Creations
Halloween 2004: Pacman Costume
Last year for Halloween, I made a Beaker costume, which got lots of notoriety at last year’s family party and earned me official cool points for making it to the front page of BoingBoing. Of course, making that costume afflicted me with a reputation for making a good homemade costume. This year, I was Pac-Man. On top of that, Sarah was Inky, the purple ghost. Here’s a picture:
The purpose of this page is to describe how to make a Pac-Man costume. Unfortunately, I didn’t notate how we made the Inky costume, but if you really need to make one, feel free to send me an e-mail. I’ll give you a hint, though: all we used was PVC pipe, duct tape, and cloth. :)
Here we go…
It took me a while to think about how to make this costume. I thought of making it spherical, but thought it might be funnier to make it like the old 2-D character in a 3-D world. So, I decided to make two “faces” and connect them together to make them a sort of cylindrical prism missing an arc.
With inspiration from Red Green, I decided to make the whole costume out of 3/4” PVC pipe and duct tape. I found that the best way to cut PVC pipe is over a garbage pail using a standard saw, like the ones the guys play in deep-South, Yeehaw festivals. The three pieces of pipe perpendicular to one another are 40 inches in length. (Note that 3 × 40” = 120” = 10 feet = 1 length of PVC pipe.) The other pieces were cut to be 55” or so, from what I remember. I calculated the hypotenuse using the Pythagorean Theorem and cut it pretty close to that number. I didn’t cut it exactly because I didn’t know how I was going to duct tape it to the rest of the frame.
The curved piece of tubing was found in the sprinkler section of Home Depot. It was probably 25 or 30 feet in length and cost about $6. I basically eyeballed the way it was supposed to fit… I attempted to use some string or a ruler to make it a perfect circle, but I thought that’d be a little ridiculous.
You can see from the images where I taped the joints together. After making this side of the frame, I made the other side, which you can see in the following images.
Next, I attached the first crossbeam to one face. If I remember correctly, I used an entire roll of duct tape at this point.
Instead of using the handyman’s most accurate tool, the eyeball, I measured the width of the front door at Sarah’s mom’s house (because that’s where I was manufacturing the costume). The door was 36” wide, so I made the crossbeams 32” long, figuring that’d give me about 3” on each side of the costume to make it through the door. Unfortunately, I would find out later that the costume was basically too big to wear indoors altogether, but half the fun of making it was realizing its enormity.
Once all the crossbeams were taped together, I found that there was no easy way to get the costume to stand. So, I stood it on the points of the mouth, as seen in the image on the left. It was from this position that I had to make the rest of the costume, which was NOT fun. It probably would have been a good idea to make some sort of stand for it somehow… but even now I can’t think of a way that that would have worked.
Now that all of the crossbeams were attached, it was time to cover the costume in the yellow fabric I bought from Jo-Ann in the clearance section for $1 per yard. I bought an entire roll, or 8 yards, which was not enough to cover the costume. Sarah kindly purchased another three yards for me at a later date.
In the images, there’s a picture of me trying out the costume. This will give you an idea of its size. I’m 5’10” tall, or 1.8 meters, and the costume is almost as tall as I am.
At this point, it was plain to see that this would be a more difficult and time-consuming project than I had predicted. It took me two solid nights to get to this point. I decided to begin putting fabric over the strip of space created by the crossbeams. In other words, I covered the space between the two faces. This will make more sense looking at the next image.
In order to attach the fabric to the circular frame, I had to use a bunch of safety pins. Unfortunately, the tension of the stretched fabric going across the costume pulled the circular tubing and warbled the shape of the costume. You might be able to see this in later images. Luckily, the fabric is 1 yard wide, long enough to cover the area needed and more. I used the slack to wrap around the tubing and pin the fabric together. See the images for reference.
This took a couple of hours and lots of safety pins. At this point, probably about 80 pins were used.
Once this was completed, I had to cover the faces. This proved to be exceptionally difficult, especially considering that I didn’t have enough fabric.
It took another night or two to get all of the fabric together and finish the costume. I made straps out of duct tape and had to wear a belt around the duct tape straps to keep them close to my body. I don’t have a picture of this, unfortunately, but if you decide to build it, you’ll find out when you try to wear the costume.
You can also see, on the left, a picture of me trying to make it through a door. This costume was pretty hilariously big. Too big, in fact, since I couldn’t even wear it for most of the night at my parents’ Halloween bash. However, we did use the rest of the pipe and tubing to build a cool pirate ship outside my parents’ house. Here are links to images of the pirate ship:
http://www.garone.net/tony/halloween2004/ghostpirate1.jpg
http://www.garone.net/tony/halloween2004/ghostpirate2.jpg
