Monster Moodboard: Behind the Scenes at Safari Anomalous

Before I was approached with the opportunity to have a blog on The HMA, I'd been going back and forth on the pros and cons of writing a blog, particularly a “behind the scenes” sort of blog for at least a year or two. One major concern was that pulling back the curtain would reveal too much, that showing my process would take away all of the magic, and everyone knows the old saying about how a magician never reveals his(her) secrets.


The word magic gets thrown around a lot in the worlds in which I operate...the magic of illusion, of creating immersive and transporting experiences. But there's magic behind the curtain too, there's magic in the studio. Liquids become solid, clay becomes a new species, cement becomes a chrysalis, all before your very eyes. Sure, it's all grounded in science, chemistry, physics, anatomy, and technical and artistic rigor, but there are moments that it feels very magical, and when it comes to magic, isn't feeling the only unit of measurement we have?


The most magical part of what I do (and what I do, by the way, is make masks, props, costumes, as well as being a special effects makeup artist) is the idea development phase. I love hearing other artists tell the genesis stories behind their work and seeing how things are put together. I'm always amazed at how much serendipity and chaos is often involved in works of art that present themselves to the world to be so cleanly thought out. To me, the process of dream, memory, experience and chance percolating, developing, and coalescing inside a human brain into something completely singular and new is, well, magical.

With this blog I'd like to do more than show work in progress pics of sculpts and molds (though there will be plenty of that), I'd like to talk a lot about ideas, and where they come from. In the title of my blog I'm borrowing a word and a tool often used by fashion and interior designers, that of the “moodboard”. Moodboards are often collages of found images that are used “to enable a person to illustrate visually the direction of style which they are pursuing “(thanks Wikipedia.). I use moodboards occasionally to organize images, along with sketches and maquettes, and I'll be posting all of that, as well as talking about where all that stuff came from, the ideas behind the moodboard.

For my first post, I'm going to tell the story behind a pretty integral part of my business and at the same time answer a question I get asked pretty often : what's the deal with the name of your company?

It's 2006. I've already made the decision that starting my own business making masks and props is what I want to do. I had a list of ideas, a pile of sketches, and I'd already started sculpting my first two masks. I don't have a company name yet. All of the ideas had to do with anomalies in nature and feral mutant creatures, and I was looking for a title that would make a reference to that. On a Saturday afternoon I started tearing apart my bookshelves in my apartment with the hope that I'd come across something that would jog my brain.

After flipping through a bunch of photography books I moved onto my dad's college level plant biology and botany books that he passed down to me...when I was six. I used to dutifully stuff all 15 lbs of them into my backpack and haul them to school and back everyday, while my grandmother wailed that I was going to “catch” scoliosis. I didn't so much read them at that age as I would flip through to the photos and diagrams while tapping my index finger against my chin and saying aloud, “Hmm, VERY interesting.”


Anyway, I was on the hunt for a scientific term, something that had to do with metamorphosis, mutation, decay, or nocturnal activity. Nothing really clicked. I moved on to my favorite of my Dad's books: “Cultivating Carnivorous Plants”. I love this book, and it got me thinking, maybe I could go for a genus-species type name, like Pinguicula vulgaris or Sarracenia minor.

Hm. Better, stronger, warmer.

It was when I picked this up that it all came together:


This is where the safari element came from, the idea that I wasn't just making this stuff, I was going out and finding it, and that the world is wilder, weirder and more dangerous than you could ever imagine.


P.S. You can find more vintage Nat Geo photos here: http://nationalgeographicscans.tumblr.com

So what kind of safari would it be? The weird safari? Dark safari? Strange safari? Bizarre safari? Anomalous safari? Oooh, I like that one. The Anomalous Safari.

When my boyfriend came over that evening I excitedly explained to him the backstory for the business I had come up with as he stepped over the piles of books strewn around my living room. And then I asked him, “What do you think of “The Anomalous Safari”?

He was quiet for a minute, then he said, “I like it, but the two S sounds back to back is a little weird.”
He had a point.
Then he said, “What about Safari Anomalous?”
Genus-species. Pinguicula vulgaris. Homo sapiens. Safari Anomalous.

The rest of the backstory fleshed itself out pretty easily to become the copy on the main page of my website (http://www.safarianomalous.com) and in the product descriptions. In the past year my interests have started to shift, and I'm going to be producing some work soon that is different from anything that I've produced up to this point. However, I think the name is flexible enough to grow with me. It's a pretty big umbrella that a bunch of concepts can fit under- safari in this world, safari on other worlds, safari through time, safari of the mind.

Fundamentally it seems no matter what I do, I'm always going on a long weird trip, I don't know when I'll be back, the terrain is unmapped, and I don't know what I'm going to find there.

So what's the deal with the name of your company? How did you come up with it? Tell me about it.