![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
stephbgSince a certain degree of mystery seemed like a good idea during development, I'd like to record some thoughts here about the design and development of my (and Husband's) masquerade costumes; collectively we were the Motion Capture Team. The trickiest part was trying to cover our bodies not too loose and not too tight, and also not to overheat.
Photos here (and a couple of individual shots below the cut). We're the black-with-orange-dots people in the first three shots. The individual winner (ZOMG awesome) PK in the pink preying mantis outfit on the second row. I'm not sure how he feels about having his name online, so if someone knows I'll fill it in properly later.
Why motion capture suits? Were they made especially for the masquerade theme?
I'm pretty sure I had the idea for the Mocap suits long before I knew that the masquerade theme was Monster Mash. I thought of them as themeless in a way: we were "whatever you wanted us to be" which happens to work particularly well for monsters. Once we knew the theme we focused on monstery thoughts, mainly Godzilla and Mothra which is a tad ironic given that those films used completely different FX processes. Everyone wants to be Godzilla, surely? We can fix it in post :-)
And too the opportunity to virtually punch Jar Jar Binks in the face kept the dream alive for some time. I did that lots of times. Husband wanted us to be Shrek and Donkey, which should explain some of the more disturbing images out there with![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
chaosmanor.
Originally I was just going to make the one suit for me, and Husband would play the part of Scruffy Crew Member with the ball-on-a-stick. The ball on a stick is used by actors on green screen stages as an eyeline for acting with invisible creatures that are added later in post production. The actors are required to be frightened (usually) by some deeply unscary guy in the crew boredly saying "Rrrrowr" and waving the aforementioned ball-on-a-stick at monster eye height. I had half hoped to rope some Rebel Empire people into play, as George Lucas is more than fond of a bit of ball-on-a-stick action.
But somewhere along the line I promised that Husband would have an equal billing so to speak, and so we both got suits and balls-on-sticks. This made for a few mixed messages because technically, the people in the suits on set don't get to have the balls-on-sticks themselves, but we all survived.
Me:
Husband:
I did come to the event unprepared to explain what motion capture was, so I may not have been very coherent when shouting explanations to people on the night.
What it meant to me
The aspects of digital life that particularly interest me are the human and organic elements. I love good old-fashioned practical FX, and anything that takes a real live human (or thing) to make it realistic. Puppet Yoda was far superior to Digital Yoda (damn you George Lucas). One of the funniest things I've ever seen was a dog dressed in an alien suit in a failed screen test for Alien3: it looked all kinds of menacing until it moved, and then it was nothing more than a happy--albeit very ugly--puppy.
Motion capture--sometimes called performance capture if there's enough detail involved--is the essence of capturing a human performance for the screen.
And then there's the fact that humans make the best monsters.
How I made them
Part I: Acquisitions
It took a surprising amount of time to acquired body-fitting black clothing for us both. It took several frustrating trips to Supre/Target/Best&Less etc (etc etc) to hunt down all the parts. Some bits came from the local Salvos store, which is a great place to hunt for costume foundations.
The shoe problem was solved with socks (one thick under and one long over pair each) rather than a trip to a martial arts shop for ninja slippers. I did find my old martial arts slippers, but they were grey and generally unsuitable, and by this time I needed two sets of everything.
The headgear problem had me stumped for quite a while. I contemplated balaclavas, more ninja wear from the martial arts place, mental experiments in hoodie constuction with fabric, rubber (hmmm - scuba gear?), gaffer tape... I suspect my renewed interest in horses led me to create the harnesses instead. Working with that amount of velcro would be entertaining for the S&M crowd I'm sure.
Gloves. A single leftover motorcycle glove from a pair bought at a Trash&Treasure maybe 10 years ago to supply a single glove for a cyber ninja costume. Knew it would come in handy one day, particularly as I found myself unable to break down and recycle the original cyber ninja hand. Grandma's tight black everyday gloves, which I used with hesitation at first but then remembered that Gran liked to tread the boards herself and probably wouldn't have minded. Black rubber gardening gloves from the supermarket. I wanted to give us one hand each that was reasonably useable, so the ping pong balls only went on one side each.
Did you know that you can't buy black rubber gloves from Coles or Woolies in anything smaller than a Large size? Because they're clearly for Manly use only :P
Orange ping pong balls are everywhere until you decide that you want to buy them in bulk, then they flee for their tiny lives. I'd found a few dozen early on in the pillaging processes, but that shop had closed down by the time I went back for more. I never want to see another $2 shop or discount sporting goods place as long as I live.
Part II: Construction
When I started I didn't think that one might be able to acquire velcro with adhesive backing, so the plan to attach the balls to the clothing fabric went thusly:
1. Cut velcro into squares.
2. Glue hook velcro to ping pong ball with liquid nails.
3. Affix soft velcro to clothing with safety pin, or stitches.
4. Press ping pong velcro to clothing velcro.
Velcro, as I discovered during early engineering tests, is a *bitch* to sew or indeed puncture with safety pins. I was not looking forward to doing this 100 or so times. Gluing velcro to ping pong balls with liquid nails was by contrast an almost meditative task, given the fumes.
I was serendipitously saved from stabby badness by an accidental purchase of adhesive-backed velcro. Black velcro in any sort of useful quantity is surprisingly (although I should have learned by now not to be thusly surprised) difficult to acquire. I never want to see another $2 shop, craft supply place, or haberdashery supply place as long as I live. I found a supply in a last-ditch-effort tiny craft section of a Thingz-type place and brought home my booty in a haze of unspooniness. When I discovered exactly what I had bought, I was deeply unimpressed with myself. But then I found that the adhesive was strong enough for the task of bonding to cloth, and so my rage turned to joy. Or something like that. Maybe not rage; maybe not joy. But turned, definitely.
I cheated a little for comfort's sake, and didn't put any balls in places that would make it impossible to sit down. I also resisted the temptation to put them in rude places.
Balls-on sticks proved to be relatively straightforward. Cheap tennis balls are easy to find, and I rifled through my Sundry Boxes Of Potentially Useful Things (subsection Long and Thin) to find a short length of leftover black curtain rod, and a garden stake which needed but a layer of gaffer tape to render it black. Small cross cuts in the tennis balls and a bit of brute force later, the balls were stuck very firmly indeed to the sticks. Yay!
Damn those things are fun to play with.
Final touches
Spots! We needed more spots! There were no more orange ping pong balls to be had, but thanks to my art show experience last year I immediately thought of the fuzzy half of the white velcro dots used to hang pictures. Two trips to Office Works, an eternity of scanning stationery shelves, and two boxes of dots later we were there.
I had planned to draw dots on our faces for the fine detail face motion capture, but I ran out of time to find a pen that would show up well, not come off with inevitable sweat, but *would* come off with some kind of gentle solvent. It was harder than I thought and in the end I didn't find materials that wouldn't collectively melt my face off. The orange stickers had to do, and though they travelled a bit (I found them in surprising places the next day), they worked for long enough to do their job.
Multiple sets of study underwear. If they didn't do the job of blurring the edges of certain bits of anatomy I really don't want to know.
Getting frocked up
Climbing into these outfits with Husband in a cheap hotel room felt frankly kinky. Nuff said.
Should we have won a prize?
There is generally some controversy about the judging at the Swancon masquerade. As a single Mocap person there is no way on the world that I would have won the individual prize against some of the costumes/constructions there (which I didn't), but as a team, I think we held our own and I'm comfortable with the win. I think we conveyed a certain amount of enthusiasm for our characters that didn't hurt, although I find the actual business of being at the masquerade and getting photographed quite frankly terrifying.
So, if you think those costumes were something I tossed together off the top of my head, quickly, or indeed cheaply, you'd be wrong. But it was fun and I hope you liked them :-)
Photos here (and a couple of individual shots below the cut). We're the black-with-orange-dots people in the first three shots. The individual winner (ZOMG awesome) PK in the pink preying mantis outfit on the second row. I'm not sure how he feels about having his name online, so if someone knows I'll fill it in properly later.
Why motion capture suits? Were they made especially for the masquerade theme?
I'm pretty sure I had the idea for the Mocap suits long before I knew that the masquerade theme was Monster Mash. I thought of them as themeless in a way: we were "whatever you wanted us to be" which happens to work particularly well for monsters. Once we knew the theme we focused on monstery thoughts, mainly Godzilla and Mothra which is a tad ironic given that those films used completely different FX processes. Everyone wants to be Godzilla, surely? We can fix it in post :-)
And too the opportunity to virtually punch Jar Jar Binks in the face kept the dream alive for some time. I did that lots of times. Husband wanted us to be Shrek and Donkey, which should explain some of the more disturbing images out there with
chaosmanor.Originally I was just going to make the one suit for me, and Husband would play the part of Scruffy Crew Member with the ball-on-a-stick. The ball on a stick is used by actors on green screen stages as an eyeline for acting with invisible creatures that are added later in post production. The actors are required to be frightened (usually) by some deeply unscary guy in the crew boredly saying "Rrrrowr" and waving the aforementioned ball-on-a-stick at monster eye height. I had half hoped to rope some Rebel Empire people into play, as George Lucas is more than fond of a bit of ball-on-a-stick action.
But somewhere along the line I promised that Husband would have an equal billing so to speak, and so we both got suits and balls-on-sticks. This made for a few mixed messages because technically, the people in the suits on set don't get to have the balls-on-sticks themselves, but we all survived.
Me:
Husband:
I did come to the event unprepared to explain what motion capture was, so I may not have been very coherent when shouting explanations to people on the night.
What it meant to me
The aspects of digital life that particularly interest me are the human and organic elements. I love good old-fashioned practical FX, and anything that takes a real live human (or thing) to make it realistic. Puppet Yoda was far superior to Digital Yoda (damn you George Lucas). One of the funniest things I've ever seen was a dog dressed in an alien suit in a failed screen test for Alien3: it looked all kinds of menacing until it moved, and then it was nothing more than a happy--albeit very ugly--puppy.
Motion capture--sometimes called performance capture if there's enough detail involved--is the essence of capturing a human performance for the screen.
And then there's the fact that humans make the best monsters.
How I made them
Part I: Acquisitions
It took a surprising amount of time to acquired body-fitting black clothing for us both. It took several frustrating trips to Supre/Target/Best&Less etc (etc etc) to hunt down all the parts. Some bits came from the local Salvos store, which is a great place to hunt for costume foundations.
The shoe problem was solved with socks (one thick under and one long over pair each) rather than a trip to a martial arts shop for ninja slippers. I did find my old martial arts slippers, but they were grey and generally unsuitable, and by this time I needed two sets of everything.
The headgear problem had me stumped for quite a while. I contemplated balaclavas, more ninja wear from the martial arts place, mental experiments in hoodie constuction with fabric, rubber (hmmm - scuba gear?), gaffer tape... I suspect my renewed interest in horses led me to create the harnesses instead. Working with that amount of velcro would be entertaining for the S&M crowd I'm sure.
Gloves. A single leftover motorcycle glove from a pair bought at a Trash&Treasure maybe 10 years ago to supply a single glove for a cyber ninja costume. Knew it would come in handy one day, particularly as I found myself unable to break down and recycle the original cyber ninja hand. Grandma's tight black everyday gloves, which I used with hesitation at first but then remembered that Gran liked to tread the boards herself and probably wouldn't have minded. Black rubber gardening gloves from the supermarket. I wanted to give us one hand each that was reasonably useable, so the ping pong balls only went on one side each.
Did you know that you can't buy black rubber gloves from Coles or Woolies in anything smaller than a Large size? Because they're clearly for Manly use only :P
Orange ping pong balls are everywhere until you decide that you want to buy them in bulk, then they flee for their tiny lives. I'd found a few dozen early on in the pillaging processes, but that shop had closed down by the time I went back for more. I never want to see another $2 shop or discount sporting goods place as long as I live.
Part II: Construction
When I started I didn't think that one might be able to acquire velcro with adhesive backing, so the plan to attach the balls to the clothing fabric went thusly:
1. Cut velcro into squares.
2. Glue hook velcro to ping pong ball with liquid nails.
3. Affix soft velcro to clothing with safety pin, or stitches.
4. Press ping pong velcro to clothing velcro.
Velcro, as I discovered during early engineering tests, is a *bitch* to sew or indeed puncture with safety pins. I was not looking forward to doing this 100 or so times. Gluing velcro to ping pong balls with liquid nails was by contrast an almost meditative task, given the fumes.
I was serendipitously saved from stabby badness by an accidental purchase of adhesive-backed velcro. Black velcro in any sort of useful quantity is surprisingly (although I should have learned by now not to be thusly surprised) difficult to acquire. I never want to see another $2 shop, craft supply place, or haberdashery supply place as long as I live. I found a supply in a last-ditch-effort tiny craft section of a Thingz-type place and brought home my booty in a haze of unspooniness. When I discovered exactly what I had bought, I was deeply unimpressed with myself. But then I found that the adhesive was strong enough for the task of bonding to cloth, and so my rage turned to joy. Or something like that. Maybe not rage; maybe not joy. But turned, definitely.
I cheated a little for comfort's sake, and didn't put any balls in places that would make it impossible to sit down. I also resisted the temptation to put them in rude places.
Balls-on sticks proved to be relatively straightforward. Cheap tennis balls are easy to find, and I rifled through my Sundry Boxes Of Potentially Useful Things (subsection Long and Thin) to find a short length of leftover black curtain rod, and a garden stake which needed but a layer of gaffer tape to render it black. Small cross cuts in the tennis balls and a bit of brute force later, the balls were stuck very firmly indeed to the sticks. Yay!
Damn those things are fun to play with.
Final touches
Spots! We needed more spots! There were no more orange ping pong balls to be had, but thanks to my art show experience last year I immediately thought of the fuzzy half of the white velcro dots used to hang pictures. Two trips to Office Works, an eternity of scanning stationery shelves, and two boxes of dots later we were there.
I had planned to draw dots on our faces for the fine detail face motion capture, but I ran out of time to find a pen that would show up well, not come off with inevitable sweat, but *would* come off with some kind of gentle solvent. It was harder than I thought and in the end I didn't find materials that wouldn't collectively melt my face off. The orange stickers had to do, and though they travelled a bit (I found them in surprising places the next day), they worked for long enough to do their job.
Multiple sets of study underwear. If they didn't do the job of blurring the edges of certain bits of anatomy I really don't want to know.
Getting frocked up
Climbing into these outfits with Husband in a cheap hotel room felt frankly kinky. Nuff said.
Should we have won a prize?
There is generally some controversy about the judging at the Swancon masquerade. As a single Mocap person there is no way on the world that I would have won the individual prize against some of the costumes/constructions there (which I didn't), but as a team, I think we held our own and I'm comfortable with the win. I think we conveyed a certain amount of enthusiasm for our characters that didn't hurt, although I find the actual business of being at the masquerade and getting photographed quite frankly terrifying.
So, if you think those costumes were something I tossed together off the top of my head, quickly, or indeed cheaply, you'd be wrong. But it was fun and I hope you liked them :-)
