Jay Maynard's Linucon 2.0 costume: TRON guard

The idea

I decided to go back to the original inspiration for my costuming for Penguicon 3.0, in April 2005. I decided to stretch my abilities a bit, and learn to sew in the process. Couldn't be that hard, right? Hahaha.

This one would be a guard program from TRON. As far as I knew, nobody had attempted one before, and it would go well with the one I'd done already - and could use one of the spare unitards I'd bought when the original costume got popular.

Here's a composite of some screengrabs from the movie:

The jacket would be the big part of the new costume; the rest would be straightforward. I wanted to do the control wands they had, but that part I could get away without if necessary.

Construction

I went back to the good folks at Being Seen Technologies for some 1-inch wide bright red electroluminescent tape. I got 5 pieces, with inverters and battery packs. This time, the bill ran to a bit over $400. Still, the stuff was really impressive.

Most of the gear used in the movie, as with the main characters, was recycled hockey equipment. A trip to Recycled Sports in Mankato turned up some hockey gloves, and some soccer shin/knee guards. I also got some different gloves at K-Mart for $1, just in case, and a respirator from the local hardware store.

I cut the knee guards away from the shin guards, and trimmed off the excess material:

and added some wide, non-roll elastic to hold them on:

I added another pair of boat shoes from K-Mart and masked the resprator openings so I could breathe through it once the painting was done, and it was time to paint.


I laid on lots of paint, eventually going through eight cans of Krylon Fusion Honeydew, but couldn't get some of the fabric parts to actually take the paint.

It was getting close to the time I needed to leave for Detroit, and I still needed to make the jacket. I'd originally planned to sew it up from scratch, making a pattern and cutting out pieces:

but I just couldn't get it done in time. Reluctantly, I decided to shelve the project until Linucon 2.0.

In the few months that intervened, I had a brainstorm: I didn't need to make the jacket from scratch. I got a down vest from my friendly neighborhood K-Mart:

I needed to quilt it, since it wasn't, but that would still be easier than making it up from scratch. I decided the ribs needed to be an inch and ahalf wide, so I go out a Sharpie and marked where to sew:



Sewing the quilting seams was simply a matter of following the lines I'd drawn. It turned out to not be quite as easy as I'd thought, mainly because I got antsy and ran the machine too fast.

Still, the finished quilting easily passed the 3-foot rule.

This one took paint pretty well once I applied a coat of fabric sizing, and came out as well as I'd been hoping.

I took a hood from an old jacket I no longer used, cut the zipper off the bottom, and painted it up. That worked quite well. I still needed to make the cape part of the jacket from scratch, though. I thought this would be straightforward. First, cut foam filling to shape:

and then cut and sew a fabric envelope, much like a seat cushion:



Unfortunately, I hadn't counted on one factor: The cape draped nicely over the guards' backs, but mine would not! The foam was way too stiff. Since it was 10 PM the night before departure, I once again had to abandon that part of the effort - but the costume was still a go. I wasn't going to give up on it again.

I schlepped a pretty big bag of tools and parts to Austin. That led the TSA to search my suitcase - and the morons lost the little USB cable for the flash card reader. That was the only thing missing, though.

Once there, all I needed to do was install the electroluminescent tape, paint the red accents, and wire it all up.

First, I stuck down the electroluminescent tape with hot glue:

Note the ends, neatly folded under the side. I didn't want the wire attachments visible. Unfortunately, this caused a problem with some of the tape I wasn't able to fix: a couple of the strips flickered very badly, while others ran brightly. I don't know if the tape couldn't take being bent, or what, but it's annoying.

While the guards' unitards in the movie were nearly completely undecorated, if you look at the gap in their jacket, you'll see a little bit of glow. I decided that that meant there was something simple there, so I added a bit of decoration to the unitard for this costume with fabric paint.

I stuck the battery packs - 4 of them, wihh 8 AA cells each - and inverters to the inside of the vest with more hot glue, and wired it all up:

Since I'm an electronics geek, I neatly soldered everything and put heatshrink over the joints. That's about all that saved me from real catastrophe later.

With the vest as finished as it would get, all I needed to do was paint red accents on the hockey gear. This was quickly done, though I ran completely out of red paint as I was finishing up.

I finished just barely in time to put on the unitard, take it off again and repair a seam I popped in a very bad location, put it all on again, and go downstairs. This was harder than it seemed, as I used a black spandex hood to hide my face - which made seeing difficult.

The finished costume

Howard Tayler, cartoonist of Schlock Mercenary fame, took these. First, with the room lights on:

...and with the ligths off, to show off the glow:

You'll notice the knee guards aren't present. That's because I completely forgot them when packing for the trip. Dammit.

The Cosplay event (I guess that's anime-ish for "masquerade") didn't go very well for me. I discovered, the hard way, that the hot glue I'd used didn't hold the battery packs well at all. The first one fell off as I was walking up to the stage, and all four had come off by the time I got back to the room afterwards. If it hadn't been for my mad soldering skillz, it would have all completely disintegrated on the stage. Nevertheless, I did win an award for "theatrical design": the judges said that I'd made it believable that it'd come from the movie.

The following couple of pictures were taken by Elze from Austin at the Cosplay:


Note the dangling battery pack and inverter in the back view. Grumble.
Elze's website covers the various cons she goes to.

This one was taken by one of the folks from One Hour Productions, the folks who organized the Cosplay: