Really closing in on Stockton Con. Things are starting to come together and the end is in sight. It's actually pretty bittersweet. This costume was both fun and frustrating, as I'm sure many cosplay projects are.
First off, something I really should've gotten to begin with, the clothes. The shirt was easy enough to find, but the pants were a pain. Finding pants in my size is never easy. The shirt is actually tight enough, I'm considering just attaching the alien skin pieces to the sleeve instead of my arm. That way I can just slip the shirt on and don't have to apply each and every piece to my arm.
I have started making the alien skin pieces. As I've said before, I'm using InstaMorph to make them. I'm finding it difficult to make smooth shapes with the pellets, and will probably try using a rolling pin in the future.
For the alien hand, I went to a dollar store and found a pair of rubber gloves. I didn't completely know how to make the alien hand, so I thought I'd try on the right glove as a test, much like how I did with the gun piece.
I forgot to get a picture, but I made paper claws and stacked them on each other to make the claw shapes. I then taped together my fingers to get the three-finger shape on my glove.
After I got the shape I wanted, I started applying liquid latex to the glove. If I had the materials, I'd just mold one, but I don't. I'm sure some people are questioning my intelligence at this part.
It dried nice, but there are still some open parts in the tape. I'll do a better job of applying the tape on the glove I plan to use, but for now I'll see if I can fix it with the liquid latex.
I figured I'd try 3 things, since there are 3 fingers. The left-most finger has tissue poorly applied to it with the liquid latex. The middle-finger has nothing done to it. The thumb has an extra layer of liquid latex. I'm gonna warn you, if you plan on using this stuff for the first time, it smells awful. Just be warned.
I haven't made a whole lot of progress on the gun, just getting more pieces and stuff. The Arduino is pretty difficult to figure out and I'm worried I won't have it figured out before Stockton-Con. I've made a few decisions about the gun since my last entry. For one, I decided not to have the Portal-gun-like arm-spike things. I also decided I don't want the tubing around the outside of the gun, and instead I'll apply it to some of the openings in the gun. Finally, I decided not to use wine bottle corks for the canisters on the top, they're too textured. I decided, instead, to use a few of these paint bottle things.
Don't have too much else to say. I plan to get a good amount of work done this weekend, including finishing making the skin bits, and getting to work shaping and painting the gun. Stay tuned for an update soon after.
Starting to feel the pressure. It's less than a month until Stockton-Con and I feel like I haven't nearly gotten enough done. Can just hope for the best and do what I can.
The tubing I mentioned in Part 2.5? It arrived! (Finally). And to celebrate their arrival, one of my dogs chewed up the package... Luckily I was able to salvage a good amount of the tubing. Plenty to do what I want.
One idea I've had is making the soundboard accessible from the top opening slide, so that I can change the sound effects if I wanted to. Problem was, the magazine clip went to nearly the top of the gun, leaving no room for the card. So I took out the spring mechanism (gonna put a battery in their, remember?) and cut it in half... Or a third... I cut the top off.
Next was to saw off part of the trigger guard. I'll have big fingers on my alien hand, and I wanna be able to hold it, so cutting off part of the trigger guard was the best way I could think of to do so. Wish I could've cut off more, but I didn't wanna ruin the gun.
Unfortunately, the part that I cut off was hollow, so I'll need to find a way to plug up the ends while still allowing the gun to be opened up. I've got a couple ideas, we'll see how they go later.
I didn't wanna go into painting my gun blind, so I took the barrel extension piece and did some painting tests on it. First order of business, put some primer on it.
Then put on a layer of white paint. If anyone is curious, I used Krylon spray paint. I noticed that District 9 guns tend to have orange stripes and stuff, so I taped off a section to paint orange.
While that was going on, I tried painting one of the wine bottle corks to see how it looked. It didn't turn out bad... But I'm not happy with the textures. Sometime next week I'm gonna see what I can do to get a nice, smooth surface. If you have any ideas, let me know in the comments.
Back to the gun. The orange turned out pretty well. For some reason the white appears different shades on different pieces, but I'm now pretty sure it was cause I only sanded part of it, and the "whiter" white is the section I sanded. Will have to keep that in mind for the actual gun. Next I'll do a "wash" over it. A technique I heard about, where you brush some oil paint over it and quickly wipe it away. The paint stays in the crevices and brings out some really nice details.
The wash was a failure. Complete failure. It turned my gun gray and made a huge mess of my hands and sink. Now I have a pricey tube of black oil paint and nothing to use it on while I'm at my current level of experience (or lack of)...
Had to repaint. Turned out nice, but there were a few cracks in the paint. It actually looked kinda cool and added to the weathered effect.
I applied some metallic black paint to the bottom section. It looks meh now, but I know a trick for making it look better. I also tried doing the "wash" again, only with acrylic ink... Again, it didn't work. Gah!!!
The technique for making the black look better? Get some metallic silver paint, get some of it onto a paper towel, wipe off some of the paint onto another paper towel (or rag) until there's just a bit left on the paper towel, then lightly brush it along the black area. Makes it look more weathered and metallic and just looks really cool. I tried a bit of it on the white and turned out a bit meh.
For one final attempt at giving it a wash, I used black acrylic paint with quite a bit of water in it. It still turned the gun gray, but not as gray. I've now given up on the wash idea and I'm starting to think I'll just go over the crevices with a pen or something... The final result looks really nice, but it doesn't look like a District 9 gun, it looks like Halo.
I only painted the one side, and left the other side alone in the case that I wanted to try it again, which turned out to be a good idea in hindsight. Next week I'm gonna try again with some new ideas and see how it goes.
In the meantime, I keep forgetting to work on the alien bits, and I still haven't even started on the hand. If I want to finish by Stockton-Con, I'm gonna need to work faster. Expect more frequent and/or longer updates to come.
Here we go, have gotten pictures of the gun aesthetic work.
First thing I did was look for bits to add the gun. For most of the bits, I went over to ReCreate over in Roseville. They were incredibly helpful in helping me find what I was looking for and had a good variety of stuff.
I was very excited to find this empty canister. District 9 guns seem to all have canisters of some kind, so this will be perfect for adding to the gun. Only thing is I'm still not sure how to attach it to the bottom of the magazine at a 45' angle. I'll have to try and find a sloped object or try and make one out of the InstaMorph.
I don't know what these are, but they looked pretty cool so I thought they could possibly be used somewhere. Admittedly, I still don't know where to use them, or if I'll even end up using them. Time will tell.
If you look at the AMR-B05 from District 9, you can see it has quite a few smaller canisters along the edges of the top of the gun. I thought I could get the C02 cartridges you use in some gas airsoft guns, but I didn't know where to find those and thought they'd be a pain to work with with they're small end. Thankfully, ReCreate has a bin full of wine-bottle corks. While they don't look like the canisters on the AMR-B05, remember that I'm creating my own custom gun and I'm not really going for a specific one, so some difference in pieces/appearance is a-okay with me. I plan to detail these somehow and then paint them silver or chrome.
One idea I liked was having sort of spike-arm things sticking out of the front, similar to the Portal gun. I couldn't find anything to do that with at ReCreate, but I found these plastic stakes at Home Depot. Unfortunately, I couldn't find a pack of just 2, so I had to settle with a pack of 4. Now I just need to find something to use for the arm to hold out two of them on top of the gun.
Finally, I ordered a thin, ribbed hose online to create some tubing on the gun. It's been taking a while to get here though. I might not be posting any pictures of it until it's already attached to the gun.
Last night I worked on getting the gun open to get an idea of the internals, as well as make it easier to paint the gun. It was an absolute pain to open it because the previous owner stripped one of the screws and glued a couple inside parts together, but my dad and I eventually got it open.
I took out some of the internals that fire darts, because they're taking up space I need for the electronics, and Stockton-Con doesn't allow gun props that are able to fire projectiles anyway. What I did keep in there are the trigger, magazine catch, barrel, and the slide at the top of the gun.
I didn't care much for the magazine holders on the sides of the stock of the gun though, and I noticed that they weren't completely attached, so I started working to get the stock open. I soon found out that some of the bits were glued together, keeping both halves together. I didn't want those bits anyway, so I sawed them off.
Later I'll sand off the uneven cuts. I managed to get the magazine holder off, but I still didn't care much for how it looked... I still cant decide whether or not I should keep them on.
Trying to think of what I can do to solve this. Do I cut out part of the stock? Do I fill it in somehow? (Don't know how). So I just put up with the magazine holders? If you have any thoughts, send me a comment.
Next I'll be painting the gun and it's bits as well as working on the alien skin. Also, big thank you to ReCreate for helping me find what I needed for this project. If you're in the Roseville area, be sure to check them out. Here's a link to their website, check it out for their location and hours - > http://www.recreate.org/
Apologies for the long time between posts, I've been spending most of the time planning everything and just getting all the pieces together.
Since posting Part 1 I've gotten a lot more ambitious with the rifle. I've decided to add lights and sounds to it, a trigger function, and even make it so that the gun will not function without my alien hand (which will be changed later so that I can use it whenever without having to put on my alien hand).
I went to Sparkfun.com for most of the electronics, they seem to have a large range of different electronics for different projects.
First, the brain. I decided to go for a Pro Micro 3.3V Arduino Board, it was cheap and should be able to achieve the basic functions that I need. I also decided to get a Micro USB to Female USB and plan to have the Female USB part sticking out of the gun (with the Micro USB plugged into the Arduino) so that I can reprogram the gun later, if I need/want to.
Next is the soundboard and speaker. I got the Audio-Sound Breakout board and a PCB mount speaker. The microSD is what will carry the sounds that the soundboard will play through the speaker.
This gun's gonna need some power, so I got a 9V battery connector. My plan is to have the 9V battery in the gun's magazine and have the connector sticking out of the magazine well, allowing for easy and fast battery changing.
Six LEDs, 4 red ones that will always be on, and 2 blue ones that will light up when the trigger is pulled.
I've been using the scene in which Wikus is strapped down and forced to test fire the guns for references and I noticed that one or two of the guns have spinning bits. Hence this small motor.
The switch for turning the gun on, and the button to have behind the trigger mechanism. Not sure how exactly it will be put together, since I haven't been able to open the gun yet, due to a stripped screw, but I'm learning as I go here.
Here's the cool bit. This here's a reed switch. Basically, it's two metal bits held apart from each other that go together when you hold a magnet to it, allowing it to send a signal. My plan is to have a magnet in the alien hand so that the gun will not do anything unless the reed switch detects the magnet from my hand.
Before I made the final purchase on all of these, I drew up a blueprint (with some help from my dad) on how it would all be connected together.
Right now I'm testing out all the electronics on a breadboard and learning how to program the Arduino (which I've named Neil) and the soundboard. I've picked up some different aesthetic pieces for the gun, but I'll go over those later. Mostly because I forgot to take pictures of them.
Finally, I've been making a bit of progress on the alien skin bits. I found some stuff called InstaMorph that comes as a jar of little plastic (non-toxic and biodegradable) pellets. You heat up some water and pour some pellets in and they melt into a moldable form for shaping and only takes a few minutes to dry into a really solid plastic. If you mess up at all, you can drop it back into the water or heat it with a hot air gun to reshape it. I practiced with a bit of it and painted it with a semi-gloss black paint I got from Hobby Lobby. In the end it turned out looking pretty cool, though I'll need to practice a bit more with the shaping.
I'll post more on the makeup part of the project and the aesthetics of the gun later, for now this is all I remembered to take photos of. Just a month and a half until Stockton-Con and I'm starting to feel a bit nervous about this project already.
I love wearing costumes, as many internet peeps do, and I enjoy making them too, despite the fact that I'm not too experienced in making costumes. Because of my lack of experiences, I've had to occasionally resort to blogs to find out how to do certain parts. I considered making a blog for my last-year costume (Booker from Bioshock Infinite) but never got around to it. This year I decided to give it a shot (I might try and post something about my Booker one later). So, here's the first part of my costume for this year, Wikus from District 9. Keep in mind, I'm not experienced, so I'm not sure how well this will all turn out in the end. Also, I'm a college student, so I don't have a large amount of money to spend on this. I have until Stockton-Con on August 8th.
Let's get started...
For this part, all I can talk about is my plan. I'm planning on being mid-transformation, so I'll have alien-bits sticking out of my arm and face.
So far, my plan is to use liquid latex for much of the alien skin, but I am considering having the arm bits attached to the torn-up white casual shirt I'll be using, so that I can just slip on the alien bits and don't have to apply each and every piece when dressing up, but I'm not completely counting on that working. This will also be my first time using liquid latex, so it'll be a trial and error process in the beginning. I'm also planning on contacting my optometrist to see if I can get a prescription for colored contacts (as it's illegal to buy them, even non-corrective ones, without a doctor's prescription).
Part of what made me decide to be Wikus for this year was what I discovered while working on one of my animations. I was making an Aliens animation and used rotoscoping for much of it, including the alien. For that I made paper claws (the ones that one of your friends made in middle school) and recorded me doing some of the hand actions with them on. I found that if you layer the claws on one another, it doesn't look half bad and is somewhat sturdy. It made me think of Wikus' alien hand, and got me considering this whole thing.
Again, I'm not completely counting on this idea working, but my plan for the hand is to construct the fingers out of paper claws and find a way to further strengthen them. They will then be painted, of course. Worst case, this doesn't work and I might get a Halloween glove and work with that.
Originally I thought "No gun..." mainly because of the price of the props on Weta's website (and custom ones on the internet), until I noticed that some people had made them from Nerf guns. I have a Nerf Longstrike sitting around that could be perfect for this project.
It won't be an exact replica, but I want to get the general feel down. I'll probably only do a paint-job and attach a few canisters to it.
I'm looking forward to putting this thing together. This will be the first time that I will be using makeup for a costume that wasn't the crayon-like stuff you get at Party City (not saying those are bad at all). I'll try my best to keep this blog up to pace with this project so that you can see my process.
3 Reasons Why A New WWII Game Wouldn’t Be A Bad Idea
I know, deep down in my heart, that a good number of people will disagree with me right after reading the title of this article, and they probably have good reason to, the WWII genre had been presented to us for breakfast, lunch and dinner in the same way vampire/zombie movies were and superhero movies currently are. Perhaps it's because I'm a WWII history buff, or perhaps it's because I was too busy playing Halo when the WWII trend was in full swing, but I just ask that you bear with me when I say that I believe it's time for just one more WWII game.
pintrest.com
Better love story than Twilight.
The last “great” WWII shooter was Call of Duty: World at War (with a few slight exceptions) and that was back in 2008. For those of you, like me, that don't immediately have a good sense of time, that was 7 years ago, plenty of time for a breather. I'm not saying we should restart the trend (I'm fighting an uphill battle just getting you to read an article with “WWII” in the title), I'm just saying that it wouldn't be the worst idea for Call of Duty and/or Battlefield to take one (or two, at most) dip back into the Second World War, and here's why:
1. There Are More Stories to Tell
Perhaps one of the reasons we all got so burnt out on the WWII era was because we kept telling the same story over and over: 'Murica fighting the Nazis and kickin' Hitler's fat face in.
imgkid.com
Insert foot here.
Call of Duty: World at War changed this up by introducing the Pacific Theater to the mix, and that was a great change in tactics and setting. You were no longer fighting like-minded soldiers through towns, you were wandering through tropical environments, fighting an enemy that was hiding beneath your feet. It was no longer a fight against the evil Nazis, it was a fight to survive the night, and it's a shame that it didn't come up until the end of the trend.
But it seems one thing we tend to forget is that WWII was a world war. You don't have to just be America fighting the Nazis or the Japanese. You can be the French Resistance fighting for freedom, or British forces fighting behind enemy lines. Maybe even turn the tables and play a German soldier. We demonized the Germans so much that we forget that they were also just fighting for their country. To speak out against or refuse to help the Nazi Government meant disappearing. You could play the rise of a Nazi soldier, see his revelation that turns it into a sort of Hunt For Red October story. It wouldn't be the most controversial thing Call of Duty has done.
callofduty.wikia.com
“Shooting up an airport of innocent people is one thing, but fighting for my life for a government that demands my unquestioning loyalty?”
There's also the possibility of an alternate reality story. We got that with Turning Point: Fall of Liberty, but it turned out to be a big disappointment, and we almost got that with Band of Brothers: Furious 4, but news on that fell silent years ago. But who hasn't watched Inglorious Basterds and wished they were the ones unloading a truckload of ammo into Der Fuehrer's face?
2. We Can Now Make Bigger And Better Looking Games
The Xbox 360 came out in 2005 and the PS3 came out in 2006, we had only had a couple years to play around with the consoles' power before our last proper taste of WWII. Since then we've seen a huge increase in video game power, thanks to the Xbox One and the PS4. Thanks to this increase in power, a video game can come closer to achieving the big scale battles that occurred in WWII. Battlefield 1943 was one of the first Battlefield games to incorporate really destructible environments, thanks to DICE's Frostbite engine, which has come a long way since then. Not only can you have destructible environments, but you can have more. More people, more buildings, more everything! Imagine playing a proper scaled version of the D-Day landing. Mile long beach, thousands of soldiers, bombs flying from every which direction.
en.wikipedia.org
“Remember, only 30 at a time! We can't render all of you!”
Why limit it to being the soldiers on the beach? Be one of the paratroopers parachuting behind enemy lines, be a fighter pilot fighting in a dog fight above the battlefield, recreate the Battle of Prokhorovka or Operation Goodwood with tank v. tank warfare, maybe even ship v ship battle like we saw in the short Battlestations series. Modern warfare may be compact and small enough to get away with the limits we had in computing power 7 years ago, but WWII was a war with massive scale that couldn't have been reached before.
3. It'd Be A Much Needed Change In Mood/Setting
Wanna know something I loved about Call of Duty: World at War? It's dark and gritty feel that would allow some few people to argue that it's horror. Just listen to the main menu music.
Don't look behind you.
I might be wrong, due to the fact that I haven't played Call of Duty since Black Ops, but it seems that shooters have always glorified war in some way. Even most of the WWII games did it. World at War took that idea of the greatest generation's glorious fight for freedom and turned it on it's head. Half of the game took place at night, the soundtrack contained sounds you'd only hear in your nightmares, limbs were blown off of peoples' bodies! World at War shares some very Saving Private Ryan-esque moments (it even features an achievement named after the film) and shares the idea of showing the brutality of war. You can't do that with modern warfare games, it's too close to home (time wise) and those who served in the modern wars are part of the gaming community.
One of the most powerful moments in a video game cinematic, for me, was the finale for World at War (spoiler alert, the Allies win the war).
Still gives me chills.
The actual footage pulls you into that “This all really happened” mindset and then it hits you. “60 million lives were lost as a result of World War II”. I'd hope a new WWII game would hit those same chords, maybe even harder. Show how the war affected civilians (China and Russia had massive numbers in civilian casualties) or even pull some influence from Band of Brothers and have a scene where you liberate a Concentration Camp. Maybe we don't have to go THAT dark, but just something to take our emotions for a ride.
A Call of Duty: World at War 2 or Battlefield 1944 would be awesome, but really it'd be cool to have any WWII shooter, Call of Duty and Battlefield just have successful and proven formulas. Perhaps I'm a black sheep, and everyone's perfectly content with the modern/futuristic shooters (nothing wrong with those). Perhaps I'd have to form my own video game developing company to see this wish come true.
I realize it's been a while since I've updated this blog, almost a year now, and it's more due to simply forgetting to post stuff than not wanting to post anything. I like the idea of having a blog where I can post my thoughts and ideas, but I find it difficult to keep it up to date and current. I'm trying to figure things out for returning to the blog world (what to post? how to keep posting?). I may abandon this one and start from scratch. Time will tell. Just thought I'd let you all know.
