The Making of a Mascot Part 1: Planning and Prototyping

For longer than any of us can remember, we’ve wanted to have a mascot of our namesake robot Makey walking around at Maker Faire to greet attendees, pose for photos and hold impromptu dance parties. And at long last, master model and prop builder Shawn Thorsson has answered the call.

You might remember some of Shawn’s previous work, like building a life-sized ED-209 from the original Robocop film, or making full sized props of the weapons from the game Evolve. The Makey costume will be a relatively simple build of geometric shapes of cast fiberglass, but the proportions of the character do present more than a few challenges for the person inside to move about comfortably.

In this first episode of our documentation of this project, Thorsson and Associates tackle the all important steps of having a good plan: Understanding the layout of the character and parts, establishing a proper scale, and then building a full size prototype out of cardboard to get a sense of how it will look and move. We’ll be covering every step of this build in Shawn’s workshop, so stick around for more as we get closer to Maker Faire Bay Area 2016.