{"id":1821,"date":"2021-10-31T13:00:00","date_gmt":"2021-10-31T20:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.mossor.org\/blog\/?p=1821"},"modified":"2021-10-23T20:05:33","modified_gmt":"2021-10-24T03:05:33","slug":"make-ghostbusters-costume","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mossor.org\/blog\/make-ghostbusters-costume\/","title":{"rendered":"Make: Ghostbusters Costume!"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Looking for some Ghosts to Bust!<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Since I was a kid, I loved movies and I loved monsters and fantasy and science fiction. I loved how they looked and how they made me feel, whether it was scary or funny or exhilarating, it made me feel something that I couldn’t find easily in my life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One of the movies that certainly did all of that was Ghostbusters. It was funny, but not really scary. Exciting, but in a fun way. And I didn’t want to be Bill Murray’s Peter Venkman or Dan Akroyd’s Ray Stantz. I identified with the brain, the nerd, Harold Ramis’ Dr. Egon Spengler. That guy was cool.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Since I was a kid, I’ve made costumes for Halloween, usually on my own. My favorite was a pair of arms that I made that hung from my neck with fishing line, holding open my pillowcase to hold candy. And when I would be at a front door and the owner was handing out candy, I’d reach out with my real arms and hold the pillowcase open the other way, so I had four arms. In my memory, it was a flawless costume and everyone was fooled. Probably not an accurate memory, but a good one nonetheless.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I didn’t have much need to build costumes as an adult. There was one Halloween party I went to with Christina where I was Frankenstein, wearing a pair of shoes I’d crafted 4″ wooden risers to so I was an immense 6’6″+. That was pretty great.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I’ve wished I’d built a really nice costume. Maybe for a party, maybe to go to a convention. But something I built and something that looked good<\/em>!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Eventually, I decided that I would build a Ghostbusters costume. It was classic, it resonated with me, it didn’t seem that<\/em> hard and I thought I might get some use out of it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I think that was about three years ago. BUT! I have finally completed my Ghostbusters costume, as you can see in the initial picture at the top of the page.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There was one main article that was my starting point called “Make This Screen Accurate Ghostbusters Costume with 80% Available from Amazon Prime<\/a>“. It’s very good and is a great outline for the basic costume.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The other thing it rightly points out is that Spirit Halloween has three pretty good replicas of the main pieces of GB hardware: the Proton Pack, the PKE meter and a Ghost Trap.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So, there was some shopping around the Halloween holiday, much of it in 2019, I think. Because of the proximity to the holiday (I got started late!) I didn’t really make much progress that year, but I got a lot of the supplies. I have no recollection of 2020, but since Halloween was canceled on account of the pandemic, I’m guessing it wasn’t a priority.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In addition to the above article, I ran across some videos on the Punished Props Academy<\/a> channel on YouTube. On that page, Bill Doran does a great job of teaching how to create props and costumes and he covered how to weather the Proton Pack, PKE meter and Ghost Trap from Spirit Halloween. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

These videos were great and a big part of helping me end up with a costume that, I think, looked better than the average costume. This, by the way, is the costume from Target. Note: The proton pack on the right is inflatable…<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The fourth piece of hardware are the EctoGoggles. These help you spot those ghosts. Spirit Halloween does have a version, but I wanted to build something a little better. For this, I ended up printing a really nice starting point from Thingiverse here<\/a>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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And here are my finished Ecto Goggles:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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This was an interesting project because it included creating the straps that would hold the goggles on my head. That required nylon straps and a leather piece that held it all together. I have long planned to learn how to sew, but never got around to it. Till now!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Here were my first two attempts. The top one was me just being surprised that I got the thing to make any<\/em> kind of stitch. The next was my attempt doing a box with an ‘x’ in the middle. Not bad. Till I turned it over. Okay, I don’t have this figured out yet…<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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About 20 minutes of practice and learning how to reverse it (didn’t know that was a thing) and I got something a little more recognizable.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Finally, I tested it on a piece of test leather to see how that would go and I was pleasantly surprised with the results!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Well, now that I was basically a professional, it was time to sew the real thing! And so\/sew I did!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The last step was to do a ton<\/em> of weathering and distressing to all the hardware so it didn’t look quite so much like a toy I purchased from Spirit Halloween. By largely following the guidance from Punished Props Academy, I ended up with something I was pretty happy with.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So, after many years and a few false starts, I finally ended up with a costume that I’d be happy to wear to a party (you know, if there were parties and I liked going to them) or to a con (uh, same). <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Since I was a kid, I loved movies and I loved monsters and fantasy and science fiction. I loved how they looked and how they made me feel, whether it was scary or funny or exhilarating, it made me feel something that I couldn’t find easily in my life. One […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1848,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[25,23,20,26],"class_list":["post-1821","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-make","tag-costume","tag-halloween","tag-make","tag-props"],"featured_image_src":"https:\/\/mossor.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/10\/GhostbustersRemastered_GamePagePromo-1920x1080-624f43daa90319793c7741e44e2f34b8.jpeg","author_info":{"display_name":"darrin","author_link":"https:\/\/mossor.org\/blog\/author\/darrin\/"},"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/mossor.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/10\/GhostbustersRemastered_GamePagePromo-1920x1080-624f43daa90319793c7741e44e2f34b8.jpeg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mossor.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1821","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mossor.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mossor.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mossor.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mossor.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1821"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/mossor.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1821\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1855,"href":"https:\/\/mossor.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1821\/revisions\/1855"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mossor.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1848"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mossor.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1821"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mossor.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1821"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mossor.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1821"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}