crazysteve's SPACE BRIDGE
Back in early 2000 I was on this really intense stop motion animation kick. I was filming everything from music videos to old toy commercials to cartoon episodes all in stop motion. It was grueling work, but I loved it. I made lots of elaborate backgrounds and sets for my stop motion movies. The most ambitious project I undertook was a stop motion version of the Transformer cartoon "Transport to Oblivion". There's a scene in it where the Decepticons stick Bumblebee in a little purple rocket car and try to launch him down a track into the circular space bridge teleport pad. Since the space bridge playset was never made, I had to build one myself to film that scene. Luckily I had enough parts and stuff laying around so that this wasn't a total scratchbuild.
The bridge part was easy enough-I took the leg and track sections from three Omega Supremes and laid them out in a way that roughly resembles the track and teleport pad from the cartoon. What was tricky was making the little rocket car. I needed it to be big enough for Bumblebee to fit into, and I wanted it to be a decent representation of the vehicle from the cartoon. I bought some old broken G.I Joe vehicles dirt cheap from a Tucson swap meet, and it was in that bunch of broken toys that I found the vehicle that would serve as the foundation for my rocket car. I think the one I used was called the Cobra Rat. I totally gutted it and cut off major portions of the body until it was the right shape. Then I built body panels out of paper and glued them on.
There's nothing special about the paper I used. It was ordinary printer paper. This was a really low budget project and I wasn't about to build this thing out of styrene or take too much time doing it. I only needed these sets and vehicles as props for scenes that lasted under three minutes total so I never labored over them much. I really did like how this little rocket car came out despite the lack of time and work I put into it. I painted it purple using crayola paint you can find in the school supplies section at any major retail store. Then I added silver highlights with a paint marker and I made a clear removable canopy out of the plastic bubble from some Transformer packaging I had lying around. It was really low tech but I think it came out cool.
I had to retract Bumblebee's legs into his body so that he'd fit in the cockpit of the rocket car, but that was about the only big compromise. I painted the cockpit of the RAT silver but I didn't paint the other parts so its red body can be still seen in places. I took some liberties with the design of the vehicle to give it a more visually dynamic shape than what it had in the cartoon. One tiny change I made was to mount the energon cubes (which I simulated using alimunum foil squares) so that they weren't enclosed within the vehicle but instead they lay exposed through an opening in the hull. My rocket car wasn't very cartoon accurate now that I think about it. I breifly considered bringing my space bridge to Botcon '02 for the art contest but I decided against it because I ran out of space in my luggage.
