Building a Vorlon Encounter Suit or, how FONT got into costuming

Why Kosh?

Several members of FONT had been attending Eastercons for years, and never gotten remotely involved with costuming. When I finally managed to haul myself along to my first Eastercon, Evolution in 1996, I was encouraged (ordered) to take along a Boba Fett costume I had made several months earlier for a fancy dress party and enter the masquerade.

The audience reaction was tremendous. Mostly, I suspect, due to it being one of only two instantly recognisable costumes that were entered that year. The other was a Babylon-5 Psi-Cop, i.e. a fairly conventionally-tailored uniform. I spent most of the next couple of hours being mobbed by hordes of people wanting photos of the costume.

Most of the other non-joke entries were period costumes, often exquisitely made. Some justified the costumes with fantasy/SF-based acts (some of which were great, including the best-in-show vampires), but many did no more than walk across the stage (not that I did any more). I, for one, felt a bit put out. Where was the Fantasy? The SF?

In the bar the next day (don't take glasses into the pool area!), we sat as a group, lamenting the lack of recognisable SF/Fantasy costumes in Eastercon masquerades in the preceding years and the corresponding lack of audience reaction. ("It was a dress. An exquisitely made, very pretty, dress, but still just a dress".) We chatted idly about how we'd like to see something with more SF content in the future, and more "amateur" costumes. From there, things devolved into a discussion of what was and was not viable given the expertise, equipment and budget (or lack thereof) available within fandom at large.

We toyed with the idea of entering something ourselves, and started thinking about what WE could do, given our various skills. We decided that we wanted something instantly recognisable, since the best part of the audience reaction to Boba Fett was that all I had to do to get a roar of approval was walk in the door. We wanted a character with some mystique, and a costume that looked impressive, so no simple uniforms. Something vaguely resembling an act was required, too.

I'd just done a Star Wars character, so we didn't want to do that again straight away (as if we could find someone with the figure to make a convincing Darth Vader). None of us were particularly keen on doing anything from Star Trek, mostly due to our total lack of knowledge of the prosthetic makeup that would be required for anything better than a uniform, but also due to the fact that several of us aren't Trek fans anyway.

At that time, Babylon 5 was pretty popular in UK fandom (it accounted for a couple of programme items at that con) and we were all fans, so we started exploring the possibilities it offered :

"Earth Force Officer?"
"A. N. Other dull uniform."
"A Minbari?"
"Too much needlework."
"A Narn?"
"Eeek! Prosthetic central!"
"Kosh?"
"Kosh. Hmm. Kosh would be SO cool, but it's too difficult."
"Is it?"

I'd just demonstrated what could be done with various household junk, gaffer tape, paint and a small budget. From there onwards, Kosh was an engineering problem...

How Kosh?

Having decided that we wanted to make the costume, then came the difficult bit. None of us were remotely experienced as costumers - one or two fancy dress parties, and my Boba Fett costume the year before. Fett was built in a true Heath Robinson, cardboard, gaffer tape and assorted household junk way - chaos in spirit, if not actually built in the workshops at the con. Beyond that, we had basic needlework, painting ability, modelling experience, and electronics knowledge.

First, we defined our basic rules of costuming:

The Six-Foot Rule.
Ninety-five percent of the audience will never see the costume from any closer than six feet. This means that it doesn't matter that part X looks diabolical when viewed from six inches, because no-one will ever see it.
Work to the memory, not the actuality.
Few people know EXACTLY what any given costume looks like. Instead, they have a mental image, which consists primarily of the main features. Thus, all you need to do is produce a fairly faithful reproduction of the most distinctive parts of the costume, and the audience's imagination will fill in (or gloss over) any missing detail. In fact, a slight caricature may well be perceived as 'better' than a perfectly accurate costume.

These guidelines betray our objectives somewhat - it was our intention to produce a blatantly crowd-pleasing costume. We mostly didn't care what anyone thought of our workmanship.

We decided that the most important parts of the costume were the collar and the helmet. If we could also get a working 'Eye' in the helmet, and use it in an act, the audience would go bananas.

Our first technical challenge was the eye. We decided that if we could come up with a viable mechanism which could be produced by our relatively limited budget and expertise, then we would go ahead with the costume - if we were defeated, we would think again about going ahead at all.

After several mental false starts involving proper iris mechanisms (which we concluded would be horrendously difficult to make and even harder to make reliable, or fiendishly expensive to buy) we had an ingenious idea : why not change the size of the light, not the aperture?

Hence, the eye came to be constructed as a circular array of 60 LEDs, which were switched on and off sequentially in rings, giving the impression of the eye opening and closing. A translucent sheet of plastic in front of the array blurred things enough to make it less obvious how we did it. The entire assembly is about 60x70x70mm, and the wiring at the back of this array has to be seen to be believed.

Next up were the collar and helmet. Fibreglass would be nice, but none of us had the faintest idea where to get the raw materials, or any experience of working with it. So, enter, stage left :

Papier-Mâché, the poor man's fibreglass

"What, you mean the stuff they make egg boxes out of?"

NO! That's just wood pulp laid onto a mould and left to dry - i.e. just like paper or card. Papier-mâché is a little more sophisticated than that. The ancient Egyptians used it for several purposes, including making sarcophagi. Unfortunately, since we didn't have access to papyrus in sufficient quantities, we were forced to settle for slightly less traditional materials.

Papier-mâché is, essentially, a composite material, just like the glass/carbon-fibre reinforced plastic used in the aerospace and automotive industries, but with cheaper ingredients. Engineering composites typically use tapes or sheets of woven glass or carbon fibres. In their place, we used the much-more-easily-available sheets of cellulose fibre commonly known as newspaper.

Commercial composites frequently use epoxy resins as their matrix. Though freely available, epoxies are often a nightmare to work with - commercial materials use ovens for curing. We used water-based PVA wood glue, available from any hardware store, diluted for ease of working and economy.

Take strips of paper, dip them in the glue, then lay it onto a support frame/mould, allow to dry, et voila. The resulting material combines the stiffness of the paper with the toughness and strength of the glue. You say paper isn't stiff? Have you ever tried to stretch it?

Once the glue and paper is built up about ten or twelve layers (about 1 or 2 millimetres) thick, it's surprisingly rigid, especially if the shape you're making is composed of complex curves. Like, for instance, a Vorlon encounter suit.

Thus endeth the Party Political Broadcast by the Engineering Wing of the Papier-Mâché Liberation Front.

An ingenious use for packaging material...

Given the way the papier-mâché is built up out of layers of small strips of paper, all you need to make a complex monocoque shell is a mould. In the case of the collar, we decided to make an internal mould and build the shell around it, so the mould would remain inside the finished article.

After a flash of inspiration followed by a rapidly-constructed test piece, we obtained a BIG roll of bubble wrap (something like 20-30 square metres of the stuff, I think), sold for use as insulation in greenhouses. The core of the collar was then made by taking large pieces of this, and rolling them up to make cylinders about 8-12cm in diameter by about 80cm long. These are fairly flexible and can be bent into the desired shape, then held in that shape by the frenzied application of sticky tape.

It took only a couple of hours' work to produce the basic shape of the collar. A little more work added most of the large-scale detailing, then it was glue and paper time.

The finished collar is fairly robust and surprisingly light. Fine detail was built onto the outside of the shell, and the inner collar sculpted from spray-on filler foam.

The helmet was a little more complex, since its shape was not suitable for production in the same manner. Using a cycle helmet as a base, a frame was built out of various bits of metal rod and chicken wire, with some bubble wrap being used for the tubular sections. This, too, was then subjected to the glue and paper treatment. The shoulder plates were constructed from foil plates, bent and mangled into shape, with cardboard and more papier-mâché for detailing.

Holding it all up

Frenzied sawing, drilling and screwing-together of assorted bits of wood provided us with a backpack-style frame, which held the back of the collar above Dave's shoulders. This frame was then extended to include a metal hoop to support the front of the collar, from which we would also hang the cloak and front panel. Control and battery boxes for the electronics were hung from Dave's belt.

A concerted hunt through the fabric suppliers of Manchester eventually turned up some black velvet with just enough gold thread to give the cloak the desired shimmering appearance without looking like it could be recycled into 1950s b-movie space suits (after all, this is a 1990s television space suit, which is completely different). After much debate, we decided not to pursue the suggestions of an alternative "Kinky Black Lace Kosh", despite the ready availability of the appropriate materials.

There followed several lengthy fitting sessions, during which the proto-cloak was hung from the frame as measurements were taken, pleats planned and hemlines pinned. Any pinpricks suffered by Dave at this point were, of course, entirely accidental.

The coloured portions of the front panel were made of white cloth, with fabric paint for the coloured patterns. The front panel lights were again provided by LEDs, mounted behind the fabric on a large sheet of card. These were wired in four groups of three lights each, which were to be triggered via a highly sophisticated random-human-digit control mechanism in time to the soundtrack.

Copious quantities of Velcro and several safety pins were then used to hold the cloak and front panel in place and prevent any unfortunate operator-visibility incidents.

It'll be all right on the night

After last minute rehearsals, everything was planned. Kosh would enter and walk down the central aisle, following the pattern on the carpet by looking through the TINY gap in the costume. Upon reaching a mark in the middle of the floor, he would turn and perform, before leaving the stage.

On the night, of course, the auditorium was somewhat darker than during rehearsals, and Dave couldn't see the carpet. Or much of anything, actually. Walking 25 yards in a straight line, in the dark, in a heavy costume with minimal visibility, is rather tricky. The rest of the team watched in horror as Kosh veered into the crowd. Fortunately, audience assistance, including a massed cry of "STOP!" as he missed his mark on the stage, saved the day, and everyone realised why we had named our act...

"I can't see a thing in this helmet"

Was brought to Reconvene [ed: WRONG! it was Intervention, actually] by Team Kosh:

Performed by Dave Colter.

Soundtrack mixed/arranged by Mark Slater.

"Now I see why it's called an Encounter Suit" - The masquerade compere [ed: Sue Mason], as Kosh was escorted from the stage by Elaine, wearing a rather fetching black dress.

For anyone who wants another look, Kosh currently resides in FAB Cafe, Portland Street, Manchester. Between the Dalek and the DJ enclosure.

[Note: For various reasons, we reclaimed Kosh early in 2005, and he's now back with Mark and Elaine]

Ingredients:

To make your own Vorlon Encounter Suit, you will need :

Acrylic paint (various colours), aluminium rod (4mm diameter, approx. 1 metre), aluminium sheet (2mm thick, 75x100mm), black thread, bubble wrap (lots and lots), cable ties (several), chicken wire (approx. 1m²), clear lacquer (aerosol, 1 can), corrugated cardboard, cycle helmet (cheap, 1), electronic components (assorted), fabric paint (various colours), filler foam (1 Large Can), foil plates (4), gaffer tape (of course), glittery black velvet (11 metres), gold paint pen, gold ribbon (approx. 3 metres), insulating tape, LEDs (large yellow, 12; ultra bright green, 60), lining material (black, 6 metres), masking tape, milk bottle (plastic), newspaper (approx. 100m2), PVA glue (approx. 1.5 litres), red primer (aerosol, 1 can), roller towel (approx. 3 metres), screws, Sellotape, shower gel bottle (brand unknown, 1), rolled steel (8mmx2mm rectangular cross-section, 2 metres), safety pins, steel screw-thread (300mm, plus nuts to fit), super glue, thick card, toilet roll tubes (8, plus 1 Sacred Toilet Roll of Antioch), Velcro (approx. 1.5 metres), water (approx. 1.5 litres), wire (lots), wood (25mm square cross-section, approx. 5 metres)

(Some assembly required. Batteries not included.)