#26 - Sangeet Prabhaker

Battles With Bits of Rubber

Most people learn techniques and perfect them. Some people then take those techniques and look at what can be improved. Sangeet falls into this camp.

He is now pretty well known for creating high quality prosthetic transfers, moulds made which contain the appliances and are used directly in their application.

As far as I can ascertain, this system was developed by Conor O'Sullivan and Rob Trenton and involves making silicone mould inserts which contain the appliances during application, speeding up the process in the chair and allowing multiple appliances to be run from the same sculpt.

Sangeet has taken this process and developed many techniques and methods to push it even further. The transfer technique involves a lot of moulding and remoulding, and is not for the faint of heart but the results can be fantastic.

Check out his website studiosangeet.com/ and his range of anatomivcally accurate injury appliance flat moulds.

I chatted with Sangeet in his home studio in North London, and we spent four hours talking about moulds, standing on the shoulders of giants, using old-school materials in new ways. We covered a number of topics, including:

• Parental influences, how you absorb things you see in your parents rather than were actively shown, especially seeing them at work and learning to problem solve.
• Using simple materials in a more effective way.
• Seth Godin – what is school for. (Video: STOP STEALING DREAMS: On the future of education & what we can do about it).
• Scott Sigler, horror author https://scottsigler.com/
• Why simply knowing good techniques doesn’t make you a good artist.
• Art v Craft - Grayson Perry http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b03969vt. (Grayson did a number of amazing lectures with the BBC called 'Playing to the Gallery'. I'd urge you to track them down to listen. )
• Grayson Perry documentary 'All Man' : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qvrC0i4pXak
• Howard Finster artist: http://www.finster.com/
• The Falstaff inflatable makeup from 1911, from Popular Mechanics. (It actually used silk, not cotton as I said in the podcast).
• Mouldmakers – Carl Lyon (https://www.instagram.com/carllyonfx/), (http://vvdfx.com/)
• Rob Freitas (https://www.instagram.com/freighttrain_moldmaker/) and his interview with Gunnar Ferdinandsen: https://vimeo.com/68578907
• Brian Best http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0078907/
• Blender, free and open source 3D software: https://www.blender.org/
• Artes Mechanicae https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artes_Mechanicae
• The baggage from deifying techniques.
• VFX and production are not living in the past, but looking forward.
• Langers Lines – directions of skin tension: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Langer%27s_lines
• Compare also with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kraissl%27s_lines and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blaschko%27s_lines
• Newtonian Fluid: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newtonian_fluid
• 3M and material development.
• The benefits of a folio of failures.
• Overusing appliances rather than working with the face.
• Incredible prosthetic artist Floris Schuller http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0776047/
• Acylic Polymers - Jesmonite, AcrylicOne, Forton MG
• I mentioned a plaster here in the UK called Alpha K.
• Dave Parvin, artist, who incidentally wrote a fantatsic series of articles collated in the book 'The Casting of Angels'.

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