The McMarlboro

Oddly enough, the end product of my Thingiverse mashup has absolutely nothing from Thingiverse. I started out with this...

Which is really just a coke bottle coloured orange on the end of a white cylinder to represent a cigarette. But this led me into group discussion, which built up the idea as a whole fast food meal, nestled into the top of a cigarette pack. The base of the idea being that diet is the new smoking, that it is just as tied to your health with just as dire consequences. So I bought a pack of cigarettes and started scanning it in the Thingtank. The first few with the unaltered pack were awful because the surface was too reflective. so I ran down to my locker for so matte-like spray paint and fixed that.

But, because of the awkward angle of the lid, the pack still wasn't scanning properly. giving me wonky images like this.

I was on the verge of giving up and just building one in Tinkercad. For my final try I decided to weigh down the lid and bottom, 

this gave me just enough of a corrected angle that the scanner could understand the box. This gave me a scan that was far from perfect but, I decided it was better than working from scratch. So I imported my scan into Tinkercad, and started chiselling away at it 

Most of the time I spent on this project was literally dedicated to simply cutting up this bulgy object so that I could use it. Which required me to make some pretty interesting hole shapes in Tinkercad.

After I had finished carving out my monstrosity, Tinkercad would nearly crash(or actually crash) every time I did something, just because it would repeat every action it had done before that. 

When I had finished carving out my box I thought about what I really wanted to do with it. Then it occurred to me that I din't actually need to put the happy meal in the box at all, I could say everything I wanted to with the box itself. Because I was using McDonald's and, because their packaging is so recognisable, all I needed to do was make the box itself a Big Mac box (so to speak). So with a little help from Bryan, I learned how to use Illustrator to create a graphic I could import into Tinkercad. 

After I cut holes, with both the catchphrase and the logo, I used a really thin sliver of yellow to give them colour. What I then ended up with was a really clean design, that said everything I wanted it to, and looked great. Instead of just talking about diet, the finished product speaks to a bigger issue. The companies selling fast-food and junk food, are knowingly profiting from the destruction of health. They know perfectly well that what they sell, is unhealthy, yet like the cigarette companies did previously, they are continually advertising to change the perception of what their food is. The work I have created questions whether or not companies in this position should be allowed curve public opinion to the extent that they do. As diet related diseases become more and more common every day, a question is raised. Should we treat advertisement for unhealthy food with the same harshness as we do cigarettes? The consequences of both are only becoming more and more synonymous.

When I imported it into Rhinoceros, all of my pretty flat edges got distorted a bit. So while I'm really happy with my end product, it has still illuminated what I have yet to learn.

I like this one a lot, because even though there is so little information you can still actually understand the whole message. 

 Here are the rest of my Rhino renders, hope you enjoyed.