Here’s the first tube. The glass is a perfect fit! I only had green fishing line on hand but this is proof that a more detailed internal structure will glow and breathe. Shown here powered at 4V. The size is 7mm diameter and 32mm long.
Here is it powered at 12V. I will install eight of these inside Ronaldo’s two HIWATT amplifier heads.
Here are the unpowered placeholder bulbs Ronaldo is using.
Today I decided to mod two of my characters. Here I’m replacing The Bridgekeeper’s good eye with a UV bulb.
The trick is to drill a small pilot hole through the eye, angled just right to miss the brain stem. Then from the back, I drilled progressively larger holes until the 5mm bulb would fit, right up to where his eyeball would be, but not breaking the skin.
And here’s the test at 12V. It’ll look better in the dark, dialed down to 4V. And I hope it casts the same ultraviolet lens flares.
These lights (including nine vacuum tubes) will be controlled via this 24-channel constant voltage DMX decoder. This is a different type of decoder than I used on the drum kit. This one is meant for “dumb” lights. Lights that can dim only in response to their power level. That way they too can throb and breathe with the music or with the dialogue.
Then it was time to lock down Zoot & Dingo. Their costumes got some padding to make them look (barefoot and) pregnant. This is because the pregnant “Phicen” bodies I ordered from China turned out to be counterfeit JAIOU DOLL bodies, so I sent them back and opened a case on eBay.
And it’s time to take the backings off their pyramid headstones while also making sure the earrings stay in place, in turn keeping their pill hats on their heads while I animate them.
So here’s how they look now. Next, I disassembled those copper microphones and mounted a 5mm UV LED bulb inside the mics. The idea here is that instead of 1:1 audio cables, these 1:6 instruments will have lighting cables. You can see the glow on Dingo’s face. My DMX program will synchronize that lighting intensity with whatever they’re singing.
The mics can be handheld too, which gives me opportunities to aim the lights differently.
And lastly, Tim the Enchanter gets a UV light too, in the tip of the wooden staff that he famously uses to cast fireballs, for sport. This was pretty tricky too. Lots of progressively larger drill bits, trying to keep them straight and true. Since my bits were only three inches long, the wires emerge from the staff near Tim’s hand — which is okay. For this prop and back of The Bridgekeeper’s head, I painted the visible wires various shades of brown to blend in.
Notice the stage monitors at Tim and King Arthur’s feet? My son Steven 3D printed those for me. Doesn’t that texture look great? Today’s his birthday!
Happy birthday, Monkey Boy!
One of the best features of 70s music is the warm tones produced by analog instruments and amplifiers. That warmth was made possible by the use of vacuum tubes.
When electrons flow through a vacuum, carrying “musically” charged samples from an instrument or a microphone, the amplified signal distorts in a way that is more pleasant to the human ear than via digital circuits. That is, the frequencies are handled more naturally in an analog circuit versus in a digital circuit where those frequency values are quantized at a certain interval, clipped (rounded) to the nearest numeric value, amplified, and then converted back into an analog signal that can actually move a speaker membrane. As much as digital technology has advanced since the 70s and 80s, a trained human ear can still tell the difference, and that difference boils down to two flavors of distortion: Warm & Cool
A big challenge in reproducing such equipment in 1:6 scale is how to replicate those vacuum tubes visually. Not just to sit there, but to light up, glow and even breathe with the music.
So here’s my engineering solution:
I found these little glass test tubes (or vials) on Etsy. The glass part is 7.8mm OD, 5.2mm ID, and 32mm long. I had to order them from China. Ten for less than $20. Shipping take long long time.
Stren Original Monofilament Fishing Line
That’s less than $30 worth of parts. The idea is to mount the 5mm OD (outside diameter) LEDs wherever there’s a vacuum tube in the equipment. Now those LEDS are only 8.5mm tall, so that’s not tall enough for a typical vacuum tube. So, we’ll cut a piece of the clear rigid tubing to about 1 inch, and then fit it over the LED. That should work snugly because the ID (inside diameter) of this particular tubing is 5mm.
And the pièce de résistance is that we’ll cut some clear blue fluorescent monofilament (fishing line), fold it over a few times, and insert it into the clear tube. Then seal the top of the tube shut, or maybe plug it or cap it.
Now, when powered up, the UV light will illuminate the glow-in-the-dark fishing line and it should look just like a vacuum tube, also illuminating any neighboring photoreactive materials.
I just made a significant investment ($1690) in my current animation project. I commissioned Brazilian master craftsman Ronaldo Lopes Teixeira to build the following 1:6 scale keyboards and synthesizers used by Richard Wright on Pink Floyd’s classic album, The Dark Side of the Moon:
Ronaldo will also for the first time build two new custom miniatures, used by David Gilmour:
While these props will take up to six weeks to get here, I have to enlarge the set on my animation stage and figure out how to light them.
Fortunately I found a set of N-scale model train LED lights that I can modify as piano lights, using a standard 3V power supply or 2 AA batteries. I’m also looking for ways to make 1:6 scale vacuum tubes that glow and breathe a little.
Today’s project is a daunting one. This is the beautiful 1:6 scale desk hand built by Mihail, my carpenter friend in Ukraine. Check out his Furniture for Dolls side gig on Etsy for some amazing craftsmanship. I’m expecting there to be a wealth of 1:1 scale carpentry work there, once Putin is defeated. 🇺🇦
The idea here is to light up a bunch of props sitting atop the desk. So to make room for 12mm diameter LED Pixel Bulbs, I need to drill 1/2” holes in the desktop at strategic places, so as not to obstruct the drawers with the back ends of the bulbs, plus all the wiring.
Why use 12mm bulbs and not 5mm? Well, 12mm is the smallest LED bulb available today that has an IC built in. That chip enables it to be individually addressable as a pixel. The smaller bulbs can only be controlled in groups on a string or in a strip.
In the case of these little phones, the bulbs need to poke through at an angle, and the wires are stiff. So drilling holes through thin plastic, through pot metal, through 1/8” clear acrylic, and through a 3/8” basswood desktop is a rather delicate operation. Especially with dull bits and no drill press. Ace Hardware, by the way, charges way too much for drill bits.
Here’s proof of concept with none of the wires cut, routed and jacked yet. That beer stein only has water in it. The amber hue comes solely from its uplight. The cash register is subtle, but in the dark its translucent features glow nicely. The fake ice under the glass caviar dish is my favorite. The caviar is actually tiny translucent pink glass beads.
I spent the next day cutting and splicing wires using dozens of heat shrink butt splices and three-wire JST connectors, for modularity and to make installation even possible while leaving the drawers functional. No easy trick there, in such tight quarters. There’s got to be an easier way…
The design wound up with six lights up top, and two spares strategically tucked away for possible expansion. Then each of the six large drawers has a bulb mounted into its back panel on 12mm retaining clips, so that I can open the drawers and light up stashes of gold or diamonds or whatever.
So that’s 12-14 bulbs total, consuming 36-42 DMX channels given that each bulb has individually addressable data channels for RGB.
So how does DMX control these LED Pixel Bulbs? Well, to make white light, you send 100% to the red, green and blue channels, using the bulb’s assigned channel range (3 channels per bulb, in sequential RGB order). If you want, say, a shade of yellow, you send equal values to red and green, and set blue to zero.
When a couple more parts arrive today, I’ll daisy chain the desk’s DMX group after the drum kit’s group, which consumes 27-36 channels for nine bulbs and three spares.
So my DMX-512 universe will look like this:
Dragonframe, my stop motion animation software, allows you to program DMX lighting sequences that sync with your animation frame-by-frame. So yes, this “power desk” will be pulsing with musical energy, along with my custom drum kit. And that’s the magic — the special effect no one will expect.
And here’s the final product with all the wires routed and jacked. Level of Difficulty compared to other things I’ve done? 7.5
Can’t wait to see it in the next test shot!
Two new characters have joined the cast of POSERS. You may remember the identical twins who ran Castle Anthrax in Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Well here they are again, warming up to sing backup for my upcoming episode.
One-of-a-kind puppets like this have to be kitbashed. That is, bashed together from multiple kits. A body here, a head there. A costume here, some jewelry there.
I found the pillbox hats on Etsy. Everything else was on eBay.
I try to buy from American sellers, but I wind up buying most of these pieces on eBay, direct from often shady dealers in China. That can take weeks or months. Or sometimes never, as in the case of Ukraine. And what I can’t find, I make myself or pay another artist to fabricate.
So tonight I’m running take 21 of this shot, which is 1807 frames long. There won’t be any animation performed until all the set pieces are in place, and all the MOCO and DMX programming are locked down.
Today my new Samsung Odyssey Ark 55-inch Curved 4K UHD monitor was delivered, a day early. I got it on sale at Amazon for $1999. This is marketed as a gaming display, and it got slammed in the reviews for its inability to display more than one HDMI source at a time. But that’s not a concern here.
While it can be pivoted into cockpit mode as shown, most of the time I’ll use it in landscape mode as a virtual backdrop for my POSERS sets. Dragonframe allows me to synchronize any video with the frames I shoot, and that video can be displayed on any external display. That means no more crappy green screens for me, casting that unavoidable green taint on my characters.
POSERS is all about the photons, so it’s only original photons from here on.
This 184-frame shot took two days to shoot, on twos. It started off as a simple idea, but like most things in POSERS the characters take on a life of their own. I was originally going to shoot the Black Knight hopping around on the bridge, after getting his arms and legs severed by the Jeep collision, and leave it at that. So I centered my 6-foot muddy road on my cyclorama and then instead of green-screening a background, I decided to wrap some of my plastic topiary panels around it to create a ravine. To keep it in place, I drilled two screw holes into my cyclorama frame. But half way through the shot, I bumped the left side and caused it to move, unrecoverably. So the trick here, as usual, was to add something that might have caused that disturbance. And that something was King Kong, who was in mid-fight with Godzilla in Shot 902.
Still waiting on a key $395 set piece for this scene that is held up in transit due to Russia’s war against Ukraine. The artist lives in Siberia, and the tracking information hasn’t been updated from Moscow since February 12.
In the meantime I have transformed our master shower into a cavernous fern grotto-like BDSM dungeon attached to Amanda & Sushi’s minka. Here we’ll see our supervillains holding Mona Lisa hostage.
The shower will be filled with about 4″ of water, using a silicon drain stopper. The 12 acrylic stands you see will act as pilings, supporting four stepping stones, two fire pits and the 1:6 scale timber BDSM rack.
Here’s the list of props I’ve used to build this set:
https://www.etsy.com/listing/689305830/doll-bdsm-diorama-doll-bdsm-doll-dungeon
Act 7 of POSERS will see the return of our Giant Asian Murder Hornet puppets. I hadn’t planned to reveal where they came from, until I was faced with needing a ceiling in Amanda & Sushi’s Japanese minka — their supervillain lair. So then it hit me that I could solve both problems at once, by designing a ceiling that was also a nest. Creepy? Yes!
This is the photo that inspired me. I researched as much as I could about bees, wasps and hornets — and I’ve always been intrigued by them. Especially how they build, how they communicate and how they organize themselves to do the Queen’s bidding.
My first prototype looked good at first, but it wasn’t stiff enough to support its own weight. I used card stock for this, folding each tube into a hexagon shape. But you can see what happed after I coated them with papier-mâché. They became stiff, but they deformed way too much.
So next I found some rather expensive white cardboard called chipboard. This prototype was a success. It took a lot more labor, however, as I had to score each fold with an Xacto knife. In the background you can see a woolen dryer ball. That ball’s diameter dictated the size of each comb. I will stuff those balls into the ends of a few combs to look like silk cocoons that haven’t yet hatched. The hexagon sides turned out to be 1-1/4″ each.
I made about 140 of these combs and glued them onto a 2×4′ sheet of corrugated cardboard. Notice how they vary in height. The average hornet comb has about a 2:1 ratio of height to diameter in real life. I also left gaps in the honeycomb pattern, to give it more of an authentic organic quality since hornets don’t use rigidly structured bee apiary panels. Today I’m going to squirt some yellow foam sealant into the joints to make it look like waxy build-up. (Hornets don’t produce honey.)
I got pretty excited to learn that cocoon silk glows under blacklight, since I’ve shot many scenes in POSERS using UV lamps and UV-reactive materials and paints. So I found special spray paint and a string of blacklight LED “fairy lights” that are programmable. These lights are spaced four inches apart, which is perfect. I poked a hole at the base of each comb and then on the back of the cardboard, I fashioned a circuit board by bending and poking each LED up into the hole. Then I secured all the wires with Frog Tape across each row.
Here are the wool dryer balls. I bought two bags of nine. I originally thought I could just cut them in half but they proved too difficult to set in the tubes that way. But I’ll use fibers and clumps from the cut-up ball to glue debris in the honeycomb. That will look like cocoons that have hatched but haven’t been cleaned out of the nest yet.
And finally, here’s one of the Giant Asian Murder Hornet puppets I’ll be using. These came out of Japanese capsule toy vending machines, ordered through eBay. I already had a set of three but decided to buy three more.
The nest was looking too sterile so I used some yellow foam sealant to simulate the muddy pulp hornets regurgitate as an adhesive. I gave it a light coat of metallic gold paint and then another heavy coat of Glow in the Dark paint — especially on the cocoons. This photo is upside down, while everything dries on the porch.
Once complete, the nest will be mounted upside down across the top of Amanda & Sushi’s living room. The 2×4′ panel bowed at first, so I glued and screwed it to a particle board plank. The lighting looks super cool and dramatic. I used two cans of Glow in the Dark spray paint for the insides of the combs, and any outside portion that’ll face the camera. The LED controller can make the lights pulse or “breath.” And when the purplish lights are off, the tubes continue to glow neon green. Will post video of that later, as WordPress makes that very difficult for some stupid reason.
