Friday, 14 January 2011

Death Mask Video




Here is the video footage I took of my death mask melting. This was the first mask I made and was made from natural wax. I suspended it over a candle and filmed the process of it melting. I then removed the sound and sped up the footage by x800 so that the video is no longer an hour long, just a few minutes. The video is not very good quality, not helped by the low lighting, but you can see the mask start to drip and then the mouth melt away. The concept of this was the death mask idea but with the idea that the mask represents a person's body, which is slowly dying.

I was thinking of expanding this, to have many death masks, which would all have different height candles, this would show that people degrade at varying rates. I have so far made 3 new death masks.

3 comments:

  1. Dear Laura,

    I love the idea of the death mask

    slowly dying. It has a zen quality.

    Just a thought ...

    Perhaps, the drama would be enhanced

    if you began the film with

    extreme close-up shots of dripping

    wax without revealing what is

    happening, then starting a slow

    reverse zoom to reveal the mask

    while cutting close-ups in-between

    the reverse zoom?

    I'm looking forward to viewing your

    next films - great work.

    bless*

    Mark

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  2. Hmmm, a good start although I think perhaps a spot light from above the camera to show (hightlight) the melting and distorting would have been good.
    Is one candle enough? Camera angle could have meant you could have used a couple to accelerate it more in the time allocated...

    Great potential :O)
    Russell

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  3. @neitz yes, sadly the quality of the video wasn't as good as i wished once it was uploaded, but some different shots may have helped. Once I am better at video editing etc it should get better.

    @Russell I like it with one candle, I like the simplicity, but a spotlight could be a good idea. could move the mask closer to the candle too to improve things.

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