Friday 11 September 2015

Frogman Number One

So the first costume I made was in February 2014.

Having seen them around I did some research and found out what was available.

Having a few conversations with an online EL wire shop really helped.  I wanted to ensure that I understood how much wire could be driven by one battery and inverter.  Or to put it another way, if I bought the bigest battery and inverter, how many meters of wire could I run.

It was all a bit confusing so I simply found a shop online called EL Wire Craft and they helped me out.





I wanted a full suit that I could manually flash different sections by hand.

I bought an ex-army hooded overall from eBay and took some planning photos and drew on a basic outline.

In fact, when I made the costume, I had lots of wire and so the outlines were much more complicated.

You can see that in the video below.


Then I costed up and purchased the stuff from here:  Neon wire





For this costume I decided to buy a hot glue gun.


I don't have any photos of the wire being attached but it didn't take took long.




I designed a simple switch box so that either of the 3 channels could be stitched permanently on, or flashed individually.  This ran by wire down my arm to be concealed in my left hand.

Again, no photos exist of said box.

The finished suit looked like this.........  Note, this video has NO post production,  WYSIWYG.


I wore the suit to two public events.

The first was a local camp and it was amazing to wear.  I wore it from late evening through to the early hours.  UNFORTUNATELY, during the early hours, I stood too near a fire to warm up and the hot glue melted.  The EL Wire was still OK, it was just that about a third of it was completely handing off the suit.  I didn't notice this at first and caught the wire on some trees.

By the morning, I realised that repairs are a thing of the suits.

After repairing, I wore this suit to Glastonbury Festival and again, loved it.

Frog xx


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