Anyone want to help build a literal tiny audience for the east van VODVILLE?

So @Omid had a fantastic idea, and suggested adding Statler and Waldorf figures to the balcony seats on the Vodville theatre. I love every bit of this idea, and thought why not go one further and fill up the whole theatre with an assortment of iconic movie characters?

Something that’s this much fun seems like it should be shared. So we’d like to invite the whole Hack Space community to play.

The theatre audience will be visible from above and behind when the movie is playing, but will also be visible from the front reflected in the screen when the house lights are up.

So if you have a favorite movie character and some 3d modeling skills (or even hand sculpting skills and know somebody with a 3-D scanner (hint: this last one is all of us)), do you want to add your personal touch to the East Van Vodville?

Here are the guidelines I am thinking of:

  • Iconic film and television characters only (film is global, so the characters do not have to be recognizable to a western audience, but should be recognizable to an average person from its culture of origin.)
  • Horror movie characters are okay, but they need to be holding popcorn (you can’t murder the small children watching the show with a bag of popcorn don’cha know )
  • Tall characters at the back of the lower bowl.
  • No modification to the existing seats, instead boolean difference the seats from your characters arse.
  • The theatre scale is 0.018% of real life, or approximately 1:55 scale.

I’ve uploaded stls and step files for the seats here: Seatingfiles.zip - Google Drive
The balcony seats are wild (can be moved around) use the single seat for reference

If there appears to be strong interest, I can make up a seating chart so you can reserve your preferred seat.

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Hmmm making a 3d model for generic audiences would work for the most part, like just round heads would be pretty simple just to fill out the seats if there’s no one taking them, and then could be individually changed to suit people/characters

Are the seats already 3d printed? or are they made of wood?


I made this lil person to sit in the seats, maybe a good start?

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The seats are already 3D printed and installed in the Vodville.

I think there may be a wee misunderstanding about our goal here. It’s no so much about filling the seats as it is about making a treasure hunt for the viewers to spot characters that they know and love, and for VHSers to express their own taste and creativity by adding something that they love.

We’re OK with it taking months or years to fill up the theatre.

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Ahhh I see! Then perhaps this STL could be a good base for people to sculpt/paint on top of/add to, as it’s already to size of the seats, would just need to be added onto!

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Okay, we did some testing, turns out with a 0.2 nozzle and some pretty minor tweaks you can get acceptable prints on an FDM (Bambu p1p) of vodville scale figures. Seated, these figures are around 20mm high, so pretty darn small

Here is the first try, a generic average dude, they were created in Charmorph in blender, then shrink wrapped in Rhino3d


Once the supports got removed and test fit in the theatre:

We also made a creature from the black lagoon:

And with a bit of @Metal_Janet 's painting skills applied

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Okay its been a bit, but we got some new figures added to the theatre
Fozzy Bear, a couple Weeping Angels (with popcorn so you know they are off duty), Gaffer the Muppet cat, and of course, Statler and Waldorf. We also added a small piece of the original Pantages theatre in the form of a tiny paint chip.



So to make Statler and Waldorf I got lucky and found a couple heads on thingiverse

Protip about thingiverse, they removed all the copyrighted material from their search function, but didn’t remove the models from their site, so if all you can find is a remixed version of something, check the description to see if it links to the sources, they often do.

Heads are no good without a body so I went down a bunch of different tool chains before settling on the following. MakeHuman → Blender → Rhino 8 → Meshmixer → Orca Slicer → Bambu p1p with 0.2mm nozzle->prime and paint. Bear in mind, I have no idea what I am doing when it comes to animation, posing, rigging etc. so my toolchain might be considered madness.

  1. MakeHuman - Good at getting a basic human figure that can have clothes. Can export a fully rigged model (ie with posable bones and such) directly into Blender via a non intuitive combination of a blender plugin and a socket feature in the program.

  2. Blender, used this to pose the figure and export to an stl

  3. Rhino 8 - used this to shrinkwrap the model which filled in the MANY MANY holes left by the above. I think Blender also has a shrinkwrap option, but I am more familiar with Rhino.

  4. Meshmixer - Used to combine the heads and make changes like increasing the size of the hands. I love this software for doing fast and dirty changes to stls. In addition to being able to mesh boolean, you can selectively highlight parts of the model and scale and transform just those bits with a gradual falloff. The sculpting tools are pretty intuitive too. Protip, put your cursor over part of the model and press C, your view will now rotate around that point.

  5. Orca slicer - I am printing these out on a Bambu P1P with a .2 nozzle. I am going FDM because I just don’t want to deal with the toxicity and clean up of resin in my house and at 1:55 I can JUST get away with it.
    Key settings are use arachne as the wall generator (prints lines smaller than the nozzle), 0.06mm layer height, slow down to 80mm/s, tree supports, rotate your figure so its on its back, and print using per object order so you aren’t stringing back and forth between models.
    These are printed out using Bambu’s basic PLA because that way I don’t have to calibrate all the flow settings, otherwise for different filament running Orca’s flow dynamics calibration makes a HUGE difference to print quality on this type of thing.

Here they are printed, the printer kracken ate Statler’s legs, which worked out because Janet had to chop Waldorf’s feet off later to fit him into the balcony. Happy accidents.

Primed it with Mr Surfacer primer, thanks @TankGuy for introducing us to that product range

And finally painted by hand with a small brush. I used a mix of speed paints (used a lot in wargaming, they tend to pool in spots to give you lots of color variation with no effort) and regular acrylics. At this scale you don’t need to be too precious or exact. I am happy with how Statlers suit and tie came out, considering I just painted it all blue and added two white lines to represent the collar. I used a fine tipped pigment marker for the eyes and I am very happy that Statler will only be seen in profile because I walleyed the heck out of him.

We still got another couple hundred seats to fill if you got a favorite character you want to add. :smile:

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how about mystery science theatre 3000?

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If we’re throwing out suggestions, I’m requesting Waldo

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Ouu good ideas, both of those need to happen. Waldo needs more cover though, right now it wouldn’t be sporting.

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how about E.T.

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in the spirit of ILM, how about R2 and C3P0.

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Maybe this version ?

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President Abraham Lincoln?

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He’s not really best known as a film character, so the logical leap that I make as to why he’d be in a theatre is as a bit of a joke about his assassination. And to me, respectfully, that joke feels a bit out of keeping with the tone that we’re trying to set. The monsters all have popcorn, fer chrissakes.

more suggestions for characters:

  • Lego minifig
  • Johnny 5/Wall-E (let’s be honest, they’ll be confused for each other)
  • Wallace and Gromit
  • Elphaba
  • V
  • Gollum
  • Sherlock Holmes
  • The Little Prince
  • The Very Hungry Caterpillar
  • Cat in the Hat
  • Winnie the Pooh and Piglet
  • Thing 1 and Thing 2
  • Grinch
  • Paperbag Princess
  • Hal 9000
  • Puss in Boots
  • Cyrano de Bergerac
  • Mickey Mouse
  • Popeye and Olive Oyl
  • Tintin
  • Alfred Hitchcock
  • Van Gogh
  • Frida Khalo
  • Bert and Ernie
  • Mulder and Scully

i’m happy to help out with the model work (CAD, printing, painting, etc) if needed

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These are all great suggestions! I’d say go ahead and pick any of them and make it happen!

sorry if this is mentioned somewhere but what scale are the minis?

1:55.

There’s STLs and step files for the chairs in David’s original post, we’ve been scaling the figures to look about right in the chair.

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