This project started with 2 meeting, each one of us brought food from his country and we spoke for hours about typography and graphic design, we shared so many inspiration with each other and it was a good way to kind of start the ideation process, just look what is appealing to the other. Color, typography, composition. We asked a lot What? What we want to do? What issue to we want to address and above all how can it be connected to halloween or to the brief.
We started with a lot of ideas but ended up sticking with a HORROR REDUCER, both of us hates horror movies, I myself didn’t see one since the first one I saw when I was 13 years old. the main features that you want to close when you are in stress are your eyes and your ears. Sitting alone in your house and watching a horror movie has to be done with something fluufy, cute and very comfortable. we first looked for a fluffy, soft fabric, something with fur and we found an old fur coat in a thrift shop.
First we tested all the servos, liquid crystal screen and sensors. we had to make sure that all the code is running smoothly. we started everything with a 2 flex sensors that turned out to be a very horrible idea for that kind of interaction, it wasn't giving us a sufficient and steady current to move the servo motors. but we kind of move along with them.
After arranging our materials, we had to think how to make the helmet, from what materials, what will be easy to work with, and also cheap. we bought 2 beach balloon and made a paper mache
kind of messed all the floor, but it was nice.
After having the paper mache all dried and cover with good transperant tape, we were ready to cut some holes and start understand how strong the servo motors are, so we 3d printed eyes and started to play around with them.
putting up the furr, and start to understand better how the fur, the motors and our components are working, at first we worked with the flex sensor outside but eventually it had to be connected to the head somehow, thats where we really understood that the flex sensors are not the right sensor for this pressing interaction and we need a good push sensor, touch sensor that will give a safe range.
the moment we start to put the helmet on our heads, we understood that we need something like a helmet gear or a helmet mount to make the helmet sit better on any persons head, so i want in the search of cheap construction helmets.
once we hooked up our helmet with the mount it was much better and safer to wear and easy to work with. after this we had hours and days of soldering. hours of using the sewing machine to make the fabric sit on our helmet and hours to make all the wires go to the same direction.
After connecting everything with everything, we started to test a lot of things, we started with 2 eyes and 2 ears but we found out that 1 eye is more efficient and 2 ears without fur will be more faster to move with the servo that seemed to have hard time with the fur.
once it was working, we started to test it more and more, length of the sleeves, place where to put the hand, arduino and code. after having it ready for use, we went to my house and document it properly in a movie that will catch the essence of it, we chose the "shining" scene that actually has all the ingredients of fear: sights, hand gestures, beautiful cinematography and good beat. and this is what we ended up having :)