BOZ
Reveal your inner monster
Boz is a novelty zombie doll meant to evoke feelings of uncanny through his mirror-face and contorted limbs.
THE PROJECT
WHAT IS BOZ?
Boz is a novelty toy doll meant for horror-loving fans. His mirror-face allows users to project themselves onto the doll to imagine themselves as a zombie. Boz's bendable body also lets user's distort his body for added creepiness.
The goal for this assignment was to create a toy that followed the theme of "uncanny", along with advertisements and packaging mock-ups to promote the toy.
WHY A ZOMBIE DOLL?
At the time, I had finished reading Freud's The Uncanny in another class, and drew inspiration from the text. In the piece, Freud discusses the ideas that the uncanny stems from our uncertainty of what is alive or not, and how the loss of our eyes can evoke uncanny feelings.
Thus, I aimed to create a doll that fit both of these points. Zombie's seemed suitable since they're the "living dead". As for the eye's, I was inspired by the button-eyes in the movie, Coraline.
HOW WAS IT MADE?
The design for Boz was made in Adobe Illustrator. After completing the design, I made stencils to cut out the shape of the doll, and sewed the individual pieces together. The toy was stuffed with wires and poly-fil stuffing, in addition to a 3-D printed bond-hand. The mirror and buttons were added last. All advertisement related parts of the project were also created on Adobe Illustrator.
E. Jentsch singles out, as an excellent case, 'doubt as to whether an apparently animate object really is alive and, conversely, whether a lifeless object might perhaps be animate.'
Sigmund Freud, The Uncanny
GALLERY
This project was presented at the IMA end-of-semester show, which is open to the school and public.
TAKEAWAYS
Patience.
Sewing and dealing with fabrics can be difficult because there is no ctrl+alt+Z to quickly undo a mistake. Since the all the work was done with my hands for this project and I was not completely accustomed to sewing, a lot of time was spent re-doing stitches to improve the look of pieces.
This project was grounding though, and a good reminder to appreciate the effort it takes to create hand-made work.
TOOLS USED
FELT & STUFFING
SEWING (MACHINE & NEEDLE)
CARDBOARD PAPER & PENCIL
WIRES
COMPACT MIRROR, BUTTONS & GLUE
3-D PRINTER
TINKERCAD
ADOBE ILLUSTRATOR
This material was used to create the entire body of Boz.
The sewing machine was used to sew together the larger pieces, while hand-sewing was used for smaller, more detailed aspects.
Cardboard paper was used to create stencils to cut out the felt pieces to create the doll.
A wire skeleton was put inside Boz to maintain any shape user's contort its body into.
The mirror from a compact mirror was removed to put onto Boz's face. Buttons were put as eyes to add a creepy-feel to the toy.
The small bone in the arm of Boz was 3-D printed.
The 3-D model to print for 3-D printed was designed on this program.
Poster advertisement, toy mock-up, and packaging design were made in Adobe Illustrator.