Happy Halloween!

"Put the frozen bananas in the cargo hold."

A few months back, I participated in ThinkGeek's Timmy Costume Volunteer Corps project, and (like last year) put together a costume for their stuffed monkey mascot, Timmy.

This year, I made a Boba Fett costume, which turned out pretty great.  While making it, I took some photos of the process to make things clearer than last year's, and I've now put them together into a little video to save time.  Since it's costume time today, I thought it might be fun to share.  Enjoy!

(Of course, Timmy the monkey is the intellectual property of ThinkGeek, Boba Fett is copyright Lucas Film, 20th Century Fox, and/or Disney, and the music is copyright Sony Computer Entertainment America.  All rights are reserved and no commercial use is intended.)

On Proton Packs and Impermanence

A few weeks ago, I let go of an old friend of mine. We'd been through a lot together, but sadly the time had come to say goodbye.

It came together in the fall of 2012 for a Halloween costume, together with goggles, knee and elbow pads, the standard black-and-yellow striped trap, and the essential insignia-bedecked overalls.

It was basically a pair of large boxes, one from an amazon shipment and one from a box fan, that I cut and glued together with some added boxes and twists in the surface for tubes and wiring, a pair of straps rigged to fit on the user's back, and holes cut out for eventual lights.

Once I had the box together I fitted be tubes (cable insulation tubing to look like actual cables) in place, then applied the paint in a few layers, and then colored the tubes by wrapping them in electrical tape and glued them down as well.  I rigged a holster for the handheld component out of a few neodymium magnets and an old soup can. 

I taped a self-contained strip of Christmas lights running in a pair of C batteries on the interior, with the pack/switch part hidden on side. To add some color I applied sharpie ink to a few empty DayQuil capsule wrappers and taped those inside the light sockets. 

You can sort of see the lights in this photo.  Anyway there was another one built into the hand-held part.

The whole process happened over a couple of weekends and one all-nighter, probably taking up between 20 and 25 hours total work.  At certain points it seemed like I'd never get it all done in time, especially the straps and the hand-held component, which was trickier than the pack itself.  

It came together pretty well!

Sadly though, nothing is forever.  Once the holiday was past and new projects came in, the old pack spent most of its time in the storage room, either getting looked at fondly when I had to out something else away or grumblingly shoved aside if I needed to take something out. One of the problems with being a taller person is the high volume needed for costume storage. It came out briefly when my brother, and even bigger Ghostbusters than I if possible, came to visit and demanded a try-on.

But otherwise, it mostly sat unused, and as with all things, it was not to be forever.

When it came time to move on from our apartment, I started to realize not everything could come with us.  We made three or four runs to Good Will in total, gave things away to family, and left a lot of thoroughly used (and not so thoroughly used) stuff on the curb.  Eventually, it became clear that the pack was a little too big and unwieldy to make the cut, and should be let go.  My wife said I could keep it if I wanted to, but to be honest the glue wasn't holding up as well as I'd have liked in places, and it had become sort of beaten-up from its time floating on the piles in storage.  I knew it was time.

Here's the last photo before I left for work that morning; when I came home of course it was gone.

It was sad saying goodbye, but you can't have everything.  We're moving in order to afford a house one day, where hopefully there'll be room for storing and maintaining lots of older projects that have value.  But there'd be little value in letting the artifact slow us down when it was the sentiment, a separate thing, that was giving us pause.

In the end it's the memory that matters, not the five pounds of cardboard, plastic, paint, and glue.  When I need one, I can make another proton pack, and it'll be easier and smarter for the experience of making the first one.  

And I'll always have the Halloween we spent together.

Projects are funny things.  When you're in the middle of one, the world seems a little bit timeless.  Or rather, the necessary steps of the project itself becomes the basic unit of time in a funny way, so that the clock seems to be leaping ahead of its own volition, and you can't be bothered to look at it.  But then time runs out, and whether you've finished everything or not, you've got to make the most of what you were able to do.

I could have done more on my proton pack.  I was trying, right up to the buzzer, to figure out how to make it make the "kaswhiiiiIIIIN" noise from the movie when it was switched on.  I'd planned on improving the back straps and the magnet holster, and making a somewhat smaller trap that would hook on the side.  The list goes on.

But sooner or later, you'll have to put it aside.  Time always runs out, other projects come in, and you have to learn to be okay with how things are.

What matters is taking the ideas you're able to get together making the most out of each project with the time you have.

Because sooner or later, like it or not, it will all eventually pass by, and you will move on without it.

Plus, I kept the goggles.  And pads, hand-held part, the trap, and the flight suit, so I've got that going for me.

How to Make a DeLorean for a Monkey

In an earlier post, I talked about how I used to make things out of paper and cardboard when I was little, and how it's a hobby I return to now and again, usually for just long enough to give my old tricks a shake and a stretch, and see if I can still do it.

I love every part of projects like this, from the first ideas to the moment when the last details come into place.  What's great is that it gives the writing-thinking part of my brain a break while I'm on the project, and usually by the time I'm finished, writing seems like a much easier and straightforward way to bring new ideas to life.

About a year ago, I entered ThinkGeek's costume project for their little stuffed mascot, Timmy the Monkey.  The idea is to do mini-scale cosplay that they can take with them to comic book conventions, most notably the San Diego Comic Con; you submit ideas to them and volunteer your time, and you get to see the finished product up on their website.

I submitted a couple ideas, some were from their list and others were not.  They surprised me when they replied by saying they'd elected two: the Shredder from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and Doc Brown with DeLorean.

It was at this point that I realized that I wasn't sure how much of a bluff that DeLorean thing had been, in order to peak their interest and consider my suggestions.  But now that they'd called me on it, I was excited to give it a try.

I started from my known strengths: corrugated cardboard and hot glue.  I built a center component that would house Timmy, the seats, and the dashboard first, to get a sense of the scale of the project.

I was working without any real precise measurements, just sort of eyeballing and blocking things out to save time.  I pieced together the back section

(behold the glory that is ad hoc iPhone photography) and the front section next,

working from a general notion that the back would be to almost the right proportion to emphasize the engine, but the front would be a little snub-nosed to make it cuter (it's a car for a stuffed monkey).

An idea of the windshield and bracing for the gull-wing doors followed

(also difficult to photograph in an interesting way), and once I was sure that the little guy would fit inside

I started piecing everything together.

When the front and back portions were added,

it started to look kind of like a car.

The doors were tricky, as I hadn't really planned for them in the shape of the front and middle jointing, and the front edge of their shape was supposed to rest snugly in place there in the finished design.

I spent about half as long as I'd spent on everything else up to that point, that is to say around five hours, getting the doors attached and the windows cut out (by then I'd had an idea, and was discarding the original plan of blank cardboard windows colored blue and white).

Once the window panels were cut out and partially reinforced, and the doors were resting in place, I took a brake from the frame and thought about the wheels.  Wheels that sat happily in the wheel wells would be cool, but wheels that would fold down like the flying car from the second Back to the Future film (my personal favorite) would be better.

So I worked out a simple system of a wheel that would be locked in place when pushed in,

but could then pull out,

and tilt down,

like the hover units in the movie.  Pictured is the demo work-up I made from card stock; the real ones were done in corrugated cardboard and eventually (it took a surprising amount of work to make four of them) spray-painted black.

Next I spent a session skinning the frame in silver-colored poster board and gluing it down.  At the same time I reinforced the windows and doors again, this time with paper clips and a thin dowel.  I also cut and glued in thin pieces of plastic, the kind you'd use on an overhead projector, for the windows.  

I left the rear pockets blank for time being, as I hadn't given any thought yet to the engine gadgets that would have to go in there.  I started on the engine itself with a blocked-out cone of corrugated, and hoped the rest would be easy to put together as I was starting to run low on time.

I put felt and colored paper down in the interior of the cabin, and glued a little printed readout of the time circuits panel with the dates of Comic Con included.

I also put together a little flux capacitor with a plastic-window front and printed back, and the little labels on the window as in the movie for authenticity's sake. 

Did I mention yet that I have an extremely patient and loving wife, who is willing to wait while I spend a ridiculous amount of time on these things?

If my memory serves, by this stage I was actively haggling for time with the ThinkGeek people due to overruns in every direction.  I had asked for and received special permission for my wife to bring the thing by and drop it off at their office, rather than shipping it, which bought a couple of days.  Somewhere in there I had to take time to make the actual costumes for the monkey (I suddenly remembered it was a costume project), but I don't have super clear memories of that.

In the last two nights, I finished glued in the wheels and finished all the superficial touches, and the car was basically done.

I lined the cubbies in the back section with black paper.  The engine fins were black card stock, mister fusion was office paper rolled up and coned, and the smaller pieces on the side were construction paper.

I'd got hold of a few mirror-like silver pieces of cardboard for Doc Brown's shades (we don't need -- roads), and I used these to signify the parts around the front and top that light up in the movie when the car is about to actually travel in time.  The headlights were just office paper again.

I used little strong magnets on the doors to both hold them in place when closed and open when up.  It was a little tricky getting them to stay sometimes, but the little "click" sounds on closing were very satisfying.

I used some more of the mirrored paper to make the future version of the license plate; it's not pictured, as I thought of it after these were taken, but I also made a small "TG" to stick on the grill in place of the "DMC" you'd usually see there.

That was pretty much it!  Here's the picture ThinkGeek tweeted when they got hold of the thing,

and here it is with some dry ice at the start of their live streaming costume unboxing party.

It was super fun, though clearly an over-ambitious idea from the start.  In all it took probably between 30 and 40 hours work to finish, which was more than I'd anticipated, but I learned enough moving forward that it wouldn't take as long to do a second time.

What's funny are all the ideas I'd had and ran out of time before I could implement them.  The wheels were supposed to rotate as well as fold down.  There was a spindle of wires I'd picked up to truss around the outside of the frame like the cables of the time circuits are draped and stapled down in the movie.  Originally the wheels were supposed to fold down not one at a time but all at once, through a mechanism that would push or pull them when Mr. Fusion was pulled up or pushed down (that's part of why there's a large dividing wall between the passenger and driver sides of the cabin).  And that's to say nothing of the ideas for the lights...

The key thing I learned from the project was to know one's limits.  If you think you've got a lot of ideas, start right away on getting them down and getting them out of you.  Things will go wrong, and be tricky, and take longer than you expected.

Even more time-consuming, and at the same time even more delightful, once you have your hands on the material you'll start getting little surprising ideas left and right, that would never have occurred to you when you're just planning things out at first on paper or in your mind's eye.

That said, don't let being conservative hold you back.  Never be afraid to be overambitious, but just always plan ahead, and make sure you have enough time to honor the start of your project honor, by not getting distracted by endless tweaking, in order to  see through as many of your complete ideas as you can, the best you can.

Things may never seem perfectly done: I never seem to have time for everything I want to develop, execute, and tweak before time's up, but it's almost always more important to take a guess and learn something than to abandon an idea because it seems too crazy to work.

Finally, look around in the world, sign up for stuff!  I had no reason to make this thing before ThinkGeek posted their project idea, and I had no monetary reason for doing so at any time.  It was just for my own satisfaction, to see if I could do it and how well I could do.  Was it worth it?  Absolutely, I'd do it all again in a heartbeat. 

In fact, ThinkGeek has posted that they're looking for submissions for this year, you can find the project page on their blog here, and I believe there's still just enough time to get something in if you work fast.

I'm already working up something for this year, though it may not be as grand-scale.  I'm pretty excited to see how it turns out.  So if the new project winds up being worth posting about, there may be more of this to come!

More like this

The Idea Cupboard, Legos, and Re-Making the World

I sat down to write a review of the Lego Movie, and this came out instead.

When I was a kid, I loved making things. Expert testimony has it that I was drawing as a toddler, primarily trucks and sharks, which visually speaking were more or less interchangeable.

When I was about five, we got a book out from the library called Easy Origami. By then I’d made a hundred paper airplanes, and we had other craft books at home, but for some reason just folding paper and making REAL THINGS (by which little me meant 3-D models) lit a fire in my child brain that has dulled and flared over the years, but never dispersed.

 The key to making origami was the rules: you start with a square piece of paper, you were never allowed to use scissors, just folding, and you could only use glue when two pieces had to fit together and the official folding and tucking wouldn't join them strong enough to play with.  It was all in the instructions: follow them carefully and in the end you get a little boat or a duck or a man.  Or a frog, one that really jumps!

 Soon I started getting new ideas, ideas that weren’t in the instruction book.  They were mostly copies from movies. Or from TV, or sometimes from books; the key was always plucking something from a story that'd come alive in my head, and making a part of it my own to continue the story from myself.

 The problem is there were no instruction to make what I wanted.  I couldn’t figure it out, not with just careful folding anyway, it was too difficult to see what you were doing, and there was always extra paper bunching in the corners.

 So I cheated on the origami rules.  I would fold sometimes, but most often if I wanted a piece of paper a certain shape, I’d just draw on it, then cut it out.  Soon I was cutting without drawing first.  When I wanted to make something more complicated than a single sheet of paper could make, I started gluing pieces together, or better yet, using scotch tape.

 From there things got messy, and started developing quickly.

 I don’t remember when it clicked, but I saw that these materials could be cut up and put together any way I liked. Forcing my ideas into shape was often tricky, as there were always surprises waiting in the material.  Often it was easier to get ideas from the surprises in the materials themselves: a pair of milk cartons became a jetpack, single pair of egg carton cups became the head and body of a little bird.  Some things were tough to do, but if I wanted a model of something, if I was patient enough, and if had enough tape, I could just make it.  

From paper I moved up to cereal boxes and egg cartons, then to corrugated cardboard.  I needed plastics and would cut up kool-whip containers.  I learned there are two kinds of paper towels: most have a tube glued in the middle, that you have to work your way to the end in order to use that are of (these days most are this kind).  But some have a tube that can be carefully pulled out of the middle easily, no waiting, and I was on my way.  The towels are tubeless, but no matter, I didn’t need them for my project.

 I learned to ball tape, and to run tape all the way around a tube and then cut it into little strips that could flower out and flatten, and the tube end could be attached to a flat surface.  Scotch tape became a regular grocery, and the family room floor was perpetually covered in tiny triangles of cardboard.

 My parents were in on this pretty much from the start.  Everything I put together was examined with praise and shown off to visiting family members.  I remember my Grandma Betty, my mother’s mom, especially liked the clever things I could figure out, and would ask for another of whatever I’d made most recently.  Everyone encouraged me to try new things, and it became the thing I was really good at.

However, a roll of paper towels without the tube is a sad and floppy thing to try and wield against the three or four kids and their messes running around.  When Mom saw how things serving a purpose were quietly lifted, cut up, and taped into something new, she didn’t get angry or discourage me; she made a very sensible compromise.

She set aside an otherwise underutilized cupboard in the kitchen.  I think up to that point it was mainly used for Tupperware and bowls and a cake carrier or two, and those up-cycled kool whip containers she saved for leftovers that I was devouring.  She said she’d put anything that wasn’t needed there, anything that I could cut up, and that should be where I got my materials from, and nowhere else.  A family of six goes through a lot of groceries, and it was generally pretty well stocked.  We called it the Idea Cupboard, and if I ever complained that I was bored, I was told to either go outside and run around, or look there for something new, then make it.

Then I grew up, and over time this practice flagged.  Why didn’t it become my career?

I took a technical drawing class in high school, with the thought of one day becoming an engineer, but the rigor was disagreeable -- so much effort, just to be sure one line is in the right place!

And then there’s the math.  Lots and lots of math to make anything really work.  If there’s anything my creative process doesn’t seem to have time for, it’s careful measurements and working out endless little problems by the rules, the way we’re told to in school, until all the little answers are right.  “This making stuff is a lot of fun, but you know what would send it over the top?  Math homework!”  It always seemed like a lot of pointless legwork that got in the way of the fun.  But the thing about engineering is, without the math, without the legwork, it just won’t work.

But I think the real reason this didn’t go further than making things that were pretty, or similar to what I saw on the screen, is the same reason it captivated me in the first place.  It wasn’t really the thing itself I was working to recreate, but a way to get into the story the thing was from, to participate in the adventures of the characters.  No plot, no props.  Who wants to lug around a proton pack if they can’t make any good jokes about it?  (Okay, bad example, I would take the proton pack and run.) 

Since then I’ve been pursuing another childhood passion, also started and encouraged by my parents.  It’s a much simpler and much, much more powerful system for taking things apart and making something new: words.  And since words are the heart of storytelling, their study and use has gradually replaced crafting things as my key ambition, though I still love tinkering out some new thing from time to time, still always from movies and mainly to impress people.

Like I said before, this all started as a review of the Lego Movie.  So what does all this have to do with a hundred minutes of tiny cartoon plastic people cracking jokes and running around?   Possibly everything.

 The Lego Movie, for those who haven’t seen it, is surprisingly good.  It’s a lot of different things at once; like many great stories, both its tone and meaning keep peeling away to reveal another aspect of the material and the characters.  It’s mostly eye-popping and funny, but it’s also incredibly heartfelt and touching, at times it passes for sharp satire, and in general it manages the difficult task of delivering a gripping plot with a light-hearted, unpretentious attitude.

But the best thing about it, my favorite thing, are the action sequences.

 These are different from action I have seen in movie up to this point, with the possible exceptions of Who Framed Roger Rabbit and the Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus.  Like any great action scenes they’re both thrilling to the story and mesmerizing to watch, executed with the same deft brilliance of fluid motion and sense of space as the rest of the animation (I could go on and on).  What’s different is what the point of the action sequences are, or rather what the characters are trying to accomplish while they’re going on.

 In Raiders of the Lost Ark, Indiana Jones has escaped the snake pit but the Nazis have got the Ark and are getting away; he gives chase, runs the motorcade of the road one vehicle at a time, and retakes the Ark (for now).  But at one point he pauses, when asked by his friend how he’ll meet them later.  “I don’t know,” he says, “I’m making this up as I go!”

In Die Hard, the hero John McClane comes under gunfire.  He runs, he hides, he figures out a way to return fire and wins.   Fighting in, fighting out; pay the problem back to its source and there’s your solution.  The villain’s game is violence, and the ingenuity of the hero is employed to make them a little better at that game, and then they win.  We dislike the bad guys because they’re violent, we like the heroes because they’re clever and violent, and because the bad guys had it coming.

 In the Lego movie, our heroes are cornered and the bad guys are closing in.  Time is up, the heroes have just one chance.  What do they do?  They don’t run, they don’t hide, they don’t run vehicles off the road, they don’t return fire.  They build. 

They start taking the world around them apart, whatever they can get their hands on, and they start making something to get them out of the jam.  Granted, the thing they make usually helps them by running or returning fire, but only after the emotional emphasis of the scene is laid down, not on the fighting, but on how cool the thing they’re making is, and how they came up with it out of scratch.

It's an ingenious twist, albeit likely the most logical result of staging an adventure story in a world of building blocks.  There’s a larger, tidy parable too about following instructions to get to success, and whether those instructions can cope with the inevitable surprises that come out of the materials.  The film itself does a better job of illustrating it and I’ll leave you to watch for yourself, but at its heart is a very simple premise, and the heart of this my article:

1.   The world is made of building blocks

2.   The blocks can be re-made to make an awesome story happen.

3.   You don’t have to be one of the characters, or the movie makers, or anyone special to re-make the blocks however you want.

It can be done by anybody, that’s what’s special.

You can just see the pitch the filmmakers must have made to the executives at the studio, and at Lego: an action movie about toys where playing with the toys itself is part of the action, in fact the most important part.  The studio executives nod to each other.  This movie could sell a ton of toys.

But as an ad campaign, this premise backfires, or at least it did for me.  I love to think that it was at least partly intentional on the part of the filmmakers.  The problem is, it doesn’t just apply to the rules of the movie, but to the world itself.

I came out of the theater not wanting to run to the store and buy toys.  I came out thinking about the Idea Cupboard back when I was a kid, about possibilities, about how we live in a world made of building blocks, made of a crazy pile of amazing, that can be re-arranged however we want.  There’s no one configuration of making things that’s better than another, so long as it works.

What’s important isn’t following the instructions exactly, it’s in not being afraid to mess up and find something new.

So it's time to make something new!  And since stories are what has held my attention all along, I’ve decided to make something about storytelling, about trying to be patient and to find the way to measure carefully and solve little problems, and to make it work.