Interesting Link: Definitive Stormtrooper Costume How-To
When I was in my early teens, I was paid something like 30 dollars to attend an anime and sci-fi convention all day long, as a babysitter for the child of a family friend.
She dressed me up like Kenshin, complete with the scar on my face (lipstick!) and I spent all day traipsing around the University of Hartford with her, hunting for Anime Fan Stuff. There wasn't actually that much anime at the convention - I had the distinct impression that it was a sci-fi convention trying to branch out to the New Stuff that Kids Like. The younger girl I was with was a little bummed, but I was relieved. The convention honestly had more of My Shit at it (Star Wars!) than it had her stuff.
In particular, I was thrilled by the Star Wars cosplay. I made sure we were in the room for the Star Wars costume contest. To my shock, however, it was almost all stormtroopers.
I was enthralled, but baffled. The costumes were incredible - exactly like the real thing! - but who on earth would want to be a stormtrooper? This was something like... 2003? There weren't stormtrooper heroes. The stormtroopers were the bad guys, and they were a faceless army, and it didn't fully make sense to me that Star Wars fans would choose to dress up as the faceless army when they could dress up as a jedi or as Darth Vader.
I immediately went home, however, and started researching stormtrooper armor. And I found this website: the Definitive Stormtrooper Costume How-To.
You know you've wanted a Stormtrooper armor since the first time you saw them on the big screen at your local Movie Theater, and untill now had no idea how to get your hands on one. Well my freinds, it's time you used those hands of yours, and build something!
That's right , this website will show you how to build a stormtrooper costume from the ground-up. Everything from making a bodycast of yourself to sculpting out the parts correctly, and then pulling vacuumformed plastic for the final pieces. Its' all right here. So sit back and start reading, and dont forget to print out these pages too. Hard copy is still the best reference material when your hard at work in the REAL world.
This absolutely enthralled me. I remember discussing it constantly with my parents, and them asking me: "So, you want a stormtrooper outfit?!" and me replying, "No, no. It's just amazing that these guys are making a giant mold out of their body and then vacuum-forming the armor. That's incredible."
It is incredible. The costume is a bad idea, but the process is amazing. I remember reading up online about all these hobbyist stormtrooper armor crafters selling full suits online to adults who wanted to be a fantasy fascist soldier and thinking: god, I wish I was good enough to make something this crazy. Not... this. But something like this.
This is a website that a kid can read for days without getting bored. There's an incredible materials list. Did you know that you need 20-50 pounds of plasticine clay to make stormtrooper armor?! You will need to build your own "vacuumform table" as well. All the parts in the parts list used to link to a picture, but many of them are missing now, which is a shame.
There is, however, a tiny but deranged photo of the body cast on the "how to create a body cast" page. I have included it here for your edification:
In this section I will show you how to pull a bodycast of a human figure. The process is relatively simple yet very dangerous. You will be working with Fiberglass Resin which is a deadly chemical, if not ventilated properly, and you will be confining a human into a plasterbody cast that could get stuck onto the model if not properly applied to the subject.
I recommend that you have 5 people present for the plastering of the model. 1 as the model, 2 as the Plasterbandage Wetters and 2 more to lay the bandages on the subject. We only had 3 people for the plastering and it took us 3 hours to do the cast. More people would have cut the time down considerably. The model needs to be IN and OUT of the cast as fast as possible. IT is not easy standing there in one place for along period of time.
Incredible!!! Two paragraphs which can absolutely capture the mind of a 14 year old who wishes she could make enormous, stupid things in her basement.
The sub-page about releasing the plaster cast from the model comes with numerous tiny photographs which I wish I could link you to directly. However, for some reason the website has been constructed as some kind of strange javascript monstrosity, and I can't link to any of the subpages at all. A crime! Anyway, here is one of them:
The steps for making the costume seem to go on forever. You mold an entire human (technically optional), then make a variety of smaller molds for the individual body parts, then construct the vacuum table, then finally make the armor. The photographs of the molds and the process are wild:
Now and again, the webmaster has provided little cartoons:
I read this site so much as a kid because it's absolutely mindbogglingly detailed. For someone who wants to google things on their own or do parallel research for fun, this is a multi-hour read. It feels like a guide for someone who is going to make their own in-home armor shop, and provide stormtrooper armor as a service to their local community. I remember trying to tally up the cost of the process as a kid and getting into the many hundreds - so it must be something that you do if you and your friends all want to become a little stormtrooper army together. I was so delighted to see group shots of several stormtrooper outfits in use together... labeled with the image size:
The website is actually a sub-site of a larger costuming and prop-making website with sections on the wacky gun from The Fifth Element, the 2012 Judge Dredd costume, letters from people who used the website to make costumes for larps or conventions, and more.
I never seriously considered getting into making vacuum-formed prop armor as a child. But I did have a powerful and thwarted desire to make deranged shit. In high school, this desire was finally satisfied when my friends and I actually made an entire trebuchet together... but in middle school, I could only read the stormtrooper armor guide and fantasize.
Now, I sometimes build bicycles. But I'd really like to learn to weld. I think it's a natural consequence of having a computer job... having a physical impact on the world begins to feel like a kind of fantastical escape. I think I find it even more of an escape to make things than I do to dress up in outfits and pretend.