Ze French iz always at ze forefront of -- how do you say? -- ze fashion. This iz why French chanteuse Yelle wants you to, eh, wear ze mask she gives online. Silly Americans can hide their fat faces they stuff with ze McDonald and Burger King.
In all seriousness, CrossFade received a press release from Yelle's people encouraging concert-goers to download an a "easy-to-assemble" Polygon Dog Mask straight out of her "Ce Jeu" music video. The press release insists that fans make the mask and wear it at her concert this Friday at the Polish American Club, part of her C'est L'Amerique Tour. But before sending you off to do an arts-and-craft project, we thought we'd test it out ourselves. Why? Because we wouldn't recommend something we hadn't done ourselves and because we had a bit of extra time between our deadlines. Check out our mess after the jump.
First of all, here is what you need: 8-pages of white cardstock, scissors, pen and glue (we wouldn't recommend the messy white grammar school glue; stick glue is ideal).
Start by downloading the PDF (link is located in Yelle's MySpace page) and printing it on the white cardstock. If you are out of cardstock or too cheap to by some, print it on normal white paper and glue it on a sturdy item like a manila folder. Trust us, you can't cheat by making the whole mask in flimsy everyday printer paper.
Then start cutting out the pieces. But herein lies one major problem: by cutting out the shapes you are also cutting out the instructions, so use the pen to ID the piece and mark what tabs go where. You can also get around this by just looking at the PDF on your computer or printing out a second copy.
After everything is cut out, start folding. Er, except the instructions aren't exactly clear on where to fold. Yes, all the number tabs should be folded but this is a 3-D mask so in order to give it that polygon illusion some of the pieces need to folded elsewhere in order to work. Where exactly? Er, figure it out yourself. In case you get frustrated and rip it to shreds, make sure to have a second print-out handy and start over again.
Now it's time to start gluing tabs and pieces together. Where to start? Personally, we started at the nose, but we aren't sure we used the best method. We just started gluing like crazy but then realized it was best to let things set and glue slowly in an order that made sense. It's best to hold connecting tabs for a second with your fingers (or tape) and move on to another piece while the glue does its thing.
After a few minutes, er, maybe hours, a dog face started to emerge. We were tempted to quit halfway through the project, but persistence was starting to pay off.
Finally, once it was all glued together, we had our dog mask! It was not as neat as we hoped for since our sticky fingers got on the mask and the folding caused some of the color to wear off. But we quickly forgot that shit; we were done!
In an arts and craft scale of 1 to 10, we give it a 4.2 for failing to give clear enough instructions on how to put the mask together, but found some sense of accomplishment once it was finished. Despite the press release's instructions to wear it at Friday's concert, we are caving into peer pressure because we are sort of embarrassed we took the time to make the damn thing.
Nevertheless, we will use the mask to dance to Yelle songs in the privacy of our own homes. Perhaps we might even recreate the video the mask was taken from.
