Wesley Scoggins
Indy Mogul
Wesley's Weekly HOW TO: Futuristic Armor, Part I
Don't throw away all of your useless cardboard boxes from the holidays, because I'm back for the New Year with a request that we just can't seem to dodge, FUTURISTIC ARMOR.
We all (most of us at least) love the stuff; from Robocop, to Halo, to Star Wars, to Heinlein's Starship Troopers, futuristic armor is a staple in cool sci-fi films, books, and games, but it seems to be generally 'out of budget' for most independent filmmakers. Well I whole heartily disagree with that assumption, and I'll try to make an entire futuristic looking armor suit for under .
I started with a 5 dollar painters suit from the local hardware store, and a 4 dollar can of H20 Latex Spray Paint. It took a can and a half to cover it totally, so you might find that getting a dye packet, and dyeing it might work better for you, but I'm unsure of how well the Polypropylene of the suit would absorb dye.
This is after the first coat of spray paint. There is still some patchiness to the color, but it can help if you want to undercoat for the armor to have a kind of camo look, so it might actually be beneficial to your design if you don't want to do an extra coat to make it nice and even all over.
I got this paintball tactical vest at my local Sporting Good's store for 10-15 dollars a LONG time ago, and I thought it would make a nice torso section.
Together, the vest, and the coveralls look somewhat passable as a military uniform already, but I'm going to panel on some 'armor' to try to make it look a bit more futuristic.
I took a sheet of cardboard from a big box, and I drew out the basic shapes. General geometric shapes are the easiest to cut out, and look surprisingly futuristic. There are so many things you can do with them, and it's really a matter of personal taste, but generally, there are 5 major panels that are repeated over and over in futuristic armor design, the torso panel, the upper arm, the lower arm, the thigh, and the shin guard.
When you're drawing the shape you've got to think 3-dimensionally, because you want flaps to come down from the side's, or you might even want to build a full shell to totally encase that part of the body. Personally I find the easiest way to go is to just build the top section of each layer, and it doesn't look too bad.
You can make this cut out section easier by drawing a shape with a ruler (measure each section of your body first) then cut that section out (get assistance from a parent if you're underage and not used to using a box cutter or X-Acto knife), then just move them to another section of the cardboard and use the cut-out shape as a stencil to draw it again. This speeds up the process a bit because it lets you get identical parts for both sides of your body, or for multiple suits of armor.
For the flaps, just BARELY cut them; it make it easier for you to fold them, and they'll more readily stay in that folded shape. To cover up the ripples of the cardboard and the cavity inside, you can either use some wood glue on that to cover it, or you can cover it up with some painters tape.
After that, I brought them outside and layered them with hammered gold, and silver spray paint. I decided on silver because I wanted it to have an unpainted metallic look, although it could realistically be painted any color you want, depending on your story, and intended environment. You could do layers of olive green and tan for a camo look, or even paint it a chroma-key color if you wanted to try to remove the armor in post and do the "Predator" invisibility effect.
I let it dry for a good half hour before I brought it in, because it's cold and it takes spray paint a REALLY long time to dry in the cold (something to remember if you're going to work on some of your own armor soon).
After that, I hung the coveralls up, and it was a matter of attaching the panels with hot glue (get a parent if you aren't experienced with hot glue!). To get the angles as right as possible, I wore the coverall before hand, and put pieces of tape on the suit to show where the TOP of my arms were, I put them at relevant places like my elbows and knees so I know where my legs would be exactly in the armor, and it helped me get everything just about right. Remember to put the vest on first, because it can be a pain getting it on over the shoulder armor panels, and for the vest panel, I attached it with a lot of Duct tape, because I think the vest is cool and don't want it's super-future transformation made permanent.
Flexibility is OK, not great, it's DECENT, but I can still look down the gun sights, and reach the pockets on the front of my vest, which are the only things that really matter.
Also what matters is that the ENTIRE COST, for the armor itself was only about 26 dollars, MOSTLY for the foam vest at about 10-15 dollars. The rest was paint and the coveralls. The cardboard is free, and additional cardboard can easily be obtained by asking nicely at your local grocery store, or fast food place -- most of them will help you out with free boxes that they were going to throw away anyway.
For the sound effects that will be a requirement for people to go, "Wow, he's in a kickass robot suit," almost any sound effects collection or website will have stuff like "SERVO MOVEMENT" listed, those are always a good place to start, you can speed them up, slow them down, and reverse them to fit whatever need you have. This website here, has 4 servo movement sounds that you can download in Quicktime and WMA.
But thanks for reading, and pay attention for Futuristic Armor, Part II, where I will cover basic helmet designs, how to make your 21st century gun look like a 22nd century gun, and how to add more detail to the armor so it looks even better.
Hope you all had a Happy New Year!
-Wes
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