Horror – Texas Applied Arts | The University of Texas at Austin

December 11, 2018, Filed Under: Da Arm, SFX 2018

Silicone Lifecasting Hiccups

Would like to preface this by clarifying that me and my team entered this with very limited background knowledge in casting and molding making. That said, definitely made the mistake of thinking working with the material would be a lot more straightforward and smooth sailing that the reality turned out to be. Here is a snapshot of the Silicone vs Latex question we started with.

Silicone is much pricer than latex, but the trade off is that (in terms of making a mold) it is reusable and doesn’t require hours of paint on process. The issue comes in that using a latex cast using a Silicone mold would have left the mold unsuitiable for being used with silicone in the future due to a unique interaction between them. In short, silicone will not cure when exposed to latex, to the extend that even having a box of latex gloves in the same room can prevent proper curing. If latex was ever used in our mold, we would never be able to go back to using silicone in it. Early on the weight was scaled much more towards keeping our options open (rather than just plunging forward and seeing where that leads us) which led to a lot of overly cautious decisions that came back to bite us. Even more significantly, latex needs to be able to breathe to dry, and therefore would have to be painted on in layers somewhat to get the details of the mold-a process that would have taken hours compared to what we believed was simple pouring for Silicone. Silicone may be better for making reusable molds but the high price of it forced us to be drastically more material conscious and conservative on rapid prototyping than in retrospect would have been ideal for testing. It led to every test being a 50 dollar investment with very high stakes-leading to a lot of delays in the interest of decision making, repeated shipping as running out came up despite us trying to use as little as possible, and just an overall suffocation of the prototyping phase. Silicone also has other challenges. While Latex would have prevented the mold from being used with silicone, casting silicone in silicone also runs the risk of them sticking to eachother if a release agent isn’t used properly. The material conversely doesn’t like sticking to most other things, including most make up and painting options. This led to another axis of struggles, in that our past knowledge of color application needed to be changed to work with silicone specific paints, and led to a lot of our background knowledge no longer being as helpful. Silicone samples and experts were also much harder to come by locally which led to a lot of this work being done on the trust of information we are reading online applying in our case. Silicone is a wonderful material but for someone who is inexperienced, going for the liquid latex and just letting yourself fall fast may have proved more appropriate for our uses.

November 5, 2018, Filed Under: Da Arm, SFX 2018

Da Arm Puns! (And Other Team Activities)

My other teammates have touched on some of our failures, our success, and our technical processes, so I am going to speak on our collaboration and what the diversity of our members has brought to the table.

In our group, we have one Theatre Design major, one Arts and Entertainment Technologies (AET) major, and two Electrical Engineering majors. With each of those backgrounds comes individual habits, and practices from studying in that field. On top of that, each member is also incredibly unique in their way of thinking, which is to say more specifically, their approach to problems, problem solving, and collaboration.

Matt with Wyatt's Arm — *Matthew Gutierrez, Electrical Engineer, holding the arm he just helped cast*

There are two examples that perfectly describe the dissonance that we have encountered as a group…

Some members are quick to make decisions, while others are more conservative and wait to make choices

and…

Our group tendency to want to work in “Silos”

Before I say anything else, I want to make something very very, clear; I am not trying to point fingers, or say that any kind of personality, or behavior is bad or wrong.

These are just situations and things that we have noticed about our group that have cause some problems along the way. All people think and act differently, and one of the learning opportunities of this class is to learn how to work with people of different fields of study, as well as those who have different thought processes.

Our first issue we ran into, mostly at the beginning of the process, was the interaction between our group and the timeline. We have members, that by personality are comfortable making decisions and moving forward quickly, but others who are not so much. They want to see as much information as they can before moving forward. Each has their merits, but the fact of the matter, is that we didn’t have time to look at every piece of data of materials, we just needed to make a decision.

Our “silo” issue is still something we are actively trying to watch and keep at bay. The term “silo” comes from a conversation I had with one of our instructors, J.E. Johnson. When we spoke to him about our troubles he shed light on the fact that we fell into the trap a lot of others do as well. We thought we were collaborating and working together, but in reality we were just alone in our silos working on something that may, or may not, be useful to the project. From what I have observed, this was the result of less than stellar communication at times, but mostly just personalities of the group. Our group members just have a tendency to shift away and start working on our individual projects without keeping up communication with the other members.

Matt's Wooden U-Joint — *A wooden joint gets the job done, at a smaller cost than buying and a shorter time than 3D printing.*

To end on a slightly more upbeat note, our differences have also helped push us forward (or kept us afloat, depending on your view). The natural way we think as individuals compliments each other in some respects. At it’s core, we have two engineers, and two artistic design thinkers. When one starts to over complicate, or be over ambitious, the other side can reign them in faster than trial and error. It saved us from trying to model everything via 3D printing when just cutting and sculpting wood would work just as well. Having a viewpoint that is further away on the spectrum (Architect to Sound Designer as opposed to Theatre Director to Lighting Designer) prevents over complication by having someone say “Why not this?” or even just asking “Why like that?” and during the explanation out loud something becomes more obvious.

At this stage in the process (one week from shooting), progress slows down, and it is a lot of clean up and finalizing. This also means more problems and stress than their are satisfying successes (or at least in my experience).

The less you have those big successes, the more you will get dragged down by the problems, and in turn it is hard to speak positively about the situations. However, this class has taught us that there will always be problems when you work in a group, because everyone is different and thinks differently. This project, and this class, is the first time many of us have truly worked with someone with an entirely different skill set and training. It isn’t super common to be in a collaborative based class with a major different than your own, and it is teaching the group a lot of what moving out into the “real world” might mean.

-Wyatt Laster

October 29, 2018, Filed Under: Horned King, SFX 2018

SKULLpting and Painting

Capturing fear can be difficult because you must consider all aspects of the fear– both physical and emotional. My job as one of the artistic leads is to analyze, create, and implement the many elements of fear in order to produce a strong reaction from the audience.

The fear we hope to capture is one of the most classic and revisited classifications: the childhood nightmare.

When thinking about the nightmares we had as kids, many are able to distinctly recall the monsters who we imagined lived under our beds or in our closets, patiently waiting until sundown to haunt us in our sleep. When you visualize the emergence of this monster, what is the first thing you notice? Is it its menacing red eyes that glare at you from across the room and stare blankly and threateningly into your soul? Or perhaps its his sharp, rotting teeth that it exposes only to present a hideously evil smile?

In my opinion, it is the hands.

To most, hands are a very mundane aspect to the human body. However, hands produce a kind of emotion that is unable to be captured through other parts of the body. They tell a story. Hands are usually associated with touch and comfort. Not in this case.

The hands of the Horned King need to tell the story of a monster desperate for power. They need to be rotting from intense desire. His bones need to be protruding from his discolored skin that surround his claws infested with dirt and grime. We want the audience to squirm from the thought of having his hands brush over their face.

So how did we create these terrifying hands?

We started with concept art.

This is just a rough sketch of how we wanted the end product to look. As you can see, it exaggerates the protruding bones and sharp claws. During later prototypes, we revised this concept to include rotting colors such as greens, blacks, and browns.

Then we moved to prototype 1.

This is the first prototype of the hands. They were very small scale and were made out of just wire, crumpled up paper, and masking tape. Surprisingly, the masking tape gave us a very nice rotting texture that we would eventually use in later prototypes. We went over the masking tape with acrylic paint to perform a color test. We were happy with the green and brown tones and decided to continue this color scheme throughout the course of the project.

Prototype 2

Like the first prototype, the second prototype also just used paper and tape. This one, however, followed anatomy more closely. We were also more strategic about the placement and direction of our tape in order to make “cracks” in certain areas and emphasize bone structure in others. In addition, I improved the paint strategy by being more meticulous with the employment of shadows and highlights. At this point in the process, we were so happy with realization of Prototype 2 that we decided to recreate it for the final product.

The Final Product

Unfortunately we ran into a major problem during while creating our final gloves: The tape wouldn’t stick to the gloves (oops). We had to adapt and come up with a different solution. Eventually we decided modeling paste would be the most effective solution. We layered the paste on the glove to resemble the bone protrusions and added additional layers to serve as our rotting texture. After drying, we added our many layers of acrylic paint and used the cracks in the dry modeling paste created by bending our hands in the glove to our advantage. We accentuated every crack and crevasse with shadows and highlights to construct some truly disgusting Horned King hands.

We are excited to eventually add claws and use these hands to reintroduce a childhood fear to our audience!