I applied silicone to the back of the head, let it dry and a shell of expanding foam came next.

Checking the fit of the two parts.

Applying some mold release fluid. This turned out to be an unnecessary step when molding expanding foam within a silicone mold. The silicone mold allows all kind of materials to peel out without difficulty.

Ready to mold.

Next I prepared to make a foam head in my mold. I used cans of cheap "Good Stuff" expanding foam. These are pretty cheap, but once you start using a can of expanding foam, the foam tends to harden in the nozzle, locking the unused portion of the foam inside the can.

How much is inside Expanding Foam
http://www.cockeyed.com/inside/foam/foam.html

After I sprayed a heap of expanding foam into the mold, I carefully cleaned the foam nozzle with q-tips, trying to keep it clear so that the can wouldn't be sealed shut the next time I used it.

The can felt more than half full, and I tried to estimate how many cans of foam it would take to make 12 heads.

I planned to control the numerous camera flashes with two rotary switches. Rotary switches put 12 switches behind a single knob. With a twist of the knob, I could fire off a bunch of camera flashes, rapid fire.

A ketchup bottle would be the switch box. I'd transform it into a camera later.

With trial and error I found what I thought would be the best spots for the knobs to be positioned on the bottle and marked them with a pen.

Then I heated up a nail on the stove and melted some holes into the plastic.

The knobs mounted.

Now I control your hamburger.

I had been cautious not to overfill the mold, but not cautious enough. Left to dry, the first head overflowed and created a bulbous neck of foam.

The head looked pretty good! The surface was somewhat pitted with voids, but I knew I could fill those with spackle or something else before I painted them.

It was very, very lightweight.

I poked a wire through to hold the head to the pvc rack.

It would work. The heads, cameras and flashes would all be firmly attached to the pvc chassis. Now I just had to make 12 of them.

Production began.

After about three heads, I got lazy and failed to completely clean out the expanding foam nozzle. I was left with a mostly-full can of expanding foam with no way to get it out.

I tried prying it open.

That didn't work.

It erupted with expanding foam, getting all over my face, hair shirt and hands. Also, the gazebo netting, the table and four chairs. This was a disaster.

With a few more heads completed, I started to notice that the styrofoam heads might not be the best material. They were shrinking!

I tried paper mache.
No longer a newspaper user, I checked out the fiberfill insulation available at Home Depot. This was definitely an option at just $8 a bale.

Instead of jumping into shredded newspaper, I tried one with traditional paper strips, stuffing them into the mold. I have seen a documentary showing men lining the interior of a similar mold to make a clothing designer's dress form, so I figured it would work ok, even though I couldn't see exactly where the paper is going.

It worked, but it was difficult to get air circulated into the enclosure, so drying took almost two full days.

I began looking for another paper mache recipe.

While the newspaper head was drying, I concentrated on building the harness which would hold all the heads. I bent more PVC pipes.

Notice my hair is shorter in this photo? That's because I had to cut the foam out of it.

I wanted the heads to be arranged in a jumbled arch around my face.

I wanted the heads appear as if in a crowd, so the construction ended up a little haphazard.

It looked a little like a rack of antlers.

And here is my completed menorah costume.

I found a recipe for cheap paper mache clay on ultimate paper mache.com.

It required toilet paper, white glue, flour, joint compound and linseed oil.

• a roll of toilet paper
• 3/4ths cup of white glue
• 1 cup joint compound
• 2 Tablespoons of linseed oil
• 1/2 cup flour

I couldn't find linseed oil available in a container smaller than a gallon, so I just left that out.

I shredded the toilet paper and soaked it.

Then I squeezed out the water..

...and tore it into shreds.

I added the rest of the ingredents and blended it all together.

This would probably be better with chocolate chips.

The paper mache clay had a really nice consistancy. Solid, smooth and very white. It pressed into my mold easily.

The hardest part was matching the two halves together and pressing enough paper clay into the seam.

Here's a shot of one of the shrinking foam heads. This isn't a stretched image.

Over the course of 10 days, four of my first heads shrunk like this, like a shrivelled apple core.

Luckily, a couple of the heads had held their shape. The heads which had been formed from the densest foam had been able to keep their shape.

The paper mache clay mold worked. The head had a nice shape, and the ingredients were cheap, but it took almost three days to dry in the mold. Too long.

It had a nice weight to it and seemed very sturdy. I'd remember this recipe for other purposes, but it wasn't right for this project.

Not satisfied with the speed of head production, I sculpted a second head out of clay.

I followed the same method to cover this one in silicone. I covered it in a single piece this time.

Cutting a puck of silicone

Placing the silicone puck.

Smoothing the silicone puck.

Complete.

when the silicone was dry (the next day) I cut my seperation line.

This worked pretty well, and I soon had two head molds in working order.

To help keep the heads from shrinking, I filled them in layers, allowing the bottom layer to harden before adding more foam.

With two molds in service, I was able to churn out 12 heads pretty quickly. I also used the paper mache heads.

I patched them up a bit and started painting.

Mixing face colors.

I wanted a variety of face colors, but I wanted to keep the heads cartoonish. This was mostly to save time.

A box of paparazzi heads, similar to the one in Russell Crowe's storage unit.

For eyes, I couldn't find doll eyes of the correct size, so I tried making some.

I painted the surface of a plastic soda bottle.

The plastic helped keeped the eyes looking shiny.

Next I added lips, pupils and an occasional mustache.

They looked crude, but I think these homemade jobs were better than a rack of identical styrofoam heads from a hat display.

With a long lens. I think this one was from an Ethos water bottle.

The blonde.

I was worried about mounting them with a wire through the head in full view, but it was fairly well camoflagued in practice.

Three guys, straight out of the Uncanny Valley Photograpy Club.

The heads went on in less than an hour, and it was time to get the flashes going.

I used 4-strand telephone wire. Actually just the red and green, to extend the connection which activated the flash.

Hazard: The high-voltage capacitor on these boards can shock you. It is painful and it might be very dangerous.

I had twelve cameras to make, so I tried to set up a little assembly line.

I didn't have quite enough disposible camera shells to complete the job, so I stalked a few photo labs in town, begging for shells.

On my 9th try, I hit gold. I got a big box of cameras from this Walgreens on Sunrise and Greenback in Sacramento.

After extending the switch with a six-foot wire, I wrapped the circuit boards in foam sheet. This would hopefully reduce the number of shock victims at the parties I visited.

And finally, I hot-glued the plastic parabola onto the flashes.

Flashes.

I mounted the flashes with duct tape and started troubleshooting them.

One problem was that I had shorted the flash charge activation switch on many cameras. I thought this would make charging simpler, but it drained the batteries. I re-soldered those with activation switches.

Running the wires through the PVC pipes was too much trouble. The curves were too sharp, and many had screws through them. It was a lot simpler to zip-tie the cords to the side of the pipes.

Flashes onboard. All the flash switch wires were routed to my shoulders, where the would soon meet up with the rotary switches.

Flash Test!

Encased in some wire loom, the cables were bundled and ran into my ketchup bottle switch box.

Here I met a new problem.

I hadn't kept the color coding consistant. Some of the cameras used a red wire for the charged half of the switch, some used a green wire. I needed all the ground wires to meet in the center of the rotary switch, but I couldn't tell which was which.

I panicked for a moment, dreading having to rip open all of my foam flash bundles, before I realized I could sort it all out with a multimeter.

By the time I got to the second switch, I was having trouble focusing, but this was the part I was most afraid of failing at. The heart of the difficulty.

When it came together, and actually worked, I was ecstatic.

I've got three contests lined up this weekend:

Friday night is "One Scary Nite" at the California Auto Museum, hosted by Flavor Flav. Saturday night is the "Exotic Zone Ball" in Sacramento, hosted by Sasha Grey and Sunday night is "Howl at the Moon" at Thunder Valley Casino.

Wish me luck!