After going three straight years without dressing up for Halloween, I decided that I was long overdue for dressing up and pretending to be someone else for a weekend. Anyone following me on Twitter or connected to me on Facebook or Flickr has seen pictures for months of my build of Thomas Bangalter’s helmet. Thomas is one of the two members of the house sensation Daft Punk. You’ve heard them even if you think you haven’t.

Ingredients needed to become Thomas for a weekend:
1 Pair Black Leather Pants
1 Black Single Row Grommet Belt
1 Black Leather Jacket
1 Black Mask
1 Pair Leather Gloves
1 Pair Black Shoes
1 Skateboard Helmet
6 Sheets Cardstock
1 LED Belt Buckle
1 Pad Metallic Silver Origami Foil
1 Can Fiberglass Resin Jelly
2 Cans Bondo Body Filler
6 Sheets 80 Grit Sandpaper
3 Sheets 120 Grit Sandpaper
300 Screw-backed Studs
1 Safety Visor
3 Square Ft. Window Tint
1 Can Spray Primer
1 Can Metallic Silver Spray Paint
4 Tubes Super Glue

The three things that require manually labor to create are the helmet, the jacket, and the gloves. We’ll start at the top and work our way down.

To make the helmet I followed the instructions on the “Make a Daft Punk Helmet” Instructable available here. I substituted spray-on tint for a roll of tint and also added an LED display in the visor which was accomplished by taping a programmable display from an LED belt buckle into the helmet just above eye level. The entire helmet-building process took around 25 hours (not counting the time waiting for things to dry or cure) put in on weekends.

 

Cardstock and Helmet	Layer of Fiberglass Jelly

 

 

 

Ears Attached	Full Layer of Bondo

 

 

 

Sanded for Painting	Almost Fully Painted

 

 

Moving on to the jacket, I had ordered a jacket from eBay that was to be the jacket for the costume, but by Thursday it hadn’t yet come. In a last-minute frenzy I used my lunch break last Thursday to scramble a jacket locally and found one that was good enough to work at Buckle. A week before I had the jacket I printed out the Daft Punk logo at a width of 12 inches and placed studs along the logo to create a dot-pattern to tape to the back of the jacket to know where to puncture the jacket for the studs. Using a knitting needle I sat down for five straight hours Thursday night and studded the entire pattern before passing out with a sever case of numb hands and exhaustion.

 

Stud Pattern	Completed Jacket

 

 

The gloves were fairly simple to accomplish after I found some metallic silver origami foil at a craft store. Before this project I was unaware of the existence of origami foil. It worked great and is much less prone to wrinkling and tearing like tinfoil is. With my hand in the glove, I measured where my fingers bent inside the glove and made segments of glove treatments cut out of cardstock. Those cardstock pieces I then traced onto sheets of the origami foil, cut out, glued the foil to the cardstock counterpart, and glued the back of the cardstock to the glove. The entire glove process took about two hours.

 

Cardstock Base	Completed Gloves

 

 

That brings us to the completed costume which I wish I had more pictures of. Plenty of people I didn’t know took pictures with me in my costume so I hope to find them somewhere on Facebook in the coming week. Make the jump over to my Flickr set dedicated to the project to check out all the pictures from the project as well as any more pictures of the entire costume I come across.