Dancin_Fool
Well-Known Member
Hey Everyone,
Not sure if this should live in costumes or props or where exactly. Anyways we finally got our wedding pictures back and I wanted to share some of them with you. My fiancee and I got married this past halloween and early in the planning process my wife to be suggested that we should have a costume/halloween aspect to our wedding since costuming is such a huge part of my life. It was the greatest day of my life and it couldn't have happened without all the help from my new wife and all my amazing family and friends.
We decided on having a fall theme for the ceremony and reception and had to decide on what we wanted to do for costumes. Now of course I wanted to do transformers, perhaps Arcee and Hot Rod as armor based costumes is my specialty but my fiancee wanted something where she could wear a pretty dress and still be a bride.
What we decided on was Disney's Beauty and the Beast, this was my first foray into anything organic. My wife to be found her Belle dress and the rest of her costume fairly quickly on ebay, my costume was another matter. My first thought was to start building up clay and sculpt the mask, however being my first foray into sculpting I decided to take a different approach. I modelled a low poly version of beast in 3ds Max and then built it using the pepakura method that I'm fairly complicated with. I then used this as an armature to build up my Beast sculpt.
All in all I was quite happy with how the final sculpt turned out but now I had the difficult task of creating a mold, this did not go so well. I built up what I planned to be a two part mold using Ultra Cal 30. This didn't go so well I really didn't know what I was doing and didn't make the mold nearly thick enough or strong enough. When I started trying to separate the two parts the whole mold started flaking apart, as I pulled them apart the mold quickly started to disintegrate, I realized I was in serious trouble. Luckily I had an amazing wife to be and she told me to calm down and think about the situation, so rather than destroy the mold I paused and thought about my options.
After quite a bit of thought I decided to turn it into a one part mold and trash my sculpt. so I spent some time reinforcing what was still connected and then began to squash the sculpt and pull it out piece by piece out of the mold. It worked perfectly, aside from the parts of the mold that had already collapsed. I wound up just gluing these parts together as I knew most of the sculpt would be covered in hair in the end anyways.
Some of the damage
The next big piece of the costume was the muscle suit. I didn't want to be one of those costumes that had a cool head piece and then a body that looked totally out of proportion. So I used the duct tape dummy method to create a body to work on. I bought some cheap under armor from walmart and started covering it in foam muscles using various muscle anatomy images as reference. When I had built enough muscle definition and size to be happy with I took measurements so I knew what size suit I would need to cover the suit.
The final part of the mask was the hair... ugh not fun. I had sculpted a ton of detail into the mask in case I didn't have time to cover it in hair and as I began to coat the mask in hair it was a bit sad to see this detail disappear. I built up the hair layer by layer a little bit at a time using liquid latex to glue the hair on. I took a few days to coat the entire mask in hair. Unfortunately I couldn't get the exact colors that the Beast has in the movie but it still turned out pretty nice.
The other aspect to this build was the legs. I originally planned on making digigrade stilts and set to work building them out of wood. However my wife to be didn't think that dancing and walking in stilts was a good idea for the wedding, she was probably right. What I did instead was model a pair of wolf legs in 3ds max, and then build them using the pepakura method. I then covered these with crepe hair and used cut up plastic pop bottles which I painted black as toe nails. I then cut a hole in the top of them, and in the bottom of them and wore them like boots walking on the tips of my toes and using the hair to hide my feet, it worked fairly well.
After this I had to order a suit off ebay, this actually turned out to be one of the biggest disasters. Finding a royal blue suit with tales on ebay is impossible, all of the beast costumes available commercially look like cheap garbage. So I found a nice navy blue tux with tails and ordered it. Unfortunately what I got was a blue pinstripe suit with tales, thankfully it was in the right size. We took it to a tailor four days before the wedding hoping that she would be able to do something, and thankfully she did an amazing job within a couple days she managed to add tails to this jacket and take in the inner portions to make it look like a perfect tailed tuxedo. The day before the wedding one of the bridesmaids added the final bits of gold touch ups to the arms and pants.
Another smaller aspect of the build was the eyes. What I did for this was I took two styrofoam balls and build up layer of white enamel, until they had a good glossy look to them, then I just painted them using blue/black/white enamels to make them look like glass eyes, trying to keep the cartoony look that Disney characters have.
The other big aspect of the wedding was the haunted house. Me and a good friend spent 6 months spending every spare weekend and a few days of the week building all the elements of the haunted house. We built it all out of styrofoam with generic wooden frames. We built up 40 wooden frames, and around 20 interior walls. We also built an entire exterior for the house. The interior had tons of props we aquired over the 6 months as well as a large fire place and stair case. We smashed a hole in one of the living room walls which led to a graveyard which we built a fake cast iron fence with the help of my father, much credit goes to him for the fence he did a great job with it. We also built a few faux tree's out of wire mesh and paper mache for the grave yard. It was great we had a number of nods to the Disney haunted house, even with our own version of madame leota! Just a note on the photo's when we actually had the haunted house open all the lights were off and we had lit the whole interior, you can see some of this lighting in the photos even with the lights on.
Building Walls
Stencil for the walls
It was amazing how well the whole house came together on construction day we had 6 hours to take all these parts we had build and put them all together to make up an actual haunted house, luckily we had a ton of people who wanted to help out and it all went up fairly quick, we rented a truck and managed to bring everything over in a single load. All in all it couldn't have went any better than it did.
So that's my wedding story, I'm lucky to have such an amazing wife to make this all possible and thanks to everyone who's actually read all the way through this. Now that it's all over with it's back to construction of my Iron Man files which I know all the Iron Man builders have been waiting for. I'll leave you guys with a few of my favourite photos from the wedding.
Thanks
-Randy, the dancing fool
The reception hall before guests
http://img607.imageshack.us/img607/1796/r150.jpg
Fun loving Sesame Street Aliens
The best man as a treasure troll
My sister(a bridesmaid) and her husband(a groomsman) as little bo peep and woody
Another groomsman as Link
The maid of honor as Tinkerbell
The MC and my haunted house building partner as Jack Sparrow and his GF in a feathered parrot dress
Jack Sparrow and Tinkerbell singing their own version of Journey's Don't Stop Believin(our song)
***** popped in to say hello
Not sure if this should live in costumes or props or where exactly. Anyways we finally got our wedding pictures back and I wanted to share some of them with you. My fiancee and I got married this past halloween and early in the planning process my wife to be suggested that we should have a costume/halloween aspect to our wedding since costuming is such a huge part of my life. It was the greatest day of my life and it couldn't have happened without all the help from my new wife and all my amazing family and friends.
We decided on having a fall theme for the ceremony and reception and had to decide on what we wanted to do for costumes. Now of course I wanted to do transformers, perhaps Arcee and Hot Rod as armor based costumes is my specialty but my fiancee wanted something where she could wear a pretty dress and still be a bride.
What we decided on was Disney's Beauty and the Beast, this was my first foray into anything organic. My wife to be found her Belle dress and the rest of her costume fairly quickly on ebay, my costume was another matter. My first thought was to start building up clay and sculpt the mask, however being my first foray into sculpting I decided to take a different approach. I modelled a low poly version of beast in 3ds Max and then built it using the pepakura method that I'm fairly complicated with. I then used this as an armature to build up my Beast sculpt.
All in all I was quite happy with how the final sculpt turned out but now I had the difficult task of creating a mold, this did not go so well. I built up what I planned to be a two part mold using Ultra Cal 30. This didn't go so well I really didn't know what I was doing and didn't make the mold nearly thick enough or strong enough. When I started trying to separate the two parts the whole mold started flaking apart, as I pulled them apart the mold quickly started to disintegrate, I realized I was in serious trouble. Luckily I had an amazing wife to be and she told me to calm down and think about the situation, so rather than destroy the mold I paused and thought about my options.
After quite a bit of thought I decided to turn it into a one part mold and trash my sculpt. so I spent some time reinforcing what was still connected and then began to squash the sculpt and pull it out piece by piece out of the mold. It worked perfectly, aside from the parts of the mold that had already collapsed. I wound up just gluing these parts together as I knew most of the sculpt would be covered in hair in the end anyways.
Some of the damage
The next big piece of the costume was the muscle suit. I didn't want to be one of those costumes that had a cool head piece and then a body that looked totally out of proportion. So I used the duct tape dummy method to create a body to work on. I bought some cheap under armor from walmart and started covering it in foam muscles using various muscle anatomy images as reference. When I had built enough muscle definition and size to be happy with I took measurements so I knew what size suit I would need to cover the suit.
The final part of the mask was the hair... ugh not fun. I had sculpted a ton of detail into the mask in case I didn't have time to cover it in hair and as I began to coat the mask in hair it was a bit sad to see this detail disappear. I built up the hair layer by layer a little bit at a time using liquid latex to glue the hair on. I took a few days to coat the entire mask in hair. Unfortunately I couldn't get the exact colors that the Beast has in the movie but it still turned out pretty nice.
The other aspect to this build was the legs. I originally planned on making digigrade stilts and set to work building them out of wood. However my wife to be didn't think that dancing and walking in stilts was a good idea for the wedding, she was probably right. What I did instead was model a pair of wolf legs in 3ds max, and then build them using the pepakura method. I then covered these with crepe hair and used cut up plastic pop bottles which I painted black as toe nails. I then cut a hole in the top of them, and in the bottom of them and wore them like boots walking on the tips of my toes and using the hair to hide my feet, it worked fairly well.
After this I had to order a suit off ebay, this actually turned out to be one of the biggest disasters. Finding a royal blue suit with tales on ebay is impossible, all of the beast costumes available commercially look like cheap garbage. So I found a nice navy blue tux with tails and ordered it. Unfortunately what I got was a blue pinstripe suit with tales, thankfully it was in the right size. We took it to a tailor four days before the wedding hoping that she would be able to do something, and thankfully she did an amazing job within a couple days she managed to add tails to this jacket and take in the inner portions to make it look like a perfect tailed tuxedo. The day before the wedding one of the bridesmaids added the final bits of gold touch ups to the arms and pants.
Another smaller aspect of the build was the eyes. What I did for this was I took two styrofoam balls and build up layer of white enamel, until they had a good glossy look to them, then I just painted them using blue/black/white enamels to make them look like glass eyes, trying to keep the cartoony look that Disney characters have.
The other big aspect of the wedding was the haunted house. Me and a good friend spent 6 months spending every spare weekend and a few days of the week building all the elements of the haunted house. We built it all out of styrofoam with generic wooden frames. We built up 40 wooden frames, and around 20 interior walls. We also built an entire exterior for the house. The interior had tons of props we aquired over the 6 months as well as a large fire place and stair case. We smashed a hole in one of the living room walls which led to a graveyard which we built a fake cast iron fence with the help of my father, much credit goes to him for the fence he did a great job with it. We also built a few faux tree's out of wire mesh and paper mache for the grave yard. It was great we had a number of nods to the Disney haunted house, even with our own version of madame leota! Just a note on the photo's when we actually had the haunted house open all the lights were off and we had lit the whole interior, you can see some of this lighting in the photos even with the lights on.
Building Walls
Stencil for the walls
It was amazing how well the whole house came together on construction day we had 6 hours to take all these parts we had build and put them all together to make up an actual haunted house, luckily we had a ton of people who wanted to help out and it all went up fairly quick, we rented a truck and managed to bring everything over in a single load. All in all it couldn't have went any better than it did.
So that's my wedding story, I'm lucky to have such an amazing wife to make this all possible and thanks to everyone who's actually read all the way through this. Now that it's all over with it's back to construction of my Iron Man files which I know all the Iron Man builders have been waiting for. I'll leave you guys with a few of my favourite photos from the wedding.
Thanks
-Randy, the dancing fool
The reception hall before guests
http://img607.imageshack.us/img607/1796/r150.jpg
Fun loving Sesame Street Aliens
The best man as a treasure troll
My sister(a bridesmaid) and her husband(a groomsman) as little bo peep and woody
Another groomsman as Link
The maid of honor as Tinkerbell
The MC and my haunted house building partner as Jack Sparrow and his GF in a feathered parrot dress
Jack Sparrow and Tinkerbell singing their own version of Journey's Don't Stop Believin(our song)
***** popped in to say hello
