Chin-heads

As an upshot of cbbc’s Chin-Mas song and a current obsession with chin-heads, we’ve been messing around with any web-cam/PSeye/video-cam we can get our hands on. And we’re not alone.

Chinheads are easy and can be done a couple of ways. First take a bandana, piece of frabic, or a baby sized t-shirt stick and tie/fit over nose covering their real eyes and forehead. Then glue googly-eyes on to chins, a dab of fake eyelash glue is the best but a spot of prit-stick non-toxic does the job - just. If no googly-eyes are to hand, draw with eye-brow pencil. Unless you happen to have children blessed with an Abe Lincoln beard, find some fuzz or felt or perhaps a small cowboy stetson to finish off the look. Then the filming begins.

Filming can be done either with your stars hanging upside-down from a sofa or bed or by inverting the camera itself. Go for whatever’s easiest. Get a background sorted so that kids can insert their chin-heads and hide their real bodies. Sort out some decent lighting, then hit play and let them babel to their hearts content.

Should you and they be really keen it might be worth editing the clip together. Windows own XP Movie-Maker does a reasonable job, as does the PS3’s EyeCreate, but I’ve a special soft spot for Kino on my Ubuntu box. Kids of 8 or so start to use these kinds of programs at school; so with any luck they’ll be able to show you the ropes, and then you’ll have your own chinny-masterpiece. And as it hides their identities, stick it up on YouTube… and in 10 years hence when they’re feeling all grown up, attach it to their Facebook page/hologram to show them who’s still boss that you care.

As for the hint about using proper glue… this is what happens with glue-stick ->

tag... play for today, 5up, 8up, enjoy and achieve