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It's been a long time coming, and he isn't quite finished, but I have been getting alot of questions about him, so I'm gonna post him unfinished.
This is my take on the classic cauldron stirring witch. My haunt is themed to jungles and islands, and witches don't really fit, plus I don't really like them. I have always liked the grim reaper and Charon the Boatman, so I guess this was a natural interpretation.
Before I get into how I made it, let me give a shout out to those who inspired me (ahem...whom I copied).
ScareFX
Scary Terry
SpiderRider
Also thanks to everyone in the technological terror forum who helped me get him going.
So this guy is a 1/2 pvc armature made with the Zombietronix calculator for a 5 ft skeleton. I used hardware cloth for his rib cage, and it has ribs are made with greatstuff. Inside of him is a 6rpm motor that cranks his head up an down slowly. It hard to see in the video because I kept moving around. His head is a 2 part urethane cast from a mold of a bucky skull. The rest of the bones are from a "bag of Bones" from Biglots and are attached with hot glue. The motor is the standard Monsterguts wiper motor, and I have hooked it up to an ATX computer power supply on the 3.3v circuit.
What makes him different other than being a skeleton is that his stance over the cauldron and the natural movement of the arms are due to the fact that one arm is fixed, unlike most witch cauldrons. The right arm is rigid all the way to the wrist. There it is joined by a simple linkage to the hand which is glued to the stick. If you visualize the shape the stick makes as it travels in circle, it would look like a cone, whereas the normal setup would draw out a tube shape. Since the upper hand is mostly anchored, and the movement there is minimal, the skeleton can be leaning over the cauldron without being hit by the rotating stick. The bottom of the stick has been shaped to a dull point, and rotates inside a 1 1/2 pvc end cap, filled with hot glue to prevent the stick and the bolt which attached the cap from binding.
I'll be posting some more pics a video when he is finished. If you want to see something up close, let me know and I'll snap some pics.
Check out ScareFX's how-to, it was a huge help to me.
Scary Terry Has all the technical info.
UPDATE: Youtube wasn't working lastnight, but flickr was, so here is a video of the early construction. I'm new to using video, so I didn't know you cant rotate them. But you can still see whats going on.
The mechanism fro the head is sloppy, it I had spent more time, I could have gotten the same movement by moving the motor closer to the head and shortening the linkage, but this prop already took too long, about 3.5 months of working on the weekends. Next year I'll tweak his head, maybe even put a spring on it so it turns as it goes up and down.
This is my take on the classic cauldron stirring witch. My haunt is themed to jungles and islands, and witches don't really fit, plus I don't really like them. I have always liked the grim reaper and Charon the Boatman, so I guess this was a natural interpretation.
Before I get into how I made it, let me give a shout out to those who inspired me (ahem...whom I copied).
ScareFX
Scary Terry
SpiderRider
Also thanks to everyone in the technological terror forum who helped me get him going.
So this guy is a 1/2 pvc armature made with the Zombietronix calculator for a 5 ft skeleton. I used hardware cloth for his rib cage, and it has ribs are made with greatstuff. Inside of him is a 6rpm motor that cranks his head up an down slowly. It hard to see in the video because I kept moving around. His head is a 2 part urethane cast from a mold of a bucky skull. The rest of the bones are from a "bag of Bones" from Biglots and are attached with hot glue. The motor is the standard Monsterguts wiper motor, and I have hooked it up to an ATX computer power supply on the 3.3v circuit.
What makes him different other than being a skeleton is that his stance over the cauldron and the natural movement of the arms are due to the fact that one arm is fixed, unlike most witch cauldrons. The right arm is rigid all the way to the wrist. There it is joined by a simple linkage to the hand which is glued to the stick. If you visualize the shape the stick makes as it travels in circle, it would look like a cone, whereas the normal setup would draw out a tube shape. Since the upper hand is mostly anchored, and the movement there is minimal, the skeleton can be leaning over the cauldron without being hit by the rotating stick. The bottom of the stick has been shaped to a dull point, and rotates inside a 1 1/2 pvc end cap, filled with hot glue to prevent the stick and the bolt which attached the cap from binding.
I'll be posting some more pics a video when he is finished. If you want to see something up close, let me know and I'll snap some pics.
Check out ScareFX's how-to, it was a huge help to me.
Scary Terry Has all the technical info.
UPDATE: Youtube wasn't working lastnight, but flickr was, so here is a video of the early construction. I'm new to using video, so I didn't know you cant rotate them. But you can still see whats going on.
The mechanism fro the head is sloppy, it I had spent more time, I could have gotten the same movement by moving the motor closer to the head and shortening the linkage, but this prop already took too long, about 3.5 months of working on the weekends. Next year I'll tweak his head, maybe even put a spring on it so it turns as it goes up and down.
