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This is Halloween

A project log for Zero, the Nightmare Before Christmas dog

Zero is Jack Skellington's dog from the Halloween/Christmas movie Nightmare Before Christmas. I'm hoping to build a semi-animatronic version

kenneth-zabornyKenneth Zaborny 09/19/2021 at 03:110 Comments

What's Halloween without a jack o'lantern? Thankfully, faithful Zero has what we need. I knew I wanted a flickering light in his nose and I had worked out how I was going to run an Arduino nano with an RGB pixel. However, when talking to a fellow Astromech builder he mentioned a tea light already did exactly what I wanted and he was right. All I had to do was clip out the LED, wire it up to a voltage regulator, and bingo. I had the light I wanted. As a bonus the "flame" in the tea light was perfect to put inside Zero's nose. It gives a little more detail than we could see in the film but I am sure this is what Zero's nose was supposed to look like. 

The pumpkin was sourced a couple of years ago from a silly Halloween prop, it was just coated in glitter. I had to scrap all that off and then cut out the jack o'lantern shape. 

I put Zero on the ground so I could check the body for clearance before deciding on paint. I've got a few days before I can paint him anyway thanks to forecasted rain. The triangular gape is going to get a filler piece of black material just to cover up the frame. Zero is more like a sheet so that area is actually just a gap in the film.

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