Blog 3
Due to the current global pandemic that is occurring, my project outcome and the way I approached the coursework happened to be different from what I’ve expected, however, not being able to access all the materials and the prosthetics allowed me to conceptualize a character without limitation of our acquired knowledge and materials.
I choose the Better Lives Theme Personal Identity, as I wanted to link the experimental handwork to fundamental communication principles. I found that exploring my characters social and environmental context contributed to the way I address different people when operating as a journalist and communicator in the fashion industry, reinforcing my own sense of empathy and responsibility as in how to view a whole audience as individuals.
I named my final character Ted. Inspired by a number of standard male protagonists in movies he’s your average, younger-looking but middle aged, skinny office man who must hide a mouth-shaped scar on his neck that talks to him whenever his mental health suffers. The scar is a visual representation of the internal voice many individuals diagnosed with mental health disorders describe their disorder with. When doing my research on how intense these voices are perceived, a significant number of sufferers describe their voice as loud, nasty or threatening voices that tell them to do dangerous and unacceptable things or try to control them. However, I believe that everyone at some point struggles with mental health and therefore, consciously or unconsciously hears someone talking to them inside their head that they can’t sympathize with. Also, I chose my character to be male to underline the long-gone unrecognized issue of men’s mental health due to social norms. He in fact looks what the western standardization of the average man would comprise to exemplify the stereotypical beliefs around men’s mental health issues.
To put this concept into practice I thought of working with silicone to mold the scar and to shape it like a mouth. From a former blogpost I’ve read that it dries very slowly so you would be able to cut through it just before it dries and shape it the preferred way.
Working towards a final character was a challenge for me. Although I find a lot of joy in leaving free run for my creativity and create a personality from scratch, everything about it must be linked together to make actual sense. Only then my character has enough power of persuasion to convey a message.
This Unit really inspired me to learn more about special effects with makeup, wanting to explore how characters in movies are being made and how their appearance contributes to their whole context.
11th May 2020 @ 1:37 am
Personally, I love the way in which Melanie Jansen has used her own perspective of being a person who communicates with others as the inspiration for her character. It is easy to tell from her detailed description of the internal struggles many with mental illnesses face that the subject matter of her character design is truly well informed, making it all the more believable and relatable to the topic of personal identity.
I’m glad to see that Melanie decided to construct an identity that varied from “traditionally attractive” forms by focusing her creativity on an average-looking middle-aged man. Shining the spotlight onto people like this is what I believe is much needed from our media, rather than merely making background characters or personified jokes out of this age range of men that aren’t donning abs or sporting perfect skin. The fragility that exists behind masculinity is a topic that should be much more widespread, and I thoroughly enjoyed reading about Melanie’s representation of this.