The Collar!

I really need to be less shouty about it.  It's not like this is the 80's or anything, and big collars and shoulder-pads are the rage any more.  Still, Vorlons have impressive collars (which may or may not match the cuffs - you'll have to e-mail me if you want to know more about that), collars that'd make Ming the Merciless green(er) with envy, so maybe it was worth shouting about.  But I'm getting off-track and I've only just started.

So where to start when building a Vorlon encounter suit?  I'd had a number of conflicting thoughts as to how I was going to build the thing, and was unsure as to how I was going to build the actual frame.  Was I going to wear the collar as an actual collar, balanced on some sort of shoulder harness?  Was I going to make it a free-standing structure that I'd carry around instead?  Or would I do something else.  I didn't know.  So I decided to just get on with building it and let necessity guide my hand.  In retrospect I would've come up with something different, but hindsight's a wonderful thing, and I'm famed for dallying for ages.  I needed to get on with something, so I did, and started on the collar.

Now I know that there are at least a thousand better ways of doing this, and given more time and more money I would've done things differently.  A properly-welded, lightweight aluminium frame would've made a great skeleton for an encounter suit.  But I had neither the skills nor the materials nor the tools to create such a thing.  So I started with... a hula hoop.

One hula hoop, slightly bent

I had no idea how difficult it would be to buy a hula hoop in January.  But apparently they're "seasonal" toys.  Who knew?


Anyway, once I'd found a relatively-sturdy hoop, I bent it into roughly the right shape, and then reinforced the shape (for the short term) with gaffer tape.  Gaffer tape's going to play a massive role in this project, by the way.  So if you're somehow allergic... stop reading now.

Stopping things from moving since ... actually, who knows?

That was the very basic skeleton, but I now needed something to pad it out.  Something lightweight and flexible but sturdy.  Luckily I had an old foam mattress lying around, which after destroying my spine and then spending several years under the stairs was no longer good for its original purpose.  So I started chopping it into pieces that I'd be able to use to wrap around the skeleton and give the collar some bulk.

Chopping a foam mattress with a kitchen knife - not
the best of ideas...

Of course those pieces were too long, so I chopped them again to be the right length.  Once the pieces were the right size, I wrapped them around the hoop and secured them in place with a little gaffer tape, as so:

Encounter suits - well insulated

With the foam in place I was happy with the rough shape of the collar that I had.  So I then went and secured it all in place with a LOT of gaffer tape.

Ambassador Kojak - if the collar fits...

All told, I think I used nearly 200 metres' worth of gaffer tape making this costume.  I try not to think about that.  Luckily I'd also managed to estimate the size of the hoop that I'd need quite nicely, and with all the foam on this collar was the perfect size.  (I won't provide actual measurements here - if you're building your own encounter suit you'll probably want to tailor it for your own height and needs, anyway.)

Happy with the size of the collar, I then decided just to build up the inside of the collar a little more, in order to actually match the real thing.

Yet more foam and tape

When I was satisfied that this had added the correct amount of bulk I then - yes, you've guessed it - covered the all of the new bulk with even more gaffer tape.  Where would we be without gaffer tape?

Kinky bondage Kosh

At this stage it was looking a bit crude, but I knew that once it was done and the details added it would look okay.  And all this hadn't actually taken that long - just a couple of hours in a single evening.  Fantastic.

What did take a lot of time was this:

My own, personal hell

In order to provide a smooth and paintable surface, and also something I could use to build up some detail, I covered the entire thing in papier mache.  Conventional wisdom was that I should have built it up to be a few millimetres thick, so that it would be quite sturdy.  In the end though, I didn't manage quite that much.

No wonder I suffered - I managed to infuse the encounter
suit with pure, sparkly evil...

Covering one side of the collar took me the better part of an hour.  This meant that covering the entire thing took two hours.  But of course I had to wait at least an hour for one side to dry before I could turn it over, so the whole task easily took three hours.  Given that amount of time, I only managed four layers of papier mache before I basically ran out of time.  If I'd not had a day job or other commitments I could've done more, especially since I had a whole three weeks at the start of the papier mache ordeal.  But still, it served.

Once I'd decided that I'd done enough papier mache, it was time to add the details.  First of all I started with the little sensor/breathing tubule things on the front of the collar.  If you actually examine Ambassador Kosh's costume you'll see that he actually has five of the things (two on each side, one in the centre).  I'd always been under the impression that there were only three, though, and it seems that this was the common conception.  Given I only needed the costume to be accurate from a distance, and it didn't have to withstand closer scrutiny, I figured that three would do.

Yep, I bottled it

The centre nozzle I made from the bottom of a shampoo bottle, and the two side nozzles were the necks of two-litre bottles of coke or lemonade or whatever fizzy drink it was I had lying around the kitchen and rapidly expiring.  With the bottle parts held in place with gaffer tape (of course) I added more detail using papier mache, building up the fleshy parts that surround each nozzle (as will be seen in later pictures).

The observant or those particularly well-versed in Vorlon culture will know that those nozzles are actually recessed into the encounter suit collar.  Well... er... I didn't have the time to do anything like that.  Given more time I would have built up lips around them, but again, time was not on my side so I just went for capturing the essence of the costume.

With the nozzles in place I moved on to the "exchaust tubes" that poke out the back sides (fnarr) of the collar.  Although the actual exhausts are fairly intricate, I once again went for evoking the basic imagery.  I'd save up some cardboard tubes from the insides of rolls of wrapping paper, and these were just the right width.  So I cut them to shape...

Yes, I was able to use a sonic screwdrive in the making of
this Vorlon encounter suit.  Geek heaven.

...and then simply gaffer taped them in the right position to the collar:

An obsessive-compulsive's nightmare

This was fairly tricky, in as much as I had to make sure that the tubes were in the same place on each side.  With the collar not being exactly symmetrical this wasn't that easy to do.

Once the tubes were in place they, too, were covered in papier mache to allow them to blend into the rest of the collar.  (In the above picture you can also see the start of the work on adding detail to the nozzles.)

The final piece of structural detailing that I was going to add to the collar were the green tube things that appear on the side of each shoulder.  I initially tried to find some vacuum cleaner tubes that were the right side, but a trip to the tip didn't yield anything suitable (apart from a few funny looks) - most vacuum cleaner tubes are too finely detailed, and have too much ribbing.

Once again I therefore decided that I'd just try to recreate the general sense of that particular piece of detail.  And as I was idly peeling off the labels off the remains of the drink bottles I'd mutilated to obtain the nozzles, I hit on just the thing:

Transparent in its simplicity

The bottles had little ridges molded into them which, whilst not being quite the same as the actual Vorlon encounter suit (yes, by this point I believe that they're real - you would too) did the job nicely.  So I cut a bottle in half, and used one half for each side of the collar.  To round of the ends I took the rounded neck off the bottle and cut that in half to make a small dome, which I kind of squised in place to make the right shape.  Once I was happy with the position of both bottles (again a lack of accurate symmetry proved to be an issue), I gaffer taped it all into place:

Of course, photographing transparent
objects against a detailed background
always works well...

All that remained was to once again add some papier mache around the join, so that the bottle parts would merge smoothly into the rest of the collar, and I was done!

All done!  Well, apart from everything else...

By this point I was quite impressed with my efforts.  All told, this had taken the best part of two of the three-and-a-bit weeks that I'd had available.  Of course, not all of that elapsed time had been spent on the collar - I'd been off sourcing materials for other parts of the project, so I'd not been completely focussed on the collar.  But the collar was definitely the most time-consuming part of the whole endeavour.

So now I had a collar!  All I needed to do next was make a helmet, paint it, figure out how I was going to wear and carry the suit, and apply the fabrics and other special effects.  Simple.

Er.

I had a week and a half left.  But, as it turns out, you'll be amazed at what you can achieve in a week and a half...

The Concept!

And the exclamation marks!

I'm very excitable, aren't I?  Must be these blogs.  Making me all tingly.  Anyhoo.

The question I was faced with, then, was how to top my previous years' fancy dress costume.  There'd been a theme to my costumes so far, which was that I was mostly undressed in them.  Whilst I have no problem with this, I didn't want to become a one-trick llama.  I also couldn't think of anything more shocking than what I'd done previously - and there was no way in hell I was going to attempt The Human Centipede Full Sequence.  I had enough problems maneuvering into the cubicles when I needed a pee with two inflatable dolls strapped to my arse, I didn't want to think how I'd manage with eleven.  No, I needed something different.

Clearly, what everyone was going to expect was for me to be naked again.  So the obvious thing to do then was to go fully clothed.  But more than that - I needed something where I'd be completely hidden.  That was the last thing that anyone would expect.  And as luck would have it, there was a costume I'd always wanted to try, from possibly my favourite science fiction show of all time - Babylon 5.  And the character?  The Vorlon Ambassador Kosh.

Ambassador Kosh, pictured with Minbari Ambassador Delenn
(Image courtesy of http://www.inigo.com/babylon5/index.html )

I'd loved the Vorlons right from the start of Babylon 5, and it had always been my dream to dress in an encounter suit - especially when I was living in the harsh North of England for three years and subjected to the weather (an encounter suit beats an umbrella any day).  In fact, I'd been so enamoured with them that not only had my room-mate and I plastered the door to our room with Kosh-isms ("I will not be with you if you go into this room", "If you go into this room you will die", etc - it's amazing, really, that I spent most of my first year being massively ostracised...), and I'd even gone to the trouble of making this little image up, picturing myself as the true(ish) image of a Vorlon:

Oh yeah - spoilers

Given that I'd made that image there was no way I wasn't going to include the Vorlon's inner form as part of the costume, too.  So there I had it - my concept!  I'd create a Vorlon encounter suit, and inside that I'd wear an angel costume.  A two-part costume.  For people who were expecting me to wear as little as possible, this was just the thing.

Only one question remained:  How the fuck was I going to do it?

The angel costume was going to be easy - I just wanted a simple dress thing with baggy sleeves.  I didn't want to bother with wings or anything - given that I'd be inside an encounter suit that'd just be awkward and asking for trouble.  But how was I going to build the encounter suit?

Naturally I turned to t'Interwebs for help, and found... very little.  Oddly enough, very few people have tried to make a costume like this.  I managed to find a handful of people who were mad enough to try it, and basically drew inspiration from them.

This guide from Fontzine provided a lot of inspiration, but suffered from being mostly textual.  I'm not a particularly good structural engineer, so I needed something more than this.  But it was great for getting some ideas.

My main source of inspiration came from the Existence is Wonderful blog.  The author of that blog had constructed her own suit, and thankfully a handful of photos of her construction efforts were available on Flickr.  These provided me with a huge amount of inspiration for building the costume - especially the helmet.  (And one day, when I've finished this blog and won't need to explain myself fully, I shall mail her and thank her.  I would ask you, dear reader, to remind me, but I have this nagging suspicion that there's no-one there.  No matter.  Onwards!)

Probably my greatest sense of re-assurance though came from this deviantART post.  It didn't reveal much in the way of construction tips, but the artist had managed to create the costume in just two weeks.  Given I had only four weeks to create my costume - but four weeks in which I would have to go to work, watch my girlfriend in her panto (twice), and fulfil other obligations - this gave me the re-assurance that it was do-able.

I had the concept, I had the inspiration, I had the re-assurance, and I had a sufficient amount of madness and determination that I knew that I'd be able to make something, no matter what happened.  Armed with all those things I began...

And detailed within the remainder of this blog, dear reader, is my guide on how to create a Vorlon encounter suit.  It's not perfect, and there are plenty of things I would do differently if I was to do it again (oh gods no), but I wanted to put something up there to help any other mad fools that, like me, would be struck with such a desire in the future.  It'll be my way of giving back.  And showing off.

Stay tuned!

The Challenge!

And also, the point.

Since I tend to voice my opinions and wave my ego around in other forums (Facebook, Twitter, SFX Magazine, the streets of Winchester after closing time) there's generally been little point me having a blog.  That and the fact that I knew I'd never manage to keep it active.  However, there was one thing I wanted to document, one thing that I wanted to talk about and which I required a blog for.  And that thing is...

...fancy dress!

Yeah, not massively thrilling, is it?

But it is to me!  I hadn't been big on fancy dress for a long period of my life.  It was only when friends of mine had their first child and threw a fancy dress Halloween party a few years ago that I started to get serious about it.  And that was unintentional.

The fancy dress was meant to be for the kids, and adults could take part too if they felt like it.  I'd always had this urge to go to a fancy dress thing dressed as He-Man (for so many reasons - but mainly because I don't even have the build to be Prince Adam).  As it happened my girlfriend at the time wasn't too bad at sewing, and was taken by the idea and a slight burst of madness, and so eventually this happened...

Not ranking high on the list of most powerful men in the universe
(This picture actually taken a few years later when
circumstances required the re-use of costumes)

As it happened another friend of mine had similar ideas, and he turned up as Little Red Riding Hood.  And thus battle commenced.  With the bar set this high, we had no choice but attempt to top each other year after year.  For the moment I think that the Dweller's won that battle with this creation, but there are still many years yet to go.

This whole thing fired up my imagination though, and so when SFX magazine started holding their yearly SFX Weekender conventions, I was finally given an outlet for my crazed ideas.

"Why not just use them at the Halloween parties?" you might be asking.  Well, the simple answer is... suitability.  And not being the target of a social services investigation.  To the first SFX Weekender I decided that I needed to top the ridiculous inappropriateness of my He-Man costume, and went as...

Lower Manhattan not to actual scale

...Watchmen's Doctor Manhattan.  For some reason or other this costume caused quite a stir, especially amongst parents who learned that they shouldn't keep their kids up after the watershed whilst I was around.  This costume gained me a great deal of infamy, even ending up with my being recognised in bars in London (I think because of the hair, and not because I have a tendency of wandering around bars in London with my big blue cock out).  For the second SFX Weekender I knew I had to somehow top it, somehow had to better the shock and awe value of a big, blue cock.

And I did.

Any pain endured by one of his components is felt by all

My Barely-Human Centipede costume definitely got me noticed.  And scared off a certain Doctor Who producer.  This definitely cemented my reputation for costumes with shock and awe value, and left me with a massive problem - what the hell was I going to do to top this for the third SFX Weekender?

The answer to that question, dear reader (yes, I'm using the singular form here - not setting my hopes too high) is what the rest of this blog is for...

Goodbye Cruel World!

Well.  It beats the standard "hello world" post that most people start off with, doesn't it?

Let's face it, starting with "hello" implies the beginning of some sort of ongoing discourse, some sort of ongoing relationship.  I've really only set this blog up for one reason, and once I'm done with that there'll probably not be a further post on here, not a single further excretion from my thought bubble preserved for all eternity on a bed of barely-stable electrons, and thus this blog will simply remain here as it is, unchanging, unremembered and unloved.  Since I'm not on here to break hearts (well, except maybe yours) I didn't really want to start with a false promise, so starting with the end seemed a much better way to get the ball rolling.  If it's already all over then anything else is a plus, isn't it?

Right then.  Let's see if this is a very good place to end.