"RIVET" ROBOT HALLOWEEN COSTUME

Laurent CanniccioniLaurent Canniccioni ✭
edited October 2015 in Halloween Costume Contest
Hello Trick or Treaters!
I'm a sculptor and prop maker from Montreal and I love nothing more than making cool Halloween costumes! When this year my 5 year old daughter told me she wanted to be a robot (a long lasting obsession of hers) I was not going to disappoint her! A brief search on the internet quickly informed me that most parents idea of a robot costume is a square box wrapped in tin foil, so I decided to create something that was as far away as possible from that. 

I gave myself some inspirational direction: nothing could be cooler than a mix of "Aliens" power-loader mixed up with a Miyazaki styled robot, right? I wanted the giant arm and claw to be puppeteered by my daughter and made sure she could open and close the claw with a trigger.

After making a mannequin from an outline of her in 1.5 inch isolation foam to build the costume over, the challenge was to make things as lightweight as possible (the whole costume weights only several pounds), and also enable a warm getup underneath as in Montreal, Halloween can be quite cold! The arms are made of pink isolation foam, wrapped in Corroplast and a very thin plastic sheeting on top to look smooth and give it some resistance. The hand is made of eva foam, as is the torso. The foam is glued on top of a front and back shape of Corroplast to minimize flexibility and help it keep it's shape. Both arms have a free joint at the shoulder and both elbows bend naturally.  The boots and kneepads are all eva foam. It was the first time I worked with eva foam and it was a blast!

A robot wouldn't be complete without some lighting, so I used blue Leds for the eyes and 2 red flashing leds inside the heart to simulate the beating. The heart was sculpted and then vacuformed to be opaque once painted, but still transparent enough to let light from the leds bleed out.

http://youtu.be/_dOIZVeOEqo

All the detailing is part craft foam, various bits and parts,  about 300 different sized googly eyes  (5 sizes in all) for the rivets and the whole thing was sealed and weathered to look old and rusty with acrylics over a battered metal rustoleum base. And that's it! Happy Halloween!

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