Breuillet Village Fest, June 26th

Courtesy of Illusion Story (c) here are some beautiful pictures of my first troop!

Myself and my buddy TB 5617. Pathfinders lead the way!

Going uphill... and too fast! We can't help it.

Look at this noob, standing in front of the Dark Lord! Outrageous...

Waaaaave! At least nobody could see the silly grin on my face.

Oh yeah, we did.

The French Garrison and the people of Breuillet.

Post-trooping debrief

Sunday afternoon my garrison was invited to a village theme festival for space-related things. Great location, hot weather (not so great) and the people were super nice. For my first time trooping I had a blast: overall, I didn't complain too much about the heat, there was always a little breeze and shade.

My suit held up quite nicely except for a couple of things:

• my thermal detonator popping off when I joined my hands around my back, I quickly learned not to do that or, to do that a little higher from now on;
• the cummerbund pouches were sagging dangerously on either side and I had to keep an eye out for friction hazard on them. Since I was keeping my speaker, phone, mints, tissues in those the weight was probably an issue;
• my boots, while I had spent much time and effort into them, didn't really look healthy from the start. "Neopren" glue doesn't agree with heat and had I not sewn the pieces together they would have all fallen apart.

Bootfail :(

So for the French edition of Comic Con next week I will need to clean the crap out of them, reattach the lining strip with whatever works and fix the pouches too. I'm thinking pressure buttons that I have no idea how to set up. 

But here are the upsides that I had not expected!

• There is plenty of ventilation in the helmet; the only times I was hot was when facing the sunlight, with no wind coming my way.
• Under Armour undergarments work! I have the t-shirt, and boxers which kept my suit from clinging to sweaty skin. Wearing tight polyamid/spandex gear under cotton clothing will favor air circulation and keep you from retaining moist! Knowing is also half the battle... against heatstroke.
• The SC breastplate provides lots of room, I could even add a black "necklace" pouch to stow my ID and money. 
• Sucking on minty cough drops prevents from stinking up the bucket with stale mouth smells. Also from vomiting and coughing or sneezing. It also keeps the visor from fogging up. Now I know this from experience!

Until next time, pictures are under way.

Tinkering with electronics

Before even starting on my costume I wanted it to have voice amplification. You can hear it in the movies, so naturally you want to hear it in live.

There are plenty of different amplification systems out there that you can buy for cheap, they're composed of a microphone (generally a headset) and a speaker box. More elaborate ones will have an amplification module to help with static noise canceling and feedback.

You can also get fan-made ones that were designed for costuming purposes, with special voice effects, and that famous "static burst" sound that ends each sentence you speak.

• ROM-FX: currently out of stock, because it was one of the most popular.
• Deluxe "Pro" Trooper Voice Amp by Hyperdyne Labs: contains many different speech modes and voice effects (Boba Fett, Boussh). This is the one I use.
• Stormtrooper Helmet Sound Kit byTrikToys: comes with 2 modules instead of one, the mike amp and the effects module, 3 batteries required.

Here's a picture of my helmet rigged with the TrikToys microphone module. I didn't buy the effects circuit board because I wanted to try something a little less expensive. 

The microphone came as a headset with an ear speaker because there's an audio line-in function to the speaker amp. This was meant to make communications possible through an outside channel but we don't have that in my garrison. Anyway, the headset is tied to the amp box and can't be disconnected if I want to use a different microphone.

Recently I switched to the Hyperdyne Labs Trooper Voice system which looks like this:

I bought a tie-clip microphone and kept the speaker amp from the TrikToys kit since I can connect it to the Hyperdyne module. This one contains static burst effects, a push-to-talk function with a remote action wire, voice effects and changers, and lots of adjustable variables. It is much more costly than a regular voice amp but the end result is much better and more fun to use. 

First post and it's backdated

There used to be a bunch of blog posts but they were actually documentation and tutorial types of pages that I turned into archived pages instead. For each of my costuming-related work I do I will post here so that everyone can keep track of what new things I'm up to.

So, back-tracking a little bit: after I finished posting about every part of the costume I mainly focused on improving the boot work. The glue I use is not very clean and it's not keeping the flap snug on the sides... I might have to sow stitches through the boot to keep the vinyl from sticking out.