Slamming my head against a brick wall.

Okay, so it's been a while since I last posted on here, but there have been many things going on.

First of all I am monitoring how much 'fat' one person creates within a week via cooking. The fat is being poured into a container and left for the duration. I will then photograph this and use it as research. Possibly extending the amount of time, and / or people involved.

Secondly, I have been intending to make a wax model of a shoe this week. There have been several problems here due to staffing, lack of knowledge on how to make the mould, expense issues etc. These have worn me down a little..

I had the idea of using a mannequin in my final piece for the project, recording it and modeling on it. Although, the cheapest mannequins I have seen are £90, ranging all the way up to £300. I'd much rather not spending that ridiculous amount of money on a mannequin so I've been trying to find alternative methods of achieving what I want.

1. Cast myself. This is apparently going to be costly, and if not more costly than the actual mannequin, not to mention dangerous, stressful and complicated.
2. Making the mannequin myself out of [insert various materials]. All the materials i have researched would be very expensive in the quantity i would need them
3. Taking influence from the Thai food artist and making the mannequin out of bread.. This would be very hit and miss, plus it would go stale and probably not react well to the heat of the substance going on the top of it.

AAAHHHH. To say the least.
I now have to come to terms with the fact that I probably wont be able to physically create / acquire a mannequin and search other ideas.

- I could create the shapes of people from plasticine / play dough. Manipulate them, take pictures and then try a form of animation. Possibly stop frame animation / inverse kinematics and animate in 3DS max.


- I could photograph 'normal' people and their bodies, compiling a book, with the ridiculous "ideal" body shape in the book. Acetate sheets so you could see through the pages, or a flip-style book with the ever changing bodies of today. 


- Rotoscope (? I don't know if this is the correct term) a person standing in a film, every few seconds gradually changing their body shape with sounds playing in the background. An animation of the outline of someone looking confident and slim, then sounds of eating and becoming bigger, sounds of being picked on and them shying away, getting even bigger, sounds of it being horrible for them, then them deciding to change, and becoming thinner, getting pregnant, growing old.. etc.

The animation for that I am intending is like the youtube video below, although with the person changing shape and size as years passed by.


These are just a few ideas swimming around at the moment, but I have a gigantic headache with all of the problems I'm currently facing. I didn't realize it would be so hard to source a mannequin for the project. Sigh.

I will try a few of these and write another blog with my findings.