FUNK-Bot

In this blog entry, I’d like to focus on a specific creative project, one that involved some serious creativity and ingenuity.  

  Ladies and Gentlemen, meet my friend FUNK-Bot!

 

Rewind, a little back-story:

I collect wind-up toy tin robots.  

I also just celebrated my 30^th birthday recently.  The party my husband organized and threw for me had a robot theme, and for the super-surprise, he transformed himself into a funky purple robot to sing “Happy Birthday” to me and serve cake!   We decided that he should be known as FUNK-Bot, because let’s face it: What else are you going to call a 5’6” dancing purple robot?

As you can see from the next few photos, FUNK-Bot was a big hit with the crowd!

 

 I think that is basically goes without saying, but a lot of thought went into this, so I thought it would be a great topic for a blog that focuses on creativity!  So, now to discuss the process: It all started with a big idea… and some cardboard and a whole lot of duct tape!  

Adam started with the helmet, taking an appropriately sized box to fit his head and positioning and cutting the eyeholes.   After spray painting the box purple, he cut pieces from the lid of a dollar store disposable cake pan and taped them inside the box to cover the eye holes.  The bottom of the cake pan eventually became the shoulders, also covered in spray paint.  The detail to the helmet was done using a combination of sharpies and acrylic paint markers.  The side antennae are two small flashlights inserted firmly into holes cut in the cardboard.

The chest was constructed in similar fashion, the only major difficulty he encountered in this phase being how to determine the proper armhole size.  Adam re-cut the holes 3 times to make them large enough that he was able to pull his arms back inside of without squirming all over the place or crawling out of it awkwardly from the floor (remember, he’s home alone and it’s for a surprise)!  At any rate, the most electronic component of this costume was an actual speaker which was playing “Intergalactic” by the Beastie Boys.  The speaker is a portable speaker that plugs directly into the headphone jack on any standard mp3 player, can be found here (although fair warning, it really didn’t seem very loud in the midst of all of the excitement, so don’t count on it for making any important announcements).   

As far as the footwear went, the original plan involved much higher boots.  Sadly, both time constraints as well as the structural integrity concerns ultimately led to a simpler design.  In retrospect though, given a little more time and more cardboard resources to pool from, it would have been better to use a pair of shoes as the base and build the boots around them, instead of making the boots stand entirely alone. 

The flexible parts of the robot were a little more complicated to construct, but started with an old pair of pajamas.  The legs and sleeves were laid out smooth and flat, and then covered with strips of duct tape, which he alternated which side laid at the top and then ran a single strip of duct tape from shoulder to wrist to cover the seam on top and bottom.  The gloves started out as a pair of dollar store cloth work gloves, wrapped in duct tape the same as the arms and attached and taped at that seam.  Adam wanted me to mention that despite being very careful, the finished pants were a bit tighter to put on and off, so he would recommend factoring in a little extra room for the duct taped parts.  

All this ingenuity and creativity made for a wonderfully memorable 30^th birthday, if I may say so myself.  A special thanks to our friend Laurie, whose own artwork can be enjoyed here, for creating this video:

   

 And if you’re anything like me and you now have that song stuck in your head, the full version (as well as a great video) is here: