After 24 runs I was satisfied I had enough for the models face, I painted these in oil colour.

Solon the crab:

I dissected a real crab into 12 pieces so that it could be moulded.

Clay-walling and creating a silicone mould.

Casting in fibreglass and then sanding

After casting the parts in fibreglass I then sculpted the mushroom cluster for the crabs back.

The caps and the stalks needed to be moulded separately in silicone. I cast the caps in foam latex and the stalks in liquid latex.

Piecing the fibreglass limbs together and priming them.

Crab after painting and finishing.

Atlantis Character Designs

For my third year project I have decided to focus on the story of Atlantis, the following images are the designs that I intend to fully realise as part of my final major project.

Priestess Barisibura

This is a special effects costume, this character will wear a full lycra body suit as well as a prosthetic on the face and the mushroom shaped headpiece is to be constructed of Plastazote.

The Priesthood

Above is the concept for the jellyfish character, I intend to use silicone to construct the headpiece to give it a translucent jellyfish quality, i will also be using electro luminescent wire on the tentacles to make the jelly light up

Solon

This is a robotic piece representing one of the characters from the text. I intend to sculpt the piece then cast the main frame in fibreglass and the mushrooms in foam latex.

A night at the Chinese Opera

I have recently been volunteering for the London Youth Opera, creating props and puppets for a production called 'A night at the Chinese Opera' by Judith Weir.

I constructed the kite photographed above and also created the moulds for the two puppets shown in the images below:

Olympic ceremonies 2012

So now that the excitement of the London 2012 Ceremonies are over I can finally reveal the photo's of the pieces that I worked on:

Head pieces for the Annie Lennox section in the closing ceremonies:

Above, the headpiece i designed and made being used in the closing ceremonies.

Below the gramaohone inspired headpiece that was also used in the show although a photograph of it being used in the actual ceremonies is not in existence. 

For the opening ceremonies I also worked on punk costumes and head-pieces featured below:

Me modelling a make-up design for the closing ceremonies...