Posted on November 2nd, 2009 in Projects.
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.
1 Comment
Posted on October 9th, 2009 in Projects, Web.
The VideoWrangler project is my work on the old VideoPress plugins by Charles Iliya Krempeaux as well as the vPIP plugin by Enric Teller in order to make the plugins compatible with the newest versions of WordPress and to reduce script size at plugin runtime.
The VideoWrangler plugins and complete documentation can be found on the VideoWrangler documentation page here.
The two blogs that I used as the basis for the plugin updates are http://www.ryanishungry.com and http://www.mikemoon.net. Their problem? When upgrading to the newest version of WordPress the plugins which drove their site quit working, yielded errors, or stopped the entire page from loading. Tracing through the plugin code I narrowed the problems down to two main sources: WordPress’ database structure had changed and the large amount of information contained on these blogs was exceeding the maximum allowed php script size on their servers.
With problems pinpointed, VideoPress was on its way to working once again within a few hours by updating references in the VideoPress code to entries in the WordPress database. The script size issue lead me back to vPIP to create a leaner function used to fetch chunks of data from the database. The original way VideoPress would gather vPIP data was for vPIP to supply VideoPress with a list of every single video entry that existed on the blog. While that works fine for small numbers, Ryanne and Mike’s blogs had years of back video catalog that made calling all of that data at once an enormous waste of space and resources. To scale back demand on the server I created a new function within vPIP that was only used to recall chunks of archive video data to be displayed on each archive page or to be displayed in the recent videos reel. This way the function would only return a set number of entries (which is specified in the plugin’s preference) as opposed to retrieving all of the site’s entries.
The updated version of the VideoPress project has been renamed as VideoWrangler to signal a fork from the original set of plugins and a change in project management. Updates to the VideoWrangler plugins will begin in November (time allowing) and will address the functionality requests from the video blogging community. The most up-to-date version of the plugins will always be available for download as a complete package or separately on the VideoWrangler documentation page.
No Comments
Posted on August 24th, 2009 in Projects, Tech, Video, Web.
Built using: Flash CS3 and ActionScript 3
Based on: ‘Flash video template: Dynamic video playlist‘
Video Player Demo Page
Version dev.3
This version brings the Flash Player even closer to complete. The sharing options in the right pane are now all functional as originally planned. The email button pops up a form that asks the user for their name, email address, and a friend’s email address and emails the current video that the user is watching to their friend’s email address. The link button pops up a form that displays the current video’s URL along with a copy button that copies the URL onto the user’s clipboard for them to paste elsewhere.
Small bug fix:
Links no longer return null link values.
I am going to do some more testing on the flash player itself to make sure there that no more bugs exist on the player and then working towards creating a control panel for the flash player to make maintenance easy. It will include the ability to upload videos and tag them with content tags. Those content tags will be used to generate related video reels for all of your videos. The control panel will also eliminate the need to update any XML by hand, streamlining the process of adding videos to the player. If you find any bugs in the flash player leave the bug below in the comments section.
No Comments
