We made it back from our on-site at Give Kids The World Village and began planning our next steps immediately. That started with our producer, Dustin, working with the Village and FedEx Freight to get Tom safely to Pittsburgh.
In order to narrow down on a decision of pneumatic actuators vs electrical servo motors, we created a rough budget to have our experts vet. This way we could start having conversations about which direction is the most feasible within our scope and the client’s needs moving forward.
Scheduling was another area of emphasis this week as we are going to need our team members to use their specialized skill sets to move the engineering work forward in tandem with the creative aspects. This parallel development is going to be a critical part to our success as time management is imperative for a project of this scale.
We set up weekly meetings with our client, faculty and experts. Relying on proven design methodologies and hardware is imperative to our timeline, design process and potential maintenance solutions.
Knowing that we have little room for iteration once a design has been locked down and parts ordered, pre-visualization is an important part of our process. We are creating both physical and virtual models of the space and figures.
Raisa created a white model of the castle’s floor plan and is working on a more detailed model at a larger scale with Dustin to assist in determining sightlines, lighting and running hardware.
Our art team is modeling, rigging and animating a virtual model of Tom with accurate measurements, so Alex can precisely determine range of motion and hardware placement for the figure.
We also needed all of our branding wrapped up, so Niharika worked with the Art Faculty to get our poster and ½ sheets finalized. Raisa did some Photoshop magic to get a team photo, which is a fun parody of NSync’s No Strings Attached album artwork.
Tom arrived on Friday and we consulted with faculty on the best way to dismantle him so Alex could start reverse engineering his mechanisms.