Shiny Things Gallery | Other Shiny Things | Funko Pop! Duran Duran Stage
Feel absolutely free to just PgDn/End key to get to the video and images, because what follows are way more words than intended. Where... do I even begin with this. I could say that it all started with a joke and got quickly out of control, but was mostly fueled by great personal significance that I will not get into here. The point is, the right thing at the right time required... well, this.
It started off simply, really. I was tentatively buying some new guitar strings in an effort to get back to playing music and happened to see the store had a Funko Pop! Nick Rhodes. Considering I was at the beginning of revisiting Duran Duran's discography and my housemate was doing some teasing about it, I decided I "had to". Good reason. For a while, nothing happened... then I decided he looked too odd, too lonely, without the synthesizers. My intention was to keep them simple, so I built a couple of prototypes and finally landed on very basic flat wire for the base and simple foam board for the keyboards themselves. Very simple stylized painted details of four classic synths: a Roland Jupiter 8, a Wasp (of course I had to), a Yamaha DX7, and a Moog One. And that, I thought, would be that.
Then my parents sent me birthday money with the suggestion I buy something frivolous that I'd been wanting right at the point when I discovered someone selling the rest of the Pop! figures at a discount if I bought them all together, so... I had to, right? But I was still safe since I wasn't going to make any more instruments. I wasn't. Until I started thinking about how I'd do a drum kit in the same style. Whoops. But they needed a stage first, right? Ha ha. Ha. Of course. Of course they did. But I wanted to stick to "simple and obviously handmade out of easy to use materials" as the style for the whole thing. What's easier than foam board? A lot of things, it turns out, but I was aware of that and I did it anyway. And attached one of those battery-operated "neon light" strings to the finished stage with wire because it's a stage and it needed neon lights. It just did, I make the rules and I state this a fact. That was the extent of the light show, or so I thought.
Back to the drum kit, that took me a while to get to actually building, but ultimately stacking foam board disks on top of each other seemed like a good start. And the glitter paint. This particular purple-y pink-y color is very, very important and was a surprise to come across. The bottle cap cymbals are still my favorite things, though. Those came out so much better than I'd hoped. Still... kind of simple, right..?
Clearly I couldn't make synthesizers and a drum kit and not make the bass and guitar. Clearly. I decided to go with that lovely Paper Gods purple/blue colorshift Peavey Cirrus bass because I just really like how it looks, and a sweet black Studio Series Gibson Les Paul because it's one I know Andy uses and I am biased toward style-wise. Both guitars have little metal bits that attach to magnets at the ends of the ribbon "straps" because I can and I did.
I didn't plan the tambourine. I just kind of wondered one day if I could make the wire work the way I wanted it to, and I had a pile of sequins in front of me from a clothing alteration project, so I started with few expectations... and became really, really pleased with the result. The mic stand and microphone were clearly the easiest bits of this whole build, but that was exactly what I needed to be last.
Then my housemate, who'd inadvertently been the catalyst for this entire thing, said the stage needed pyro. I was going to ignore him, but started researching miniature lights. None of them quite did what I wanted them to do (though it must be said that I've found an upgrade for the future... yeah, I know, but well into the future), but I did have this beautiful fabric. It gradually shifts from red-orange to orange to yellow and was pretty much perfect for, you know, fire. Plus, shiny, no fuss, and could easily be added to or removed from the stage. And as there is one specific song that I think of associated with stage pyro, "Wild Boys" became a bit of a theme.
As for the RGB LED matrix/"video screen"... uh. It had just been part of a curiosity for some time and this was my excuse to finally get one and play with it. I hadn't even begun picking at Python projects and this had already become a process. Experience with pixel art helped as I was getting album covers into tiny 64x32 pixel images, but just compiling them into a gif... was not working. It was overall too complex and the RGB screen kept freaking out with all of the brighter colors, so I had to do more color correcting. For every frame of album art. And then had to use to Microsoft's ExpressivePixels to make it all work together in an animation. Ultimately I split the album art and the "Wild Boys" animations to make it a little easier on myself, but they play together in an endless loop on the matrix itself.
As for the video of the animation and the stage (also unlisted on YouTube if it's having trouble loading here), every attempt at color correcting makes it look worse, so I resigned myself to the over-saturation of reds and included a more accurate but worse quality video of the "Wild Boys" animation tacked on to the end there. I worked way too hard on getting the fire to look right to let that go unappreciated and looking like lava. The backdrop is actually a sheet of iridescent black vinyl that I haven't yet made use of, but now I'm just tempted to keep that as a backdrop. It would be completely impractical, of course, but what's one more thing tacked on?
Credits: RGB LED matrix and all the basic parts are from Adafruit, and I look forward to playing with all that this odd little toy can do. The "Wild Boys" MIDI file is from FreeMIDI.org and I am endlessly irritated that there are no credits attached because the whole file is amazing. The "WILD BOYS ALWAYS" background fire is based on picking Nevit's fire file apart and then basically completely destroying it, but apparently it all worked out in the end right? (The "SHINE" is just... photographs of the glitter paint on the drums. Too good not to use.) Album art originated from the Duran Duran fan wiki before I got hold of them, and clearly their respective artists/designers before that. I tried compiling the animations into "actual gifs" as well, which are free to use or pick apart or do whatever anyone might like to them. If anybody wants the ExpressivePixels files, feel free to contact me and I will... figure out how to get them to you.
Altogether, it's a labor of love and silliness and celebration getting to do different things from my usual creations, I think. And probably isn't technically done yet, but it's done enough. Because it's mentioned nowhere else: Tron is security, the Cactuar laying in front of the stage is... uh... a groupie, and cars are-- Cars. Because cars, right? We just don't talk about the solid gold John Taylor on a pony. It does not exist. You saw nothing.
It started off simply, really. I was tentatively buying some new guitar strings in an effort to get back to playing music and happened to see the store had a Funko Pop! Nick Rhodes. Considering I was at the beginning of revisiting Duran Duran's discography and my housemate was doing some teasing about it, I decided I "had to". Good reason. For a while, nothing happened... then I decided he looked too odd, too lonely, without the synthesizers. My intention was to keep them simple, so I built a couple of prototypes and finally landed on very basic flat wire for the base and simple foam board for the keyboards themselves. Very simple stylized painted details of four classic synths: a Roland Jupiter 8, a Wasp (of course I had to), a Yamaha DX7, and a Moog One. And that, I thought, would be that.
Then my parents sent me birthday money with the suggestion I buy something frivolous that I'd been wanting right at the point when I discovered someone selling the rest of the Pop! figures at a discount if I bought them all together, so... I had to, right? But I was still safe since I wasn't going to make any more instruments. I wasn't. Until I started thinking about how I'd do a drum kit in the same style. Whoops. But they needed a stage first, right? Ha ha. Ha. Of course. Of course they did. But I wanted to stick to "simple and obviously handmade out of easy to use materials" as the style for the whole thing. What's easier than foam board? A lot of things, it turns out, but I was aware of that and I did it anyway. And attached one of those battery-operated "neon light" strings to the finished stage with wire because it's a stage and it needed neon lights. It just did, I make the rules and I state this a fact. That was the extent of the light show, or so I thought.
Back to the drum kit, that took me a while to get to actually building, but ultimately stacking foam board disks on top of each other seemed like a good start. And the glitter paint. This particular purple-y pink-y color is very, very important and was a surprise to come across. The bottle cap cymbals are still my favorite things, though. Those came out so much better than I'd hoped. Still... kind of simple, right..?
Clearly I couldn't make synthesizers and a drum kit and not make the bass and guitar. Clearly. I decided to go with that lovely Paper Gods purple/blue colorshift Peavey Cirrus bass because I just really like how it looks, and a sweet black Studio Series Gibson Les Paul because it's one I know Andy uses and I am biased toward style-wise. Both guitars have little metal bits that attach to magnets at the ends of the ribbon "straps" because I can and I did.
I didn't plan the tambourine. I just kind of wondered one day if I could make the wire work the way I wanted it to, and I had a pile of sequins in front of me from a clothing alteration project, so I started with few expectations... and became really, really pleased with the result. The mic stand and microphone were clearly the easiest bits of this whole build, but that was exactly what I needed to be last.
Then my housemate, who'd inadvertently been the catalyst for this entire thing, said the stage needed pyro. I was going to ignore him, but started researching miniature lights. None of them quite did what I wanted them to do (though it must be said that I've found an upgrade for the future... yeah, I know, but well into the future), but I did have this beautiful fabric. It gradually shifts from red-orange to orange to yellow and was pretty much perfect for, you know, fire. Plus, shiny, no fuss, and could easily be added to or removed from the stage. And as there is one specific song that I think of associated with stage pyro, "Wild Boys" became a bit of a theme.
As for the RGB LED matrix/"video screen"... uh. It had just been part of a curiosity for some time and this was my excuse to finally get one and play with it. I hadn't even begun picking at Python projects and this had already become a process. Experience with pixel art helped as I was getting album covers into tiny 64x32 pixel images, but just compiling them into a gif... was not working. It was overall too complex and the RGB screen kept freaking out with all of the brighter colors, so I had to do more color correcting. For every frame of album art. And then had to use to Microsoft's ExpressivePixels to make it all work together in an animation. Ultimately I split the album art and the "Wild Boys" animations to make it a little easier on myself, but they play together in an endless loop on the matrix itself.
As for the video of the animation and the stage (also unlisted on YouTube if it's having trouble loading here), every attempt at color correcting makes it look worse, so I resigned myself to the over-saturation of reds and included a more accurate but worse quality video of the "Wild Boys" animation tacked on to the end there. I worked way too hard on getting the fire to look right to let that go unappreciated and looking like lava. The backdrop is actually a sheet of iridescent black vinyl that I haven't yet made use of, but now I'm just tempted to keep that as a backdrop. It would be completely impractical, of course, but what's one more thing tacked on?
Credits: RGB LED matrix and all the basic parts are from Adafruit, and I look forward to playing with all that this odd little toy can do. The "Wild Boys" MIDI file is from FreeMIDI.org and I am endlessly irritated that there are no credits attached because the whole file is amazing. The "WILD BOYS ALWAYS" background fire is based on picking Nevit's fire file apart and then basically completely destroying it, but apparently it all worked out in the end right? (The "SHINE" is just... photographs of the glitter paint on the drums. Too good not to use.) Album art originated from the Duran Duran fan wiki before I got hold of them, and clearly their respective artists/designers before that. I tried compiling the animations into "actual gifs" as well, which are free to use or pick apart or do whatever anyone might like to them. If anybody wants the ExpressivePixels files, feel free to contact me and I will... figure out how to get them to you.
Altogether, it's a labor of love and silliness and celebration getting to do different things from my usual creations, I think. And probably isn't technically done yet, but it's done enough. Because it's mentioned nowhere else: Tron is security, the Cactuar laying in front of the stage is... uh... a groupie, and cars are-- Cars. Because cars, right? We just don't talk about the solid gold John Taylor on a pony. It does not exist. You saw nothing.
