Thursday, August 7, 2008

Time Tripping

One of the questions I get asked all the time is how I got started working with papier mache. My first memory of papier mache was in high school art class making a papier mache elephant.

As luck would have it, there happened to be a photo of my elephant in one of my high school year books.

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My memories of the elephant are vague at best, don’t remember it as being a great experience or a horrible experience, I just recall making the beast. I have no idea whatever became of that first mache creation.

In college I was required to create a short 16mm. film for my cinematography I class. The film had to be an instructional so I chose “The Beginner’s Guide To Grave Robbing.” Somewhere deep inside me must have been the papier mache elephant memories because I created a papier mache corpse and two tombstones for the film.

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Several years after graduating college I found myself working in Battle Creek Michigan as the head of a cable advertising production company. To make a long story short, all the employees got together every Halloween for a party and “murder mystery” role-playing type thing, only we taped it and edited the nonsense into a movie called “Zombie Asylum.”

The party was a great deal of fun but the movie didn’t contain one single zombie…so my plans for the third year were to create some life-sized zombie puppets that would be featured in “Zombie Asylum III.”
Unfortunately I moved back to Midland to take a new job and the Zombie Asylum tradition came to an end.
Here are a few photos of some zombie puppet props I started way back in 1989.

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So this is my faithful readers is how I got started working with papier mache.

Pretty exciting I know.

-scott


1 comment:

NWJR said...

...and I'm one of the few people that has seen both films in question, I'm sure.

:-D

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