Wybie mask from Coraline film

A year ago I made a replica Wybie mask from the film version of Coraline. While I believe the original prop was designed from a 1950's welding mask, I started with a very similarly shaped industrial face shield, with the clear plastic replaced with thick black sintra. The side crank is a replica replacement Porsche window crank.

I stenciled the skull pattern on the front then painted it in, leaving the welding mask rectangle gap. The original prop was designed to look like a camera three lens turret, which I could not afford to pillage, even from the depths of ebay. I created a replica turret with more sintra, PVC fittings and paint. I wanted the crank to spin the turret, but I realized that since the original prop was from a stop motion film, it didn't have to spin, so neither did mine.

With it all assembled I wired in some green ultra bright LEDs and it looked great. I made plastic lens diffusers out of some packaging plastic, sanded to turn the LED dots into glowing lights.

One year I will actually wear this for Halloween. I have used it as part of the 52 Weeks of Video project, when I featured it in a short, surreal film.

52 Weeks of Video

I have started another year-long project on flickr. For a whole year (September 2006-2007), I took a daily self-portrait for the 365 Days project. This was a great experience, though daunting. I attempted to slow things down in 2008, and started taking a weekly self-portrait for the 52 Weeks project, though somehow this proved more difficult than the daily photograph.

Time has passed and I was itching for a new project, when I was invited to the 52 Weeks of Video project. Since Flickr started accepting short videos, there has been much controversy, but more importantly, there has been much creativity from the users. This new weekly video group was just what I needed to keep me creative and busy with my camera.

This is what I put together from a toga party yesterday:



If you want to follow along, my video set can be viewed here.

Previously on Slashboing

• Start of 365 Days
• Start of 52 Weeks