This week in theory we got delivered our Unit 22 - stage craft. We talked about this briefly before then elaborating on Unit 25 some more as we were all struggling with the portfolio section of this brief and with the turn in date looming we wanted to adress this firstly. Once we all had a grasp of that we moved back to Unit 22: looking through the brief and working our way through the mark scheme. Thankfully after completing 2 essays so far and getting fairly positive feedback when we went through the brief I felt that a lot of it made sense to me (not to mention it is very similar to Unit 1 - the performing arts hence I found this quite easy to tackle. As we didn't have too much more to learn/be delivered we were set with the task of completing the first learning objective and handing it in the next day. I did my preliminary research by reading a book that we had at college before then making a start on my essay. Unfortunately didn't get it finished by the Thursday before lunch however I did get it completed this morning (Friday).
This week in practical after I had completed a full wig styling and makeup application I thought that I would work a little more on my clay flat mould. Unfortunately my sculpting tools hadn't arrived until the day before college so I couldn't do any sculpting outside of college. For this sculpture I decided that I wanted to do a bullet entry wound as I hadn't done any prosthetic sculpting for a fair few months now and so I wanted to start off easy and then move onto something more complex. I started out by taking a mound of clay and smoothing the edges of the clay piece before then hollowing out a crater in the centre. I did this sort of lop sided intentionally as the image that I was basing it off had a similar look to it that it was slanted on entry. Unfortunately I didn't think to take any photos of the sculpting process and only realised once we had started pouring the silicone later on. From this I then used a metal toothbrush to add texture by cross hatching this across the clay before then powdering it and using the clay extruder to add my cutting edge to my piece. Then cleaning the tile with lighter fluid and covering it in Vaseline ready for moulding in silicone. Now that the piece itself was prepared I then used a yoghurt pot as my wall around my sculpture and glued it down with hot glue. We then as a group prepared the silicone mixture of A and B in a ratio of 1:1 to be mixed and poured onto the pieces.
In total we made the mixture 120g (meaning 60g of part A and B); we found that this was fairly successful for 3 moulds with a tiny bit left over however nothing in which could have been used for anything. After pouring a small portion in each of the cups we then pressed the silicone onto the piece to make sure that it has sunken into all the small nooks and crannies before then pouring the rest of the mixture into the cups from a height. We then left this for 20 minutes to set throughly before demoulding them. Using a large powder brush and baby power we powdered the tops of our pieces before then peeling them up from the tiles and powdering the bottom. After this we then used a craft knife to cut round the edge of the piece release it from the cup before then powering that edge too.
I think to work on in future would be for me to get involved with the pouring and application of certain special effects products. I think because I am more inexperienced with SFX I am very intimidated by it all and can easily let people mix, apply or pour mixtures while I watch. For next time I think that I will be first in line to pour and get involved with practical SFX stuff.
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