Ocular prosthesis

An ocular prosthesis, artificial eye or glass eye is a type of craniofacial prosthesis that replaces an absent natural eye following an enucleation, evisceration, or orbital exenteration. The prosthesis fits over an orbital implant and under the eyelids. Often referred to as a glass eye, the ocular prosthesis roughly takes the shape of a convex shell and is made of medical grade plastic acrylic. A few ocular prostheses today are made of cryolite glass. A variant of the ocular prosthesis is a very thin hard shell known as a scleral shell which can be worn over a damaged or eviscerated eye. Makers of ocular prosthetics are known as ocularists. An ocular prosthesis does not provide vision; this would be a visual prosthesis. Someone with an ocular prosthesis is totally blind on the affected side and has monocular (one sided) vision.

History

The earliest known evidence of the use of ocular prosthesis is that of a woman found in Shahr-I Sokhta, Iran dating back to 2900–2800 BCE. It has a hemispherical form and a diameter of just over 2.5 cm (1 inch). It consists of very light material, probably bitumen paste. The surface of the artificial eye is covered with a thin layer of gold, engraved with a central circle (representing the iris) and gold lines patterned like sun rays. On both sides of the eye are drilled tiny holes, through which a golden thread could hold the eyeball in place. Since microscopic research has shown that the eye socket showed clear imprints of the golden thread, the eyeball must have been worn during her lifetime. In addition to this, an early Hebrew text references a woman who wore an artificial eye made of gold (Yer. Ned. 41c; comp. Yer. Sanh. 13c). Roman and Egyptian priests are known to have produced artificial eyes as early as the fifth century BCE constructed from painted clay attached to cloth and worn outside the socket.

Glass Eye Pix

Glass Eye Pix is an independent film studio based in New York City, headed by producer Larry Fessenden since 1985.

History

Fessenden created the company to copyright his own films. The name came from a glass eye one of Fessenden's friends gave to him. The company eventually grew to encompass others' works as Fessenden began to mentor younger filmmakers.

Glass Eye Pix has produced films in and out of the horror genre, including 2012's The Comedy (Rick Alverson), 2011's The Innkeepers (Ti West), 2009's Wendy and Lucy, 2009's The House of the Devil (Ti West) and 2008’s Liberty Kid (Ilya Chaiken).

Glass Eye Pix's low-budget horror banner, Scareflix, was designed to create lean budgeted, auteur-driven films from new directors. Scareflix productions include Glenn McQuaid’s I Sell the Dead, Ti West's The Roost and Trigger Man, James Felix McKenney's Automatons and The Off Season, and I Can See You and The Viewer by Graham Reznick.

In collaboration with Dark Sky Films, Fessenden and partners Peter Phok and Brent Kunkle also produced Scareflix films Bitter Feast (Joe Maggio),Stake Land (Jim Mickle — winner of the Audience Award at the 2010 Toronto Film Festival's Midnight Madness), and Hypothermia (James Felix McKenney).

Larry Fessenden

Laurence T. "Larry" Fessenden (born March 23, 1963) is an American actor, producer, writer, director, film editor, and cinematographer. He has starred in films such as The Last Winter (2006), I Can See You (2008), Bitter Feast (2010), You're Next (2011), and We Are Still Here (2015). His screenwriting efforts include Habit (1997), Wendigo (2001), and The Last Winter (2006), all of which he also directed. He has also directed Beneath (2013), and a segment of the anthology horror comedy film The ABCs of Death 2 (2014).

Personal life

Larry Fessenden was born in New York City, New York. Fessenden comes from a privileged background: his father was a banker, and Fessenden attended St. Bernard's School, then Phillips Academy, from which he was expelled. He is married to Beck Underwood and the couple has one child.

Career

Fessenden has operated the production company Glass Eye Pix since 1985. Fessenden was influenced by the old Universal Monsters.

An actor, screenwriter, director and film editor, he has worked, in addition to feature films, on such television projects as the NBC horror anthology Fear Itself (2008), directing the episode "Skin and Bones". He wrote the screenplay of Orphanage (2007) with Guillermo del Toro, an English-language remake of El Orfanato.

Glass

Glass is a non-crystalline amorphous solid that is often transparent and has widespread practical, technological, and decorative usage in, for example, window panes, tableware, and optoelectronics. Scientifically, the term "glass" is often defined in a broader sense, encompassing every solid that possesses a non-crystalline (that is, amorphous) structure at the atomic scale and that exhibits a glass transition when heated towards the liquid state.

The most familiar, and historically the oldest, types of glass are based on the chemical compound silica (silicon dioxide), the primary constituent of sand. The term glass, in popular usage, is often used to refer only to this type of material, which is familiar from use as window glass and in glass bottles. Of the many silica-based glasses that exist, ordinary glazing and container glass is formed from a specific type called soda-lime glass, composed of approximately 75% silicon dioxide (SiO₂), sodium oxide (Na₂O) from sodium carbonate (Na₂CO₃), calcium oxide, also called lime (CaO), and several minor additives. A very clear and durable quartz glass can be made from pure silica which is very tough and resistant to thermal shock, being able to survive immersion in water while red hot. However, quartz must be heated to well over 3,000 °F (1,650 °C) (white hot) before it begins to melt, and it has a very narrow glass transition, making glassblowing and hot working difficult. In glasses like soda lime, the other compounds are used to lower the melting temperature and improve the temperature workability of the product at a cost in the toughness, thermal stability, and optical transmittance.

Fetty Wap

Willie Maxwell II (born June 7, 1991), better known by his stage name Fetty Wap, is an American hip hop recording artist from Paterson, New Jersey. He rose to prominence with his 2014 breakout single "Trap Queen", which was a sleeper hit that peaked at number two on the US Billboard Hot 100 chart in May 2015. The success of "Trap Queen" helped Fetty Wap secure a record deal with 300 Entertainment and a distribution deal with Atlantic Records. He subsequently released the Top 40 hits "679", "My Way" and "Again". Fetty Wap's eponymously titled debut album was released in September 2015 and reached number one on the US Billboard 200 chart.

Life and career

Early life

Willie Maxwell was born on June 7, 1991 and raised in Paterson, New Jersey. He began taking interest in music in 2013. Initially starting off as only a rapper, he later decided to start singing as well because he "wanted to do something different". He was nicknamed "Fetty" (slang for money) as he was known for making money. "Wap" was added to the end of the name to perform under in tribute to Gucci Mane's alias, GuWop. When he was a child, Maxwell developed glaucoma in both eyes. He revealed in a 2015 interview that doctors were unable to save his left eye and instead fitted him with an ocular prosthesis.