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Staff Memories |  |
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Staff Memories | |
 It all started out
innocuously enough. Emmo (Mark Chadwick) and I were watching the AX'95 masquerade
as we were taping it for posterity. Out came that year's hit of the costumes: the God
Gundam costume, complete with its little blinking lights. I was saying to myself:
"That is a good costume. Yes, that is a really good costume. It is not what I would
do though." But since I had never been in a masquerade, what would I do? Then it
occurred to me when the entire audience stood up and saluted "Sieg Jion! Sieg Jion!
Sieg Jion!" at the top of their lungs: Would it not be neat if the audience was
chanting "Sharon! Sharon!" as they were during the scene when Sharon Apple first
appears in the OAV of Macross Plus. I turned to Emmo and said: "You know what. We
should make a Sharon Apple costume." |
 With that the
project started. Planning went slowly and so did the gathering of equipment. We already
knew what we wanted to do: to have the audience go crazy as Sharon rolled down the aisle
to the opening of Santi-U. We of course had to do a job that we would find acceptable in
terms of the construction of the box.. it would have to have lights that did a good job of
zooming along the gap near the top of the box. We would need a nice glowing red eye, and
the box had to shine like.. like.. like freshly polished acrylic! |
 I appealed to Emmo
for the electronics. He could certainly design a circuit that would do a good job in terms
of appearence and once I mentioned the idea to him you could see the little circuits being
soldered in his mind. There were some misgivings amidst our burgeoning enthusiasm: it
would require a lot of LED's, and at US prices they are a bit expensive since we were
thinking we would need at least 200, plus a couple of the large ones for the eye. Luckily
for us we were both going on a trip to Japan with several other friends in early August
and Emmo knew exactly where to go in Akihabara for cheap LED's. To the tune of 100 nice
red LED's for 700 yen. |
 With the LED's
secured we began the slow (and often procrastination filled) process of designing Sharon.
My project was the actual box, clothing, and pedastal design. Emmo's project was the light
array and power supply. We both worried a little about sound, but eventually we figured we
could trust the house sound well enough to just let the tech crew play the cd for us. We
had a little trepidition about that though, until we figured that we just would not have
time to mount Emmo's Bose sound system inside of Sharon and the power supply would become
a little bit problematic (although we did not fully rule this idea out until about two
weeks before AX'96.) |
  There were a total of three visits down
to the Los Angeles area where Emmo and I could meet and discuss our plans. I had a cad
model of the basic unit pretty well done, Emmo had the basic shift-register circuit design
pretty well done as well. |
 It was not until
about two weeks before AX'96 that I finally figured out where to go for all the proper
plastic and that I could actually assemble the unit: TAP the fantastic plastics place!
The store members at TAP got to know me quite well over the next week as I ordered $408 of
custom cut 3/16" & 1/8" black acrylic. I still need to go back there and
show them just what we built with all this plastic. They were certainly curious (the parts
list included 49 different pieces of plastic not including the eye piece and the little
hooks and other pieces of assembly work.) |
 This is also about
when Emmo shifted in to overdrive and began designing the circuit for real (after at least
two re-designs) and started soldering. The soldering project became one of the biggest
time sinks in this project and sucked in several innocent bystanders (even some who before
then had never held a soldering iron.) |
 We even had Hiroki
Onodera who was doing a little trip to Japan before AX'96 run off to our favorite shop
in Akihabara and buy us 200 more LED's "just in case." |
 There was a brief
period (of about two hours) when I figured the initial cost of all the plastic and how
much work we had to do in a week when it almost did not happen, but a co-worker said that
we had to do it because it would be so cool. That tipped us over the edge. We ordered the
plastic and began to learn how to work with acrylic. |
  In one week we started piecing it
together. I say "we" because at this point Lionel Lum showed up on the
scene and offered to help. Which is a good thing because without his dremel tool and
jigsaw this also would not have happened, not to mention the sheer help of having an extra
set of hands and another mind to puzzle over how to assemble the base of Sharon. |
 Carolyn, my
better half, also provided invaluable assistance from time to time as well as did Peter
Gruhn. Carolyn took over the task of assembling Sharon's skirt. That saved me about
three days of work I had no time to do because we were too busy just trying to cut and
glue Sharon together. |
 After one week of
grueling assembly, several mishaps, and one major design change the Sharon Apple box was
ready to head down to LA (all of this assembly work was taking place on the patio of our
apartment in Mountain View.) We still had not assembled the actual pedastal that Sharon
was going to rest on (a wood frame on a set of coasters.) But we figured we would do that
Saturday before the masquerade actually started. |
 Meanwhile down in
LA, Emmo was madly redesigning the circuits and soldering circuit boards together. The
actual circuit was rather neat and modular, but I will skip the details. Suffice to say
for the chip-heads out there that we had one HUGE shift register. During this time period
Emmo had enlisted the help of Erika Sato in the soldering efforts, being the ever
helpful and concerned person she is. During the convention we even got Ken Kindsfater
to lend a hand, he not having touched a soldering iron for several years at that point
either. |
 Back up in
Mountain View we were faced with another dilemma. Sharon was big. Not just big,
kinda huge. So huge she would not fit through a door without some creative tilting. So
huge that she would not fit in to the back of the van through the door. We actually had to
remove the middle set of seats in the van, slide Sharon through the side door, push Sharon
towards the back of the van (resting on a set of wooden blocks that would become her
pedastal's frame) and then put the middle seat back in, and THEN pack all the luggage for
four people for a week at expo back in to the van. This prompted Albert, the
con-chair, one of the four people to say "She ain't coming back up this way man!
uh-uh! Ain't doing it!" |
 So with that
behind us we got the box down to LA with little mishap. You should have seen the look on
the bellhop's face when we asked for a cart to ferry Sharon up to our room. |
 Now, Sharon was
the right shape and all, but she was still totally covered with the brown masking, so none
of us had seen her in her full glory. Emmo finally arrived, and he had to finish
soldering. Suffice to say that people were soldering straight up and during the opening of
the masquerade. |
 We also have Peter
Lin to thank for figuring out how to make the face plate for Sharon Apple's eye look
so much better. This is one of our last-minute great secrets. |
 I remember working
in con-ops when word reached us that there was another Sharon Apple box at the con.
I was immediately devastated. I had been worrying about this since we started working on
Sharon.. what if someone else got the same idea. Now it had come true. But, when we saw
the competition (which was set up in the dealer's room) our sails reinflated and we
started working with fervor. This was no competition: a ply wood box nailed together with
just a red light for the main eye... it was not even to scale! We were going to blow
them away. I heard it said that when we came out during the masquerade we 'demoralized
upon sight.' While this is probably not true, it certainly made me feel good. |
 It was during this
Saturday that I built the frame for Sharon out of brute-force engineering methods (lots of
screws and nails). Again thanks to Erika for running out to a nearby hardware store and
securing just enough screws to finish putting Sharon together. Also a very big thanks to Shaun
of the VTech front for having tools on hand to make the job another magnitude easier to
complete. There were several close calls here as I had found I had to hack away at several
pieces of wood to make sure it would all fit together still. |
Then came the final bit of assembly during the masquerade. We were working in the dark
with several small penlights being used to illuminate Mark's fingers as Lionel madly hot
glued the circuit boards to the mounting frame (We now call Lionel
"Hot-Glue-Boy"). Emmo was doing his usual cursing about how it would suck and
would not work.  |
 By this time I was
getting impatient. I wanted to see Sharon! So we started stripping off the brown
masking and, oh, was she a sight to behold. Even more so when mounted on the frame. We
covered Sharon up, mounted her on top of the frame and started the wait. |
 By this time, the
masquerade was in full swing. I was the locomotion for Sharon sitting inside her skirt
(now tell that to a fan-boy of Macross Plus). I had practiced earlier walking around with
the frame. Basically it was a walk in a crouch. |
 When the time came
near for Sharon's debut, we wheeled her to the far end of the aisle. I wish I could have
been outside to see just what other people saw. I still wonder how many people were aware
of what we were doing. When the time came for to roll I started walking in my crouch,
holding my breath all the while queuing off a set of blinking lights every now and then. I
remember worrying constantly all the while not to have my feet travel to far or they would
snag on the back of the frame that Sharon was resting on. I could dimly see through the
fabric as the cameras began flashing. Talk about a racing heart, I had not been on stage
in 12 years and this was quite the rush. The audience was chanting "Sharon!
Sharon! Sharon!" Our dream had been fulfilled. Since this was all that we were
really after we had made Sharon a non-competing entry in the masquerade and I was very
elated to hear a comment of "Thank god!" from, I presume, one of the other
contestants. |
And that is the main part of the story of the Sharon Apple Project: We did it all just to get that 30 seconds of effect as Sharon rolled down the aisle.
The staff of the Sharon Apple Project:
Mark "Emmo" / "Emerson" Chadwick
Peter "I Was There" Gruhn
Ken Kindsfater
Peter "Special Eye effects" Lin
Eric "Scanner" Luce
Carolyn Lee Luce
Lionel "Hot Glue Boy" Lum
Erika Sato
John "Pomru" Yung (for his assistance in Art Show)