Tron Costumes Part 4: Identity Discs

Part 1: Concept

Part 2: Garment Construction

Part 3: Electronics

So all of the credit for the amazing discs goes to our Dad, who made them completely from scratch and did an incredible job.

Initially, we had looked into buying discs, but the only things we could find online were flimsy foam things that didn't light up and were only painted on one side anyway.  Our Dad is a very talented wood turner and it struck me that the discs were something he might be able to help us with.

What followed was a LOT of emails that went back and forth as we all discussed how these things should be designed and how to make them functional.  Really, Dad is the one who should narrate this process, which I would be happy to add to this post, Dad, if you want to write anything.  But for the time being I have lots of pictures that Dad sent us during the process!

It looks like he's making the groove for the LED lights to go here

See?  There they are

It seems like to took forever for the LED lights to come

He colored epoxy with blue paint pearls and poured it
into the groove and wrapped it all with duct (duck?) tape

Here are the interior grooves with epoxy poured in.

Making the inside bevel

And the outside bevel

Look at those beautiful angles

Adding the beautiful detailing

The back of the discs are removable, and you can see inside he has 8 AA batteries lined up providing power to the LED lights.  You can see the switch below.

Beautiful

Here are some different views and lightings as Dad was playing around with his amazing creations.  You can see that even outdoors you can still see that they're lit up.

Here's the back of the disc after being painted black

One concern was how long would these last being lit up?  Dad did some trials to see how long they could stay on and still offer a glow.  I think he gave up around 32 hours when they were still going strong (is that right, Dad?).  Anyway, ridiculously long.  Adam and I haven't even changed the batteries yet and we wore these around all day and night.

At this point in the disc process we started trying to figure out a good way to get these on our backs.  Many more emails went back and forth, and we decided that we wanted an actual piece to mount these on.  Dad came up with a really beautiful design, and the part that I really like is how ingeniously simple they go together.  Dad used rare earth magnets - four on the back of the disc, and four in the "back rack."  Rare earth magnets work really well until you slide them away from each other, then they come apart really easily.  We didn't want gravity to do the sliding for us, so the back rack holds the disc in place and prevents gravity from making the disc slide down.  Then we just twist the disc a little on the rack and -poof- off it comes.  Fabulous.

Dad created this pocket in the back of the back rack where I put the 8 AA batteries that lit up our whole costumes.  I had the entire costumes - jackets and pants/skirt wired into this battery pack.  I kind of like that the identity disc sort of powers us.  

Here's how the disc and back rack fit together

Dad glued velcro onto the back of the back racks, and then I glued and stitched (mostly around the edges) the matching velcro onto the back of our costumes.

Shiiiny

Here's how they looked on the costumes:

Sorry the disc is sideways, Dad.

And here's us at the convention:

These discs got a LOT of attention at the convention, everyone wanted to look at them and hold them, and most people assumed we had bought them.  You should have seen the looks I got from people when I told them our Dad had made them from epoxy and wood.  They are pretty amazing, and the whole time I was working on the costumes I was motivated to try to make the costumes live up to how great the discs were!  I think they turned out pretty awesome.

Thanks, Dad!!  You're the best.

P.S. I might do one more post where I talk about some of the smaller details and about the cool stuff the costumes can do, and about how the day went when we actually wore the costumes.

Tron Costumes Part 3: Electronics, or how Adam and I learn a marketable skill that we never want to use ever again

Here's part 1.
And part 2.

*This part gets really detailed because I'm putting everything I learned out there for anyone who comes along in the future wanting to do this.  I saw some Tron costume guides online that I sure wish had been more detailed.  If you're not here to learn how to do this, just read on and be in awe of how much work we had to do! ;)

So let me do a little 'splaining about this EL tape we were using.  It didn't come in custom pieces.  They only sold it to us in three-foot strips, so if I only needed a piece that was six inches long, I had to cut it off of a long strip and then create a custom connection on the ends.  Below is a picture of the back of an EL strip.  You can see there is a large gray section - that gray stuff is the material that lights up.  On the right you can see there is a tiiiiny strip of gray that runs down the entire right side, and they are separated by a white line.  It might be easier to see lower down.  In order for the strip to light up, both the large and the small gray strips need to have power running to them, and they need to stay separated!

I read online that we could connect two cut pieces of EL tape by taping copper tape along the gray areas.  This turned out to be a really weak connection.  If you waved the strip back and forth the connection would short out - and it's probably because the EL tape we were using had such a tiny strip of gray to work with.  Copper tape probably works great with split EL tape which has two equal sized gray strips to work with, but we were using parallel EL tape which has that tiny gray strip on one side.  (The piece that is pictured above actually works great, but it's the only strip we were ever successful with using the copper tape, and we experimented a lot.)

So we needed an alternative to copper tape.  I went to our EL supplier's website and it turns out they have these "connectors" you can use.  There's a fuzzy video of a guy working at a table showing you how to do this, but because you can't really see what he's doing you sort of just have to go off of what he's saying.  Also I'm pretty sure he's using split EL tape so it's probably easier.  Anyway, I'll show you below how we did our connections and if there's anyone out there who knows a better way of doing it please feel free to comment.

Okay, so these are crimp connectors:

And this is a female "EZ" connector on the right (the boxy black thing) and the two open wires on the left:

Adam would cut away some of the black stuff so he had more wire to work with

You have to solder the crimp connectors to the wires of the EZ connector.  It ends up looking something like this:

See how there's silver gunk on the left side now?  That's the crimp connector attached.

Soldering was Adam's job.

There's a little groove on the back of a crimp connector.  You lay the wire down in the groove, and then melt solder over them both to connect them.  It sounds much easier than it is, Adam can tell you.  He probably soldered around 200 of these little connections.

Once things were soldered, then it was my job to clamp the connections.  The sharp pointy parts of the crimp connector have to go through the EL tape, specifically making contact with the gray stuff that lights up (so that electricity can pass from one through to the other).

The instructions on the left are supposed to be done first.  Then top to bottom.

This is all harder than it looks.  The crimp connectors are actually slightly wider than the thin gray strip on the right (I know it looks green in this picture.  I'm calling it gray), so when I tried to clamp the connector through, sometimes I'd miss the strip completely.  It became an art nailing that tiny sliver right on the money.

This is where the biggest problems came for us on the day we wore our costumes.  You'll noticed in the photos, small sections of our costume weren't lit up.  It's because of these little guys right here.  Sometimes the crimp connectors just disconnected from the gray stuff, even underneath all of the hot glue.

We went back to our hotel in the afternoon after wearing our costumes around for most of the morning.  When I took off our jackets, I noticed that some of the wires had just been bent so many times from us walking around that they snapped.  If you look in the picture above, I should have actually taken the hot glue up higher, right onto the black covering of the wires.  Where the black covering stopped and the bare wires begin is where we had a lot of breaks.  We broke out the ol' soldering iron right there in the hotel room and fixed a lot of this stuff, and we were back on our way that night with almost everything restored.  But it was pretty stressful.

Anyway, most of the time I'd do a female wire in one end and a male wire going out the other end, and my lines ended up looking like this (except usually much longer):

I cut slits in the jackets and pushed the wires through, so all of the wiring (and connectors and hot glue and stuff) are on the inside of the costume, the uninterrupted EL tape is the only thing on the outside of the costumes.  This technique gave me a little trouble later on, I'll talk more about it later.

So once we got all of this figured out, I realized that I needed to map out the wiring on the entire costumes, so I would know how many connectors we would need to solder and supplies to order and all those details.  Here's what that looked like:

I know most of it probably doesn't make sense, but all of the Ms are where I figured I would need a Male connector, the Fs are all female connectors, and Xs are where the lines end.

I also realized that I needed to know how long each strip of EL tape needed to be, so I measured all of the masking tape on our costumes and marked it down, and then tried to map all of those measurements out on 3-foot strips so I would know how many strips to order from the website (we inevitably needed to order more, but it was good to have an idea of what we needed to begin with):

You can see that I needed to label each individual strip of EL tape, I started with A and went all the way through the alphabet, finally ending with HH I think.  Then when we got the tape I had to cut all of those pieces and label them, which you can see below:

Then I had the lengthy job of clamping in all of those connectors we had soldered and hot gluing and taping and testing.  Sometimes they didn't work, most of the time they did.  We got better at it, too.

Once that I was done I started gluing the pieces to the costumes.  (The EL tape comes with an adhesive backing, but it's not quite enough when you're putting this on a costume that is going to flex a lot.)  We used E6000, which is an industrial-grade glue and needs a couple of days to cure completely.  The glue is supposed to be placed on a surface that has been roughed up, so most of the time I took a microplane or grater to the areas that I was going to glue first.  Then after I glued down the strips I put masking tape over it at intervals while it cured just to make sure that there wasn't any sliding out of the right position.

I ran into one problem at joints where I had a narrow angle, like on the chest of Adam's jacket in the picture below:

Because I had wiring coming out of both ends of the EL tape, I had to overlap the two pieces and run one strip over the other and then into a slight slit to the side of the EL tape underneath.  If that doesn't make sense, I don't blame you because I could barely grasp what I was doing even with the pieces in my hands.  Anyway, I didn't like it because it didn't provide a good crisp line where the joint is.  So I pulled it off and came up with the following solution:

Rather than have one wire in at the top of the tape and one wire out at the bottom of the tape, I moved the wiring much closer together so that I had a long strip of EL tape with no wiring!  I was amazed that it still lit up the entire EL strip but it did.  So I used these pieces on the jackets where I had the slight angle - I just ran these pieces out to where the joint was and cut them off at the right angle and glued them down.  It looked much sharper and I was happy with it.

So then came gluing.  Lots of gluing.  I only glued one area at a time and then waited the full two days for it to cure so that I wouldn't mess up the glue while working on a new section.  It took me a few weeks to get everything glued.

But we were still missing something!  Something very important.

 

Part 4: Identity Discs.

Tron Costumes Part 2: Garment Construction

Here's a link to part 1

I knew that sewing my costume from scratch would be really time consuming, so it's one of the first things I started on.  (We also ordered a few supplies from our EL tape website and started experimenting with how it worked and how we could manipulate it early on).

I needed a cheap fabric because I didn't want to pay for real leather, so I asked around at sewing stores and landed on vinyl.  Vinyl is like what you use to cover tables when you need something waterproof.  It had the firmness that I was hoping for, color and texture were good,  the biggest downside is that it's not very breathable but since it was only a vest I figured I'd be okay.

The inside of the vinyl fabric is this yucky gray scratchy stuff, so I also bought a nice, silky black lining fabric and each piece that I cut out of vinyl had an identical piece cut out of the lining fabric and they were sewn together before I started combining any of the actual garment pieces.

I started looking for a vest pattern, which are not too hot right now I can tell you: not a lot of patterns out there.  I had to buy a vintage pattern on etsy for $4.00 (from the 60s), but it had the right kind of look that I was going for.

Here are some photos I took of the process.  Mostly I took photos to send to my mom and ask her questions, because like I said I knew nothing about all of this and she had to answer a million questions for me and advised me.  Thanks, Mom!

Tracing out the pattern:

Cutting (below).  This hurt my knees.  At this point it was still all a big secret so I couldn't complain to anyone, so you get it now!  Ha!  Okay, sorry.

My pattern weights are glass prep dishes.  By the way: you can't iron vinyl.  If the fabric came with a few creases (which happens naturally on the bolt), I used my iron without touching and steamed the heck out of them.  They got a little looser and I pulled and pulled and they relaxed but I'm not sure they went completely away.  It didn't end up being a big problem.

Below are all the pieces cut, lined, labeled, and laid out.  You'll notice that it's much longer than the finished product so I had something to work with when I wanted to create the angled hem.

Below is me in my messy, messy office/sewing room.  We'll just state here that it's very messy and you will all forgive me and we will move on, now, yes?  Great, thanks.

So here is everything initially sewn but with no finishing.  Mom informs me around this point that yes I have to do the facings.  If you don't know what a facing is, just know that it's an invisible pain in the ass that sewers have to deal with and they have all arbitrarily agreed that facings are important and yes you have to do them.  Lame.  Basically a facing is like a huge (unnecessary?!) hem on the inside of a garment that adds structure and neatens out the line.  And yes, I did add them.

Below: Gotta keep the baby contained somehow while Mommy is serging!  Check out my awesome circa-1970's serger.  I had to re-thread the needle 10 times because the thickness of the vinyl layers kept messing it up.  By the way: this is the first project I've ever used my serger on.

The skirt came along in due order.  Except I made an entire other skirt first, and realized that it was too small once I got it mostly put together.  I had read the sizing info on the pattern wrong (rookie).  Had to re-buy the vinyl and lining fabric, trace a new pattern, re-cut everything from the new fabric, re-line it, and put it all together.  But the zipper turned out really nice!!  It was my first zipper :)

Below: Facings are in, hemming is done, zipper is added (made a mistake that still bugs me but whatever).  There's even a kick-pleat in the back.  I used chalk to draw how I thought the angling of the bottom should go.

At this point I started using masking tape a LOT to mark where I thought the lighting strips would end up.  I borrowed a dress form (that's like a mannequin that you put sewing projects on) from a friend (thank you, Brenda!) because it's really hard to put masking tape on your own body and get an idea of how it's looking, don't you think?

Below, I've made my initial cut and I'm trying it on to see how the length looks on my body and do some additional adjustments.

And here's the finished product:

The last step was to hang the vest and skirt on the dress form and do the cutting and angling of the skirt.  

Here's an unflattering picture of me trying on the finished product along with some boots that I found at a thrift store for around $4.00.  I actually went back after this picture and re-hemmed the front of the skirt so it was a bit sharper, not so rounded.  It looked cool but then I ended up having to wear the damn thing backwards anyway so it's not like it really mattered in the end.  Oh well.

Once my vest and skirt were ready to go, I started applying masking tape to mark the design of the lighting.  Adam came over and tried everything on, and I laid out the masking tape, and then I marked the edges of the masking tape with chalk so I would know where to lay the glue down later.  (I used the dress form for my stuff).

But before we could do ANY applying of the lights, we had to get them in working order first!  Next post: we learn how to solder!

Part 3: Electronics

Tron'stumes, or how I made our Tron costumes for SDCC 2013

I thought I would do a post about the creation process for our Tron costumes for San Diego Comic Con 2013.  Most of you have seen our pictures already on Facebook, but for those of you not on The Social Network, here's how they turned out:

That's us on the exhibit hall floor.  Adam found a picture of us on movieviral.com that was taken at night and looks pretty cool (below).  We were waiting for this interminable train to pass so we could cross the street, and we thought it was such a pain but it ended up being kind of lucky!

Here's one more of us at night with an original Tron cosplayer that we found in the gas lamp district of San Diego (below).  By the way, cosplay is what we are doing, it's a thing!  It has it's whole own subculture that I bet you didn't even know existed. ;)  (I didn't up until a couple of years ago!)

So Adam's costume was made from a leather jacket we found at a thrift store for $34.  It was brown but we dyed it black and I think it turned out really good.  Adam's pants were the ones he used last year for his Thor costume.

For my costume I sewed the vest, skirt, and gloves all from scratch, and it was my first time taking on my own costuming project (last year I was Padme from Episode III, but someone else made my costume, although I did make the very elaborate pin on the front of the costume).  So I know where all of the little mistakes are but overall I think it turned out pretty good.

Our Dad is a wood turner, and he turned our amazing discs for us.  Basically they are made of wood, epoxy, and LED lights.

Everything took us about five months from conception to finished product.  When Adam first suggested Tron costumes I was like, "No way.  No way I'll ever have time to do that."  But the idea grew because  it just sounded so cool.  Early on we researched lighting possibilities, and it looked like EL wire or EL tape would be a good way to go.  We decided on EL tape because it's the closest to the look in Tron: Legacy (I think it's what they actually use in the movie although they use a very sophisticated foam/latex suit that has had the EL tape custom made into it.  I researched how they did it in the film).

So here are the first drawings I did of what I envisioned my costume to be like.  At first I was thinking I would wear a full jacket and match Adam, but I realized that I would get too hot.  You can see I was already playing with the idea of wearing a skirt.  Wearing pants did not appeal to me at all, although she wears pants in the film.  So I knew I wasn't going for a straight Quorra costume, it was a little bit of an elaboration on that.

This is the main image from the film that I worked off of:

Here are my second drawings where I firmed up what I was going for (below).  You can see that I've decided on boots and a vest.  It was hard to decide how the zipper would work down the front since there is a strip of lighting that would cross over the zipper line.  The one on the left is the closest to how it turned out.

I designed the bottom hem of the jacket and the skirt to be at alternating angles, to be sort of a scalloped look.  I ended up gluing the lighting to the wrong side of the skirt, so that design point went out the window and now the angles are parallel.  If I could do it over again I would make the angle of the skirt more vertical, or sharper, and obviously I would glue the lighting to the right side, but I think how it ended up was fine.

For Adam's costume, we had the pants and found the jacket before I started to figure out how his lighting would be designed, so I took pictures of him, printed them out, and drew in pencil some ideas for how the lighting would go.  I mostly used pictures of Sam Flynn from the movie but I also looked at how other Tron costumers had designed their Flynn costumes.

Some primary costume design concerns were: 1. We needed to be able to go to the bathroom (I didn't want a lot of wiring going between the upper and lower pieces).  2. Flexibility and sitting down: I didn't want to be sitting on lighting or wiring and I didn't want the lighting pieces to do any extreme bending. I think we did our best and we definitely learned a lot.

I'll have to break this up into multiple posts, so next will come the actual garment construction for my costume.

Part 2: Garment Construction

Just in case you thought I was kidding

Here's proof of the amorous, hilarious  moments I stumble upon with Jane and the kitties.

(Her face is painted because we went to the fair)

Moar Cats

I've had a request for more about my cats. I decided to buckle down and do some more of my terrible illustrations. You're welcome.