As we are reminded by the current state of affairs, masks are often used for the protection they offer. Sometimes they protect our lungs, sometimes our identity. Other times masks are vessels for spirits or memories. They are totems of the spirit animals that guide us and monuments to our heroes that adorn our own faces. Masks carry tales and legends, they allow us to tell and better understand stories that aren’t our own.
My 200th sneaker mask was created for a longtime supporter & collector, at his request I’ll be referring to him as “Sparky”, and his wife as “Tigerlily”. Sparky reached out to me to tell a very special story, one inspired by ‘The Neverending Story’ (1984) he was kind enough to write about what this mask means to him:
“In the fall of 2017 as Tigerlily and I were planning our move back to San Diego, my stepdad Bill started losing his 13 year battle with cancer and the drugs were no longer working to keep him alive, so he made the hard decision to stop everything and let nature take it’s course. Could be a day, could be a month, but we were losing him. It was an extremely difficult time for all of us, but at the same time we’d had time to accept that it would happen one day. Four days later, he passed in his sleep on a Friday afternoon, surrounded by tons of people who loved him dearly.
On Saturday morning we piled into cars and drove to mid-state Illinois to go see my grandma, my mom’s mom, as she’d had multiple strokes and was taken to the ICU. Another heavy day after just losing Bill. That evening we all drove back to my mom’s house, and my mom was trying to keep her mind occupied by sorting through photos and lining things up, but it was painfully obvious that she was exhausted. I finally got to a point where I made her go to bed. I gave her a long bear hug, kissed her forehead and told her I loved her. If I knew then what I know now, I’d have hugged her even longer. But after she headed upstairs to her room, Tigerlily and I made the hour trek back home to get sleep, something that’d been eluding me for days.
Sunday morning I woke up and had 6 voicemails and dozens of texts as my ringer had been off for the first time in a week. First my brother, then my aunt, then the sheriff’s department, my aunt again, my brother again, and the sheriff again. Immediately I thought my brother or uncle had gotten a DUI. My aunt didn’t answer. My brother didn’t answer. So I called the sheriff. In the middle of the night, my mom had tripped in the hallway, hit her head on the wall, broke her neck and died instantly. 36 hours after losing Bill, I lost my mom. It hit me like an avalanche. I was in shock for so long, it wasn’t until a year later I realized the shock had lasted for months.
For 6 months I worked on their house, tried handling estate stuff as much as I could, but in truth, most days I could only manage to deal with the pain of it all for a few hours before I’d need any excuse or distraction to pull me away from it all. Standing in her house after she was gone made it painfully obvious that it was no longer a home, but a building full of stuff. My mom had created homes for us, even when we were dirt poor and scraping by through my youth, she provided a haven.
When your parents pass, what do you keep? What do you part with? What reminds you of them? How do you hold on to it and never let go? One of the fondest memories I have of my mom is her buying us The Neverending Story on laser-disc. We didn’t even have a LD player, she would borrow one from the library from time to time so we could watch our favorite movie together. My mom also wasn’t afraid to be herself. She’d give the shirt off her back to anyone in need, she stood up for the less fortunate, and she never let anyone else dictate her style and flair. So I knew I needed to memorialize her iridescent boots in some manner, maybe a shadowbox display of sorts.
All these little pieces of my mom started coming together and developed into an idea of building a Falkor mask from the boots, but there was just one pair and they were at least 2 decades old, so there was no chance of finding more pairs. But I am my mother’s son, my style and flair is loud as well, and I just so happened to have the iridescent Nike Knows Super Bowls Air Trainer 1’s. I wasn’t sure at the time how Gary would react to this idea, or that I’d be able to get all the words out. But he embraced it with open arms, and we worked through tons of details to memorialize two people that meant so much to me.
At it’s base, the entire mask is built upon a hockey goalie helmet, a nod to my youth where mom and Bill would be sitting in the stands for every single game, even the 5 am tournaments. The scales of the boots running down the back sides of the mask, a reminder that they’re always behind me. Much like the real Falkor in the movie, or like life itself, the mask can look scary and menacing while also looking fun and goofy, it’s all in our own perception. I think Gary did a fucking amazing job of straddling that line between the scary unknown and the comfortable familiars. That is exactly what it feels like to lose your touchstone, the one person that can center you. I carry way too much anger and it comes out in destructive ways. My mom was the only person that could put the beast back in the cage. Losing her meant losing the chains that kept me in check. Seeing this mask daily reminds me that her energy is always with me, she lives on through me, and that I need to be an example even when I don’t think anyone is watching, because she always will be.
Lastly, it’s mask 200, a symbol of 2 souls intertwined for infinity so tightly they barely spent 36 hours apart. Selfishly I want them here, but the duprass* between the two of them was so strong, I believe the universe reached out and grabbed my mom too so she wouldn’t have to spend another second away from her soulmate.” – ‘Sparky‘
Personally, I also saw this as a chance to pay tribute to Jim Henson and the artists and puppeteers from Jim Henson’s Creature Shop (who created the original Falkor in ‘The Neverending Story’).
I said: “If we’re gonna do this, I’m going full Henson.”
So I started by adding smoking nostrils, powered by a CosClouds kit by Spoon Makes. The CosClouds kit is a mini fog machine (vaporizer) that can easily be built into various props and costumes for various smoke effects.
That wasn’t enough though, the eyes had to be special. After all, this is a milestone piece. So, as much as I hate working with electronics, I chose to take on an even bigger task. Programming a mini computer (Raspberry Pi 3) to display animated eyes on 2 1.5″ LCD screens. Sounds crazy but AdaFruit makes it pretty easy. I say “pretty easy” but it took me months to get it working right. I even took it apart and hired pros to solder my connections because I was getting a mean glitch in one eye. Ends up that wasn’t it, glitch was still there. After months of working on just these animated eyes, I discovered the frame rate was too high, and somehow I reprogrammed it to a lower frame rate and got the eyes to work. That sounds crazy to me, I don’t know how I did that or figured it out. But I hope you find something to challenge your mind during this quarantine, find something you never thought you could achieve and use this time to start on your path to mastering something you thought was beyond you.
I modeled the base mask for Falkor in ZBrush and had it printed, on a Raise Pro 2 Plus for the grey base and the detailed parts like the teeth and nose were printed on a Form 3 printer. I made a silicone mold of the 3D printed teeth in order to cast them in a glow in the dark resin. The nose is the original 3D printed piece, I dyed it in a synthetic grey dye.
Look, I know this isn’t a traditional Falkor. His OG teeth were creep af, so I gave him a new grill. And sure Falkor didn’t have holographic armor either. But look closer to the original and you’ll see he did have iridescent scales. I should also point out, that under a black light the Falkor mask glows all white.
I want to thank Frankie Coto for his help on the photo shoot, he also filmed some of the mask for SNKRinc (they’re on hiatus during the quarantine but I’m sure we’ll see that footage surface at some point). Also thanks to my apprentice Nolan Lewis. Thanks to my partners Jason & Molly over at Freehand Profit Studios who helped print parts for the Falkor mask.
Below you’ll find a massive photo gallery of 39 images, but you’re still missing out. To get full access to tons of exclusive content and limited edition stickers, pins and tees, sign up to be a Patron on Patreon.com/FreehandProfit. (February’s pack was Falkor based and Patrons have been enjoying early access to these images for a month now!)
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- “duprass” – Connection on a deeper level between two people.
- Kurt Vonnegut coined the phrase in his novel Cat’s Cradle. It refers to a couple that lives so entwined they are one entitiy. You don’t have to use it if you don’t want to, it’s a small phrase from their eulogy when I had to give it twice.
- “They were lovebirds. They entertained each other endlessly with little gifts: sights worth seeing out the plane window, amusing or instructive bits from things they read, random recollections of times gone by. They were a flawless example of a duprass, which is a karass composed of only two persons.”
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