Archives for December 2019

December 21, 2019, Filed Under: student experience, Uncategorized

Sweep the Monster off of its..Steel Feet

With our steel structure close to being done, my team and I needed to start thinking about ways to make the other teams’ lives and job more easier, along with an easy assembly of the structure during set up. The eye team needed areas where they were able to suspend and/or place their eyeballs on the structure that wouldn’t obstruct the lighting team’s vertical LED lighting or the nest wall team’s application of the walls. This is where guest artist Parker Jennings really came in handy for this particular leg of the project.

Parker came in with this idea of creating a web of crossbars on the outer parts of the structure made out of pencil rod. These crossbars would reinforce the structure and give the other teams areas to place their contributions to the nest. While this was a great idea, we were worried about the strength of the pencil rod up against the heavy duty materials and technology that would be put on it. We didn’t want to risk anything being damaged so we went back to the drawing board and came up with using flatbar.

The flatbar solved the same problem of not obstructing the lighting team’s LED strips and gave the eye team and nest wall team easier attachment points to the nest while reiinforcing the strength of the entire structure ten-fold.

To put the straight flatbar on the arched structure, our team bent the bar by hand by clamping an end to the structure, welding it in place, bending and clamping to another area, and repeating the process. At the end we used a grinder to separating the six arches from each other for easy assembly at the installation site.

With the structure done, we wanted to create some sweeps to the structure to add some depth to it, elevate the nest and make sure no one was able to get too close to all the fragile moving parts inside the nest. These sweeps also gave an area for our sandbags to weigh down the nest in case someone leaned into it.

With the structure completely finished, it’s safe to say that was one of the most challenging endeavors i’ve had, coming in with no skills working with steell. It was also one of the most fun projects I have worked on and the nest came out great as a whole and made over 60,000 people very happy. Through our ups and downs we reached success and i could not be happier with the final product.

December 21, 2019, Filed Under: student experience, Uncategorized

3 Students vs. 1 Steel Monster

This journey was a test to my abilities and creation of new ones. I came in with some sculpture experience and set design skills but I had never worked with steel before. First thing we did was come up with a visual of a structure that was as close to the designer’s idea with the ability for other teams to build off of it.

Now that we had a design to go on. We went through the process of order the steel, having it bent and cleaning it. During this time, we also started collaborating with the designer to figure out what angle to cut the steel at. This area is where our problems started, where even though we triple checked these angles, the height didn’t reach our ten-foot goal. Guest artists Chris Labeck and Sarah Conway helped us during this process and we went back to the drawing board, using a lot of geometry and careful calculation. After we knew our angles were correct and tested them, we went into mass production of measuring angles, cutting steel, separating them into their respective categories and welding the ground pieces together under instruction of Sarah.

We achieved having pieces to make an arch type structure but had an unclosed space at the top of the structure with no idea how to connect the structure to each other. We thought about connecting them together with pencil rod, brackets, This is where our third guest artist, Mike Ortiz, came in with an idea of a ring to connect the top edges and only attached to only one part of a half arch for easy removal.

Up to this point I believe we’ve done a good job of creating the skeleton of the creek monster habitat The process is difficult and a bit tedious but rewarding because the addition of these new skills and the new relationships I have with these new artists.

December 20, 2019, Filed Under: Uncategorized

Finding the Path…of Leaves

Aurora, from the leaf team, here. I never got around to talking about our process for creating the leaf path, so here goes. By design, the leaves needed to cover a a large swath of ground in an attractive way, lead visitors through the habitat, and allow young visitors an opportunity for safe interaction. To achieve these ends, the leaves took two different forms: a ground cloth fixed in place and individual loose leaves. Both of these elements needed to glow under black light.

My teammate and I knew from the beginning that time, durability, and cost of materials would be major constraints. As much as we would have liked to use real leaves for the loose leaves, we knew they weren’t practical. Laser cutting our own leaves from heavy card stock proved to be an advantageous solution. We could create shapes that mimicked those of the real leaves on site; they would move and rustle similarly to real leaves, and they would eventually biodegrade if they manages to escape our installation.

After much thought and testing, we settled on a layered approach to creating the ground cloth. The under layer, a plastic construction fencing, would provide stability and durability without retaining or trapping water. The upper layer, a perforated blue camouflage cloth, would give dimension when expanded and glow under the black light. I came up with the idea of attaching to two layers to each other with a tagging gun, the kind used to affix price tags to clothing.

The area underneath the nest structure proved to be its own unique challenge. Our original idea had been to fill that entire space with loose leaves ankle deep, but we could afford neither the time nor the materials to create so many leaves. The groundcloth from outside the nest, wasn’t quite right either; it just wasn’t strong or flat enough to to be a good walking surface in such a high traffic area. What, I thought, if we turned it upside down? That would solve the durability problem, but didn’t look all that great. We changed out the construction fencing for a garden fencing with a more screen like appearance. That did the trick.