The Man Who Melted Shaquille O'Neal's Face

It's a simple rule, and one that most people have found easy enough to abide by: just do not melt Shaquille O'Neal's face unless it is absolutely necessary. This works well for Shaq, of course, and it's also worked well for most of us, but for the Los Angeles-based filmmaker, computer artist, and animator Davy Force, it proved entirely too restrictive. And so, using Shaq's spare, mugging-heavy commercials for Gold Bond Medicated Powder as a canvas, Force sat down and just melted the hell out of Shaq's face.

Really got after it, I mean. Really stuck with it until he was sure the job was done. The result is 70 seconds of harrowingly distorted, rapid-fire Shaqface insanity, all of which doubles as what is undoubtedly the most effective ad for medicated foot powder imaginable. It is both peerlessly professional and floridly, life-changingly insane. This makes sense, once you learn that Force has directed videos for DJ Shadow and Amon Tobin; he was nominated for an Emmy back in 2003, for the animated opening credits he made for the E! Network's The Anna Nicole Show. Although "makes sense" is probably not the right phrasing, here.

"I make a lot of videos," Force told me. "But most of what I do, this sort of culture-jamming, TV-based video remixing, is not really fit for public consumption, and has the numbers to prove it." The other pieces on Force's YouTube channel mostly fit this description-they're visual tirades, short and intentionally exhausting staccato sorties of noise and color. They're not funny, but they're not supposed to be. (The top YouTube comment on the video is a complaint from the moderator of /r/HailCorporate that begins, "Redditor with 194 IQ here," which hints at the seriousness of, and a certain humor deficit in, the scene, at least to the extent that YouTube comments ever indicate anything beyond the urgent need to discontinue YouTube's comment section.)

"These videos are kind of my knee-jerk reaction to what I do in the daytime," says Force, who works in commercial animation. "This is kind of a gross world, and I need to kick away at it however I can." He describes the video work on his website, InfoChammel, as "things that aren't entertaining, on purpose."

In this case, though, a combination of circumstance-a friend asked Force to put together a video for a comedy show-and subject matter conspired to inspire a change in direction. "It's a mixture of my two favorite things," Force explains, "Shaq and Gold Bond. So maybe a little of that residual love comes through."

"Gold Bond is very close to my heart," Force told me. "I was always sponsored by Gold Bond back when I used to perform live."

What this means, it emerges, is something like the opposite. For years, Force performed his video remixes for live audiences, appearing as an opening act for Beck and Devo, among others. Force found special inspiration in the hostage-video anti-polish of Gold Bond's pre-Shaq television ads, which "just had these mutant, weird, not-meant-to-be-on-television people in them, just giving testimonials about ointment." As these elderly, rash-afflicted oddballs emerged as something like the star of his show, Force wound up spending his own money on Gold Bond products, which he threw out into the audience at the end of the act as a sort of party favor. "Gold Bond is pretty special to me," he says.

Which leaves Shaq. "I'm a huge Shaq fan," Force says. "I'm a Shaq fan, like a real Shaq fan. But also I'm a fan for, well, not all the wrong reasons, but," he trails off. "So, mostly I like Shaq as an actor. I like Steel a lot. Kazaam is pretty damn awesome, that's a close second." The confluence of Force's favorite unguent brand with his favorite, um, actor proved inspiring; Force says he wound up pulling together his Shaq/Gold Bond remix in two days.

There was a problem, though: it wasn't funny.

"The original edit had no manipulation or any of that," he says, "it was just a music video remix, and I remember thinking, 'this is way too boring.'" He remedied that by taking the liquidity function in After Effects and doing any number of strange and horrifying things to Shaq's face. While Force granted that Shaq's gleaming plus-size dome offered a mighty canvas, he downplayed the importance of his subject. "You could do it with anybody, really," he said, in a tone of professional understatement.

I asked if there was a moment in the process of making the video when he thought to himself that perhaps he had spent enough hours melting and morphing Shaquille O'Neal's face for the day, or more than enough. "Nah," Force said. "It was easy. It's just 70 or 80 cuts in all." He makes it sound easy enough, and reasonable enough, that it takes me a moment to remember that the entire video is just 70 seconds long.