 Once I had developed my new dummy, I needed to use him for a new
 prop that I
didn't already have. Lacerated Larry was what I decided on. Above you can see
the starting point. I had retrofit him with the alternate shins that bypassed
the ankle, since I was planning on Larry always in either a standing or sitting
position, but never where his feet would have to pose other than on a 90 degree
from his legs.
The next thing I did was remove the head that he was first fitted with, as
this dummy wasn't going to need one. What he would need though, was a neck. I
cut his neck down to approximately 4" above the shoulder level and using Polycel
Insulating Foam (the same thing as
Great Stuff)
 I
covered all around it and left it
to dry overnight.
Once dry I carved it with a pneumatic cut-off tool to approximate a neck bone.
It wasn't as lifelike as I had hoped, but in the dark of the haunt
 with the
1" exposed above the neck he will be fit with, this was perfectly fine. I
then coated the exposed foam neck bone with caulk to smooth out the surface
somewhat.
Next I replaced his articulated wrists and hand and attached human- looking
hands directly to his forearms. These are Stage Hands used for props that you
can get from a major Halloween supply store like the Halloween Outlet. Once I
screwed them on to his forearm, completely bypassing his wrists since I wouldn't
be needing them to articulate,
 I painted them both with adhesive cement. Once
the cement had dried I painted the hands a skin color that was much more
convincing than the orange/pink color they come in. The cement is another trick
I picked up from SpookyFX.Com that makes the paint adhere to the plastic without
flaking off. However be prepared for this to take a long time to dry. If left in
the sunlight to
 dry fully it may speed up the process somewhat, but these were
still tacky for days.
I will be using a Talking Boris for the main effect of this event and will
need to modify it to work with a sound chip that has it's own motion detection.
These put out considerably less sound signal than a cassette recorder we used to
animate our
Crypt Keeper, so we will
need to use a different combination of in line electronics to make the head work
with the chip. Once again I turned to the vast knowledge of the
chat list folks for help. Luckily there were some techno wizards there that
could tell me how to tackle the challenge. After about 40 or more hours of
trying every conceivable combination of capacitors and resistors, I learned I
would be using the same capacitor as we used on the Crypt Keeper, but instead of
a 10K ohm resistor I found success in using a 2K potentiometer I got at Radio
Shack that came in a bag of about 20 different pots (potentiometers) for just a
few bucks. I don't have a pic of
the package here, but below is a
photo of what it looks like. |
