Now it’s time to wrap up the KISS Tindies wireform practice project with a few images for prosperity. Here’s the band together on stage:

An earlier version of this picture had Catman’s drum set in its bare copper wire form. It worked fine, but I recalled most drum sets I saw on stage performances had a band logo or something on their bass drum surface facing the audience. I hastily soldered another self blinking LED to my drum set, arranged so it can draw power from a coin cell battery sitting in the drum. Calling this a “battery holder” would be generous, it’s a far simpler hack than that.

I then printed a Tindie logo, scaled to fit on my little drum. Nothing fancy, just a standard laser printer on normal office printer. I then traced out the drum diameter and cut out a little circle with a knife. Old-fashioned white glue worked well enough to attach it to the copper wire, and that was enough to make the drum set far more interesting than just bare wire.

A black cardboard box lid served as a stage, with a 4xAA battery tray serving as an elevated platform for the drummer. I watched a few YouTube videos to see roughly where Demon, Spaceman, and Starchild stand relative to each other and Catman as drummer. It may not be a representative sample, but hopefully it eliminated the risk of: “They never stand that way.”

With batteries installed in everyone, it’s time for lights, camera, action! It was just a simple short video shot on my cell phone camera, one continuous pull back motion as smooth as I can execute with my bare hands helped by the phone’s built in stabilization. I had one of the aforementioned YouTube videos running for background sound.

I wanted to start the video focused on the drum logo, but doing so requires the phone right where I wanted Demon to stand. After a few unsatisfactory tests, I decided to just add Demon mid-scene after the phone has moved out of the way. It solves my position problem and adds a nice bit of dynamism to the shot.

(Cross-posted to NewScrewdriver.com)