Halloween 2012 - Trojan Horse

As with many of the Corps' projects, our Halloween project started over beers in the afterglow of a successful costume excursion. Sitting around and talking trash after Geek Kon, we were tossing around ideas for fun group costumes when the horse came up.

As with many of the Corps' projects, hubris made someone say "We could totally do that".

And so we did. With last year's group costume in mind (8+ participants) we planned for a horse that could accommodate 6 people with room to walk. We settled on a simple trapezoidal box pattern with a forward-mounted head, which would be easy to build and offer that oh-so-critical leg room so people wouldn't be stepping on each other's heels (this really sucked with the 2-man AT-AT walker outfits we did in 2010). As this project was destined for the drunken chaos that is Madison's Freak Fest event, we wanted something that would make an impression but be resilient against the inevitable battering it would sustain.

So: Lightweight, cheap, and big? We were looking at a cardboard build. So we got cardboard: 20 of the largest moving boxes Home Depot sells.

To look a bit more like a proper wooden horse, we also got contact paper (not pictured). We had a lot of area to cover, so we ended up getting three 18"x75' rolls. For a cheap project, contact paper is not actually very cheap in these quantities. We also got a stapler and hundreds of zip ties for the structural assembly.

Armed with this equipment and a playlist of horror films, we started making 'boards'.

Basically, we just took 11" wide cardboard strips, folded them roughly in half, stapled them in place, and then laid on contact paper. The length of the boards made this a two-person process, and after 40 of them we were already getting pretty sick of it, so we moved to a double-width board for the remainder of the project. Folding the cardboard is important, because it drastically increases the lateral strength of the board -- critical when it's wooden appearance is going to be tested by hundreds of passerby.

We started assembling the sides of the horse indoors. Here you can see it taking up most of the living room:

Foameo's apartment was a cardboard charnel house. Here's the start of the head, which would go on to get a lot more external detail and internal reinforcement.

We moved outdoors to finish building it. The first night, we ran into a problem: insufficient zip ties to finish assembling everything. Let this be a lesson to those who do their materials calculations and shopping while hung over. Also, apparently there is such a thing as "too big", so try to keep that in mind and maybe listen to T-Paint when she says it could probably be smaller. After going out the next day to acquire more zip ties, we were able to put it all together:

For reference, the interior roof is just shy of 6', so the overall horse comes to about 8'. The interior is a zip-tie nightmare, supported by a very simple box PVC frame:

Come the night of Freak Fest, we all piled in, lifted with the PVC handrails, and rolled out Flintstones style. There was entirely more room inside than necessary - we had space for another box gameboy costume, and were frequently invaded by still other enthusiastic fans or just plain weirdos who noticed the backdoor and invited themselves in. It took several attempts to breach the gates of Freak Fest itself - apparently the police had read their classics - but finally one bemused old veteran let us in. We got enough hilarious reactions to make it well worth the build trouble, and while it wasn't really the right environment for photography, we're going to live on in the cell photos of hundreds of revelers. Here (some of us) are on State street.

And yes, we were all styling Adventure Time costumes inside the horse, for an extra surreal edge.

Nightmare - The Claw

Nightmare’s claw design varies widely depending on which piece of art you’re using, and the model used in Soul Calibur 4 really likes to clip through itself for any fist-like gestures. What this meant was that I had some latitude to design a more physically possible arm for terrorizing folks.

Hilde's Helmet

Hilde's helmet was a piece that haunted my dreams at the beginning of the build--it's very visible and super complex. In the end, it wasn't quite as bad as I had feared!

Nightmare - Torso

So this piece was kind of a monster (ha, ha). The original build idea had called for moldmaking and foam casting, but as deadlines loomed, I determined there just wasn’t time to learn the whole new process and also get it done before Gen Con. Enter low tech solution: build it around the body form!  

Misadventures in vacuum forming

So, one of the new developments in our costuming mayhem this year is the vacuum forming. We've already put up a few shots of this stuff...


It turns out that vacuum forming is actually kind of difficult - who knew?!

Hilde's thigh armor

Here's a brief writeup of my technique for building the vacuum form blanks for the thigh armor! I'm hoping to use similar methods for most of the arm and leg pieces.

Hilde's wolf pauldron - part 1

Since Hilde's armor has a total of 8 wolves to be sculpted (helmet, 2 shoulders, 3 belt, 2 spear), I thought I'd kick off the actual armor-building on the wolf shoulders.

Nightmare - Soul Edge I

So we in the Corps are pretty big fans of starting with a character's weapon and working backwards to the outfit itself. Weapons are a good way ease into a big project but have some early, tangible results to make you feel like you're getting somewhere.

Usually these weapons don't look like this, though:

6 feet of crystal sword. Well. Okay. Not so much of a quick, early project, but you gotta start somewhere.

As discussed in the initial post, my plan is to sculpt the hilt and cast it in foam, use plexiglass and polycarbonate for the blade, and hold it all together with a wooden shaft. Lets see some progress, shall we? 

Nightmare - Bodyform

Okay. Nightmare has some weeeird stuff going on with his torso, making it necessary to do quite a bit of careful modeling and engineering. Holding stuff against yourself and looking in the mirror is okay for a while, but eventually you really need a form to work with. Using the tutorial found here, the Corps teamworked up some bodyforms. Making these things is indecent, so we don't have any process shots. Here, though, is the finished result for me:

But I have issues, and a very weird hat to build. So I took it a step further:

Are you scared? Because you should be. This thing is terrifying to be in a room with.

Nightmare - The Beginning

Well, costuming season has come, and it's time to get to work!

As previously introduced, my Foam Corps moniker is Foameo - that chap in the bulky grey suit up top. I'm a pretty mediocre hand with a sewing machine, so when we start looking at a new round of costumes, I'm the one who aims for more structural outfits.

So this time, I'm going for this bad boy:

Nightmare from SC IV. What a badass, right? Claw hand, glowing bits, smoking helmet, big freaking crystalline sword...

Yes, this... costume... is psychotically complex. Yes, I'm still going to try and build it. This would be a good time to reinforce T-paint's earlier observation: we are pretty much lunatics when it comes to propmaking.

But look at the upsides with me: As the ultimate villain, being Nightmare will make for great scene-setting with everyone else's outfits. The costume has room to build in lifts so I tower over the masses, something I'm terribly fond of. I'll get to build that articulated claw I've always wanted to do. His nonexistent midriff and exposed joints mean it will be much better ventilated than my last two big projects - I won't have to build in fans!

Obviously, there are some hurdles as well. In the clear light of day, then, let me briefly run down my plans for each. Hopefully this will help make me accountable for all the trouble my big mouth gets me into. I'm pretty long-winded when I get going, so I'm putting it under a cut.