Thread: ED-209 {robocop} Greeter prop

Tweet

Hi all! I am looking to make an ED-209 greeter. I am thimking like 9 to 10 feet tall. I have been kicking the idea around in my head for a few days now and I have a basic plan for what i want to do but, I thought that I would reach out to all of you people and your vast wealth of knowledge and see what ideas you had that I didnt think of. Any references or ideas for movement, sound, building materials, etc... would be greatly appreciated.

What I want it to do....
1) go from crouching to standing
2) gattling gun arm
3) pre recorded or voice changing effects

For those of you who are not familiar with ED-209. It is the Mech warrior looking thing in the movie Robocop that malfunctions and ends up killing people. "you have 20 seconds to comply"

I am still brainstorming, so any and all suggestions would be appreciated. I have seen all the ED-209 videos on youtube. So I am looking for original ideas and maybe references to props that could be addapted to fit my needs.

Thanks in advance for all your support!

Happy haunting, Calvin

For movement, pneumatics would be a likely choice. An audio program could be used to make something close as a pre recorded.
This would be needing some $$$ if your looking to animate this.........

Not looking to fully animate just crouch to stand and the gun to spin that's all.

I saw a free JetSki shell on craigslist & it mad me think of ED-209's body or maybe a motorcycle windshield & build on to it. The Gattling Gun I saw once on hauntproject.com not sure if it's still there. The guy used a rechargeable hand drill & made the barrel part out of like 1/2" pvc. cut up. Thats all I have for now, sorry.

Thanks booboo I'll look into that!

My hats off to you if you can make it work. Sounds pretty ambitious. May I suggest instead of it ratcheting ED up from a squat to a stand, where you would surely need pneumatics, you just have "him" rotate in his mid section. Make it light enough and all you would need is an electric motor.

Heres a website about how Craig Davies & Phil Tippitt made ED: http://www.robocoparchive.com/info/making1-ed209.htm

If you want to go in a different direction (and you have $50,000 just lying around) you can get a lifesize Robby the Robot from "Forbidden Planet" here http://www.thegreenhead.com/2005/10/...-life-size.php

Good Luck, Marc

The top part would be the easiest: either the bucket from a wheelbarrow or some foam sheets stacked tegether and trimmed to shape. Working your way down, things would get a little more complicated. Foam would be good for most of the construction because it would be easy to carve and keep things lightweight.

(raven) I got a worm drive idea in my head I'm gonna test out this weekend for the rise. And the body is gonna be cardboard, paper mâché, and foam with a PVC frame underneath. Should be light. But we all know how these things end up way off the mark from where the original idea started. I'll post pics as I go along. BTW thanks for the links!

Calvin

Ok! I got the rough PVC frame for the legs done this weekend. I had my fair share of problems, I had to make a few mods from my origonal plans to make the legs more rigid.

I got the worm drive that I had in my head into reality! And I am proud to say....... It worked! The drill is a bit noisy, but for a potential 2 foot rise I think it was worth the less that 15$ I put into it. I will prolly cover the drill with an insolated box for the final product for noise reduction. I'll post a video of the (how to) on the worm drive if anyone is interested.

The curent setup has a 5" rise of the torso. This is due to the setup of the legs. I had the bottom of the legs on hinges at first but it was a bit unstable. I have to fix this issue to achieve the rise i want. I have a few ideas, but would love any feed back I can get.

Below is a video of where I am at so far. Please let me know what you think and any ideas you might have on improvement!

Click the picture for the video.

That worked out pretty well. After seeing your first post, I went to Netflix and watched Robocop online. The real thing was pretty noisy when it moved. Like they said on the robocoparchive, I think some parts of it were exaggerated just because that's what they expected the engineers would have really done.

Keep in mind too that if you make it talk, people are going to be paying more attention to the voice than the sound of the drill so they won't realize what it is or how loud it is.