Now a brief message from security from crash and nerf herder.
He never gets tired of that, I swear. Thanks, Alex. I've not heard that 12 times today.
All right. How's everybody doing today? So my name is crash. This is nerf herder. And we are
goons but we're also members of the 501st legion. So that is a costuming group if you don't
know about where we have to build screen accurate
armor or screen accurate costumes for the bad guys. And we thought for you guys we'd talk a
little bit about how the costumes are built and the technologies involved. Because look here,
this is all about learning how to build things, learning how to hack and make stuff. And it's a
great making and a physical skill to do all of this. So I'll show you a few things and then
answer whatever questions you guys have. Sound good? All right. So what movie is he from?
We know Star Wars. Which one?
The force awakens. What? Transformer. Oh, first order. Did you want to see? All right. So he's
wearing a first order storm trooper. Now what's interesting about his costume is in the movies
these are custom 3D printed for all the actors. So it probably costs, I don't know, $10,000 or
more to do that. Obviously that's not the kind of thing that's going to be affordable for somebody
who wants to build their own thing. So I'm going to show you a little bit of that. I'm going to
show you a little bit of what this is. So this is what his costume is. You can see this is just
the costume of a inimitable force. And so his is actually made using a technique called vacuum
forming. So who knows what vacuforming is? Yep. So with vacuforming, what you do is you have a
mold. So for example, for my blaster, this could be a mold for a vacuform. They heat up a piece of
plastic, drop it down so the plastic conforms to this, and use a vacuum to pull out of the bottom.
And so that gives you the exact plastic molds.
So when we get these costumes, these pieces all come as raw vacuum formed pieces that we
actually have to put together. His is super hard. How many hours? About 120 hours to build.
About 120 hours to build his because since they 3D printed it in the films, there's seams all
have to, there's no seams in it. And so he has to glue everything together, shape it, fit it,
put a thing called bondo on it, sand it and then paint over it again. Now mine's easier because
it's really old. This is 1977 technology and so all of my pieces are actually raw vacuum formed
and then these strips here are just designed to cover up the seams. Now the other fun thing is we
all like to play with helmet electronics. So if you come up and you want to take a look, I have
fans in my helmet and you can hear all these noises from my chest plate because I have an
amplifier.
.
, let me unsnap here if I can, an amplifier hooked up to my iPhone which is playing background
loops and does the voice distortion. And so that's how we're actually able to go ahead and do
that. And there's a bunch of different ways to do it. You can even get speakers that actually fit
into these mic tips here. So what questions do you guys have, if anything? Yes.
.
Come on up. Question? Okay, forgot the question, next. Why do we put so much time into making
them? Why are you in this room? It's fun. And you learn new skills. Now for us what we do is we go
out to charity events. We have fun. We have fun. We have fun. We have fun. We have fun. We have fun. It's a
events, other public events. We do hospital visits to help sick kids. So it's actually a
charity organization. For the grownups in the room it's like the Shriners except we dress up as
stormtroopers instead of wearing silly little hats and driving around in little cars. At least
that's what he told me. Yes? So voice distortion, there's two techniques that most people use.
What I have is an app on my iPhone and it plugs in and I have a wired headset and that iPhone
app actually does the voice distortion. It's called Trooper Talk and it also has the background
loops. The other thing is called an iCom and it's a dedicated electronic device that, you know,
before iPhone days they mostly came up with and that also does the background loops and the voice
distortion. Yes? How much? So the cost in vacuum for me is of building the walls?
And then having the actual vacuum change. Once you have your mold, the sheet of plastic is $5 or $6.
So you can make out a lot of them very quickly once you've got the cooling. Versus for the
printer, it's nice because you can print anything. But, you know, once you build the mold it's only
going to do that one thing. A lot of people will build their own vacuum form tables with an old
heating element out of an oven and a shop vac. So, I mean, you can build those very cheap. So it
sort of all depends on if you want to buy something.
Or build it all DIY. Okay. I can just yell louder, too.
Any other questions? Yeah. Question. Can storm troopers go in water? Well, it's all plastic, so
probably. But I can barely walk and I don't really want to try and swim. Any other questions?
All right. If you guys want to come up, I can let you see a piece or two. We can do some
pictures. Thanks for your time.