Robot

The original selfie I started out with. Almost bald with a little help from my receding hairline.

Frist draft.

The robot's neck powered by IKEA. Shot in the kitchen in front of my cardboard bluescreen. Pieces of paper to simulate chin and shoulder, which later allowed me to blend things easily. The neck consists of an extension cord and mostly leftover stuff of IKEA furniture all squashed together in a thermos jug.

The shot I used in the final montage. Taking care that the blue screen is evenly lit simplifies extraction later as it basically allowed me to use the blue channel as a mask for the layer.

Since I wasn't happy with the earphone approach of my selfie, I built this thingy. The glass bowls helped to get the distance and thus the perspective on the "ears" --correct-- close enough. These are pieces from some cosmetics mirror attachment - something :-)

The background. A third of the time in this image I spent on creating the background; I probably should have just painted it. But I wanted everything to go through the camera. So here is the one I used in the final montage. It's a glass bowl with strips of black cardboard for the columns. In the end it worked but I'm still not a 100% happy with it.

This was used, too. Only a small detail that probably won't be noticed by many. It still adds to the illusion.

The challenge here was to create a self portrait of my opposite. But while thinking about the assignment I found that I am or can be very different persons and there is no single quality of me that I wanted to portray the opposite of. I don't remember any more what finally sparked the idea of me as a robot. But one thing I come down to when I try to describe myself is creativity which is a quality usually not associated with machines. When I had that thought I just played around with it and added the "army of me's" - pronouncing that the opposite - which is me - is a pretty unique person.