Exploring the Use of Rubber in Special FX Advanced Polymers Weekend Workshop

I am planning on visiting Sidney later this year and I am wondering if there would be any interest in my doing an advance Polymers FX Weekend workshop. This could be as advance and or as simple as you would wish. I would need help with putting it together location and equipment. Please give me your ideas. I am the owner of MakupArtist www.makupartist.com which hopeful most of you are familiar with us. I think a focus into latex would be best but open to discussion about silicones and other applications. We are doing some amazing stuff with thermal plastics right now. We can also do an advance prosthetic application if we can have access to a studio to perform the work. We of course do some of the most advanced applications in the world so you will not believe what the new world of rubber can do! Anyway post some ideas on this. Look forward to seeing you. Doc

Great to see you are thinking of us down under. I have read some of your articles and you are a very funny guy. It has been hard to learn much about foam latex as it all seems to come from a kit. Can you describe a little more about process. Of course everyone in the crowd wants the Mission impossible makeover. What is going on out there? Thanks

Hello Kevin, thank you for writing. One thing that has always fascinated me about latex is how very little has changed in the some odd two hundred years since they first figured out how to use sulfur and zinc to accelerate and activate latex. There are many new chemistries and stabilizers that are used but for the most part the rubber industry is still using the same basic chemistries they used then. Process is really what it’s all about and that has to do with the creative use of material. With MakupArtist we have made so many advancements in rubber mostly because we found problems with no solutions. I don’t know if you read my article on Chlorinization of a Latex Mask but this is a good example. When you Chlorinate latex you actually place a chlorine atom in-between the latex molecules which alters the natural tendency of latex to be sticky making it smooth and soft like skin. Of course being chlorine it also took color with it so we were the first to develop a process for chlorinating without color loss. The basis of foam latex is also for the most part unchanged and it has come to mostly procedural changes. We of course in 200 years have produced better smaller bubble soaps that help to stabilize the latex for production but for the most part it still has to do with making big bubbles and cutting them to smaller bubbles till you produce a fluid foam, getting it to stay there until you can gel it is always the trick. Mostly people and even polymer chemists don’t know that latex foams beautifully without soap or any additives. The soaps are added for stability. I have also found it interesting there is so little written on foam latex as it is extremely proprietary. Makeup Artists worldwide never have an opportunity to work with the real foam process as it is as you mention from a kit. When you work as we do in production of thousands of foam pieces a month it gives you an opportunity to experiment and modify to make change in a short period of time. When we do a production run of say a thousand pieces we will have about 99% perfect mask which is really unheard of in the industry. I know this as when we first started our production we were closer to one or two percent perfect masks. For this reason we have a number of artists send us their work for foaming as it is rather difficult to reproduce what we do from a kit. If we do this seminar and can find a studio equipped with an oven we can actually do a foam process if you would like. Silicones to me are rather interesting because almost all this technology did not exist 40-50 years ago. Sure you could buy silicone sealants and molding rubbers but nothing like the Platinum cures and specialized silicones there are now, many of the chemistries had not even been invented 40 years ago. We do have a line of silicone masks coming and are working on a new structure that has a foam latex outer skin that is chlorinated so very human skin feeling, to that we bond a very thin inner layer of silicone. This inner layer allows us to easily bond different kinds of silicones to the inside of skins. Yes you probably know where this is going we are stratifying muscle tissue from silicones for the recreation of human structure. Some of the work is going to medical training for doctors but it also has application in robotics and of course in Cinema! You asked where it is all going; When we put our consumer lines on to MakupArtist it really has put our hand on the pulse of the world so to speak as we now sell in every country in the world. There are so many people doing independent film because the equipment has gotten cheaper and better and smaller. Independents always work on low budgets; often times breaking the rules to try to create something for a dance. Many times you can do a better more imaginative project if you don’t have the money to do it. What we are seeing is more of these people coming to us for either off the shelf masks or sending us their form to foam and what I find most amazing is the consumer requests which are almost exactly of which you just spoke and what we are now calling the Impossible Mission Mask. We have a new thinner mask we are working on that we simply call the impossible Mission Mask. This is a pro consumer line of mask reasonably priced that allows you to trim and fit and attach the mask fairly easily to anyone. We have developed a combination of adhesives to go with it. The mask has an industrial rubber cement that is applied and dried and acts like putting a tape surface on the inside of the mask. We then have a very sticky latex glue that is thin coated to the face and dries in minutes and when the two dried surfaces are put together it give excellent adhesion and yes of course that removal look from Mission Impossible everyone loves so much. Well I guess you caught me rambling a bit I have been known to do this. If I was to put it simply, the world imitates the Cinema. As cameras and equipment become better so will the general public’s desire to work within mediums that were once only reserved for pros. This will also give pros better access to higher quality applications as we have more requests and interest in this work, it is a circle. Chances are you will have a robot in at least your work if not your home in the next twenty years. What do you think it will look like?