X-Men Homecoming Float

[Snakenator9]

Hey guys, me again! So you may have heard that my school's homecoming theme is Marvel, and our class has chosen (drum roll please) X-Men!!! X-Men is pretty much my favorite group of super heroes, so I was obviously psyched out.


But, as you probably know, it seems like kids these days are being ripped away from he realm of comics and superhero goodness, so I immediately got nervous about how it would turn out. So, I went straight to my class president and explained that to her, and she agreed. In fact, only 2 other people out of the group working on the float have ever read or seen X-Men, and about half of the others have never heard of the name! So, I was out in charge of the float, along with the two others to help me out with ideas and opinions. So, here's what we have after one day of work:



Here is our make shift support system for screwing on the walls.

Here is the front after a little work. Notice the first building being built up on the side.

The painting on the right is done, or at least on the walls it is. The building is getting more complete.

Here is the plan. We are having the present day academy on the left, and a torn down, messed up future academy on the right. There will be a "portal" in the center to go to and from each side. There are initials and shortened names to show where everyone will be going. We will be having tons of various mutants in front of the float to perform a dance/fight sort of thing during it. Gambit will be down there and instead of throwing cards, he will be throwing candy into the audience. We will be having a battle on the float.

Here are all the characters we plan to have. The circled are "mandatory", uncircled are "would like to have, starred are "would like to, but doesn't really matter". We also have the chart of who is fighting who.

More progress. The first building is done except for details and painting. Center portal will have a curtain with changing lights pointed at them to create a cool effect. We started on the second building too.

I am also in charge of all the props and special parts of the costumes, ie. helmets, armor, etc. here is the magneto helmet base.

I didn't feel like we could have an X-Men float without a centinel, or at least part of one. So here is the base for that, completely free handed. I am really proud of it, not to boast.




So here is a little about what is going to be happening. We have 1 minute to do this, so it should be perfect. Calmer X-Men music will be playing, and then will transition into the TV series theme and the "good guys" will walk out of the first academy. The group in front of the house will begin the dance/fight thingie. The guys on the float will head over, Blink will open the portal, and the "bad guys" will come out of the second academy. They will begin fighting until about 40 seconds. Then the music will intensify to something like "Xavier's Theme" from DoFP. That is when Prof. X and Magneto will come out from the two academies. Then, at about 50 seconds everyone will start walking towards the edge of the float except Wolverine and Phoenix. At the end of the minute, music will be at its peak, and Wolverine will stab Phoenix like in the movie, and lights will go out and music will stop. And that is the end of the float. BUT, my favorite part: before the music starts Deadpool will be sitting on the center of the float on the edge, trying to eat a chimichanga through his mask. He will be doing this the whole thing, not really paying attention to anyone. When everyone else starts to back away he will get up and walk away too so as not to draw attention from Wolverine and Phoenix.


so, any questions, ideas, feedback? I would LOVE to hear what you think of the whole thing.


thanks, Dawson

 

[Snakenator9]

Well, here's some photos of my update. I coated the helmet in paper mâché and coated it in plastic. I'm going to do another coat and then paint it. I plan to do a sort of battle damaged rustic look. I don't really like the bright purple of the helmet I'm modeling and I really don't like the look of the movie helmets design, so I'm going to combine the two and make a comic style helmet with the colors of the movie. So it will be purplish brown sort of color, but have a silver coat on the "M" looking parts in the front. I will then use bronze acrylic paint to paint the tips and top edges of the M to make it look a little rusty. Just a little realism for a very unreal helmet.



I also started painting the sentinel head. I will be adding in an eye (probably half a ball). What do you guys think would be good color for the eye? And I will also be painting the top part purple like the original sentinels head. As you can see I just mad my own version of a sentinel with a few ideas from comics and movies thrown in there. I really like the look of the black paint. The picture doesn't do it justice. It started to dissolve into and mix with the silver so it looks like marks from an explosion or something like that.

so, any opinions? Ideas? Improvements?

thanks, Dawson

 

[Snakenator9]

Well, here's another update! It's really coming along, but there is still more to do before Friday night.


We finished, or are almost finished with the building construction.

Sorry for the quality. By the time I took the photos tonight it was almost pitch dark out. The present day academy is near complete. We just need to add on the brick painting.

The future is not nearly as far ahead as the other. We plan to paint it the same as the present day build, but only darker. We will also have the door hanging on its hinges to simulate ruggedness, as well as a few bricks on the ground so that it looks like they fell off.

We started painting the walls and floors. We had painted the floor green on one side, but decided we would just get astro turf and lay it down. Remember, this is a private school, so most of the kids here have money to throw away, and that is how we can afford the turf and other pricey items, such as the water fountain we will have. I started drawing out the trees, but it was just too dark, even a few hours beforehand, to be able to see the pencil marks. So I will paint over them tomorrow.

- - - Updated - - -

I forgot! I need to write out the fight scenes. Anyone have any ideas how to do this? I figure we shouldn't exactly send a bunch of high schoolers out and tell them to fake fight.

 

[Snakenator9]

Well, it's certainly coming along! We have 3 days left for everything to be completely finished. I started designing the choreography for the fighting on the float.

heres es the basic fight between Phoenix and Wolverine:
[video]https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=igM5LVdRYdY[/video]




Bricks are done. The ivy will be put in different places, we are just seeing how it looks with the coloring. We will also have a door there.

Done with the happy part of the float painting. We will also have a small fountain and turf instead of green paint.

Here's a view of what's going on with it

We also got some of the props in. I just couldn't resist the urge to put on the wolverine claws!

so we still have a lot to do, but we should be done soon. I am working on what the announcer will read as the float goes by: "Here comes the Sophomore float, the X-Men, traveling in time and fighting in the future to save the past." It's simple, but gets the job done. What do you think?

 

[Snakenator9]

So, we finally did it. You may have realized that part of our float didn't really fit in: the sky. On one side we have a very realistic night scene, and on the other we had a very happy and cartoony scene. But, we finally fixed it, or started too.



In case you didn't see it before, here's what it previously looked like.

This is what it looks like as of now. We wanted to have a really nice scene, so we had the artist from the other side paint it. But, she can't work on it again till tomorrow, so we have left it like this.

Here is the finished wall on the future side.

Here is the now very brick covered institute of the future. We also have a door on it, but I took the picture beforehand.

We also put the fabric up on the portal, as well as got the block for Storm to stand on. The door is also on the past institute, but none of these I got picture of. The turf arrived today, so we will put it in tomorrow.

 

[Snakenator9]

Here's some more progress! Cutting it really close to the due date though... :^/



The turf is down and awesome!

Door is all good. We also have some ivy to put on it.

Near completed cracked bricks on the future side.

A look at the sentinel head.

Here's the complete view of the future side.

Almost done with the painting of the present day side.

tomorrow is the due date!!!!!!!! I'm nervous as heck, but also super excited.

 

[Snakenator9]

Well, Homecoming 2014 was last night, and it was awesome! We did incredible! I am so proud of everyone who took part, because it turned out amazing. We all came together at the end and it really worked out great. PLUS, I started a generator all by myself! I'm proud of that... Anyways, here's the video of our float:

I think we really did great! you can't really see the whole thing in the video, like Professor X who was behind the portal, and Deadpool throwing candy on the edge, but you can see the basics.

Now the sad part: we got third.

The freshmen were Thor, and they had no story line. They had three scenes from the first movie, the diner, the city scene where he fights the Destroyer, and in front of the Asgardian city. They only had thor there, just doing random stuff, no story line.

The Juniors got first, though they shouldn't have. They had a lab where a junior high kid went in a big tube thing and then a highschooler came out dressed like Captain America. Then they just had the scene from Captain America 1 where the girls are all dancing and stuff. It was good, but it just focused more on the dancing than Cap.

And the seniors got second. They should have gotten third. They were spiderman and did a decent job. They had Spidey jumping around on buildings fighting Venom. It was decent, but then the dancers came. They scarred my eyes! I don't mean to be mean or sound like a sore loser, but the dancing was terrible! I think the only reason they got 2nd was because they are seniors, and so they HAVE to do good.

Once again, I don't really care which place we got because I just liked being able to do it. I think the disadvantage we had was that X-Men has SO MANY characters in it, not many people know who everyone is. If we had focused mainly on Woverine we may have done better, but that just isn't how the comics are. Even without trying to we still did a lot with him.

so, what does everyone think? I really want to start a conversation on here, and no one else seems to wanna!

Thanks, Dawson