First you must ask yourself if you are willing to spend the hours of 10a-11p constructing a Pac-man and one (or more) ghosts.
We were.
How to make your own Pac-man and Ghost group costumes for Halloween and/or Chemistry Lecture Invasion
The materials we used pretty much fell into our laps at the last possible moment.
It's probably a good idea to not rely on luck as much as we did for this.
Materials
Cardboard. Boxes full of collapsed USPS shipping boxes. We had two sizes, the flat-rate was the smaller of the two.
Tape. Two rolls of duct-tape, 3+ rolls of regular scotch tape, 1+ rolls of packing tape.
Scissors/Hunting Knives. Had there not been 30 people on our floor each with their own hunting knife handy, we would have not finished this project.
Pencils, Pens, Markers. Were used to mark where to cut the cardboard and were promptly lost thereafter in the massive amounts of trash cardboard, that is why we needed to continuously return to get multiples.
Colored Paper. Originally we were going to use poster-board or something but then we were informed that our local deliveries building had large rolls of colored paper. We used approximately 60-70 sq. ft of gold colored paper and maybe 30-40 sq. ft of blue colored paper, about 6-10 sq. ft of black.
Hax. We needed some really nice hax to pull this off. We used our resource hax and then our speed hax to finish this project before Monday, October 31 (2005).
and some string
Originally we had called Walmart the day prior to construction to see if they had any extra boxes for us to use. They told us something about calling during the night-shift so we called again then. The man who answered said that we simply needed to be there by 7:00a to pick up the extras. However, college dictates a different sleep cycle, so we got up at 10:00a and called them. We were informed that we needed to make reservations the night before with the men workig the night-shift.
Shafted.
So we went and got some food, asked around, and got two empty vegetable boxes from the local dining hall. We saw our LA at lunch and asked her about where we could get boxes.
"Check Wade," she said.
There was a stack of boxes in the corner of the room, we asked if we could grab a few (although they seemed rather compact). The dude behind the counter told us that the boxes were from a prank, that they were ordered to Wade via prankhax and that we could have as many as we pleased.
Upon opening a box to empty its contents, my eyes befell a magnificent sight. The boxes were full of more boxes.
That was our first encounter with the magic luckhax.
Yay we have boxes. Junk; we need tape.
So we chill around the dorm for a bit and then we realize that we have people on our floor who actually buy things. A few weeks ago a girl tripped over my tape dispenser.
It shattered into pieces because of the fall off of an end table and the collision with her foot. Therefore she owed me all her earthly possessions.
We asked her for tape, she had a HUGE roll of duct-tape. "thx." Our second encounter with luckhax.
Awesome, we have basic materials. How are we going to make a circle :|
String!
So we hax some string from a girl who likes to knit and stuff and we draw out the circle by picking a basic radius length (height of one USPS [large] box). We put some duct-tape on the string to indicate the raidus we would use. After taping a bunch of boxes together (3x3 large) and centering the string we held a pencil/pen to the duct-taped portion and went around radially.
Junk. Scissors are useless against this cardboard madness!
(note: image is of ghost constuction but the knife is there)So we used some very large knives that we got from our affiliate floor members via luckhax.
The end result was a mad hax of a quarter circle. We then used the quarter to trace another quarter.
The quarters were taped together and used to trace another two quarters (1/2 circle).
We haxtaped some more boxes together, traced the half circle and cut it out.
Now we had a full circle which we traced and created a (fairly identical) circular counterpart. We decided to make the mouth not come out from the center but rather raidus/2 of the radius as to allow the user to have more breathing room.
We had haxxed two sides of a Pac-man, now we needed to give it depth.
When we needed to give the Pac-man a third dimension we decided that we would need more boxes (boxen if you will). Wade still had a pile of unused USPS boxes boxes boxes so we took a few smaller boxes of boxes.
The smaller boxes of boxes had smaller boxes inside them which we used to prop open and place on one half of the Pac-man. We taped down a "spine" to the Pac-man outfit that would line up with the person's back and keep both sides of the suit an equal length apart.
The spine box was a large USPS shipping box with the box lids folded to be half length, the halves were then set to the sides at 90* angles (perpendicularity) which also allowed us to have a very good approximation to keep the circles level with each other during the addition of the third dimension.
After the spine was placed we simply needed to add the depth-verifying boxes. Our luckhax had not run out and we encountered it yet another time. It turned out that the height of the smaller shipping boxes was equivalent to the height of the spine (the large box with its flaps folded by half). Max. Hax.
We taped the smaller boxes all the way around and left two spots open, one for the viewer and a smaller one in the base of the mouth so we could easily add a bag for when we went trick-or-treating.
We added a shoulder harness that was made of onef of the vegetable boxes we got at lunch, it was very thick cardboard (3 layers). Hax.
For more intensive shoulder harness explanation please see the Inky construction explanation toward the bottom of this page
We still needed colored paper. Checking the "convenient store" yielded no search results. We did not want to go hunting down the only open places on a Sunday and then spend lots of $$$ on poster-board.
Aha! Wade has colored paper too for RAs and LAs to make bulletin boards with! Hax.
"What do you need it for?"
"Pac-man costume :D"
"...Well, it's kinda for like bulletin boards and stuff."
"Yeah it's a pretty big bulletin board, need to put some stuff up..."
"lol k just keep it moderate or whatev d00d 8-)"
"thx <3"
(We showed the girl the finished products and she was very pleased)
Layering the Pac-man took a while, we needed to double layer it to cover up all the markings from the USPS boxes (dark blue) and the duct-tape stuffs.
We had to attack the people at Wade four times to get enough yellow paper (and some black for the mouth) to cover it well. The final time we ...haxxed some blue paper (swiped with intent of return) and did not return to Wade until the costumes were done.
We still needed to add eyes. I wasn't sure what to make them look like at first, round or what. So I asked my roommate and he explained that they look like backwards pacs. (lol nice pacs)
So I take a look online, after a few minutes on google image search I come to a conclusion and make them look as my roommate first instructed. They seem to make the costume look 100x more awesome.
So we cut into the arm hole centers and then folded the yellow paper back and taped it on the inside.
The black paper was added to the blantanly visible part of the mouth and then to the inside-sides of the mouth so when looking at the Pac-man from a non-perfect profile view you could still see perfection.
Then we had our final product. The harness busted after a day of wear and was fixed up with emergency duct-taping at a very late (well, early) hour.
Total elapsed time: 9.5 hrs
Construction time: 7 hrs
(but this was definitely one of the best Sundays I ever lived regardless of how many hours I spent staring at USPS logos)
Inky the Ghost
The project started almost immediately after Pac-man was done and took considerably less time because we had already perfected the method.
We checked some pictures online of actual Pac-man gameplay and decided that Inky should have a smaller radius for his semicircle top and that he should ideally consist of a semicircle and rectangle.
So we whip out some string and tape together the larger USPS boxes again. We draw a semicircle (1/2 circle)
We made two semicircles and then taped rectangles to them to create the two "halves" of Inky (the blue ghost). Finding that we would need a shoulder harness for the ghost costume as well, we rejoiced when we had taken exactly two boxes from the eating commons. Luckhax madhax ownhax etchax.
We proceeded to trace and cut the bottoms of the two sides into triangles to emulate more Pac-man-ish-ghost-looks, although somehow there is no photographic evidence of this even occuring.
(note: this picture was taken after joining many pieces together and is not the next logical step)One of the spectators (several had come and gone, spending much time simply watching us make this stuff) suggested that instead of using a flat spine that we use a box-ish spine (that is, opening the spine box up to yield more support) and it worked wonderfully. friendPatric, the wearer of the Pac-man suit, definitely insisted that the Inky suit frame was much more stable than the Pac-man one, which might warrant a slight redo of Pac-man in the future.
[From here on out it's the same process as the Pac-man suit except for the addition of an extra support box.
When I should have added the shoulder harness I did not so we had to hax away at some of the construction paper after applying it (augh-hax) and then had a great tape shortage.]
We began the sides and in case you were wondering how we got the postal boxes to curve (or imitate a nice curve) we bent them at fourths and then haxxed them into place via tape and resourcehax.
The boxes are then placed along the edges and taped into place (overlapping onto the sides of the frame)
Although we should have done this before placing the ends together and taping up the sides, we added the secondary box support immediately after cutting the bottom corners out of the ghost costume.
We cut arm holes a bit late (after joining the sides) and started to cover the ghost in blue paper. We found out that only one layer was needed to make it look fine (the Pac-man yellow was not dark enough and exposed too many duct-tape areas / USPS logos so we used a double layering). I made no notice of the lack of shoulder harness in the suit and was helped in covering the suit in blue paper.
We poke a hole in the center of the arm hole covering paper and proceed to cut it and fold it back.
Then I notice that the harness isn't in place.
Junk.
The harness has two long ends on it that stick out on both arm holes and are folded up onto the suit sides and duct-taped securely into place. The normal line of moves in this chess game is to put the shoulder harness in and then add the paper. So we had to use some speedhax and work backwards.
I unwrapped the semicircle of the suit and the taped down the long ends of the shoulder harness. Then rewrapped the top of the suit.
A spectator / tape helper examines the wreckage / awesomeness and we decide that we can add the eyes.
The whites of the eyes are taken from printer paper and we patiently waited for friendPatric to return the blue paper we took earlier and to also return with a darker blue color for the irises (and pupils I guess).
friendPatric returns and tells us that there is no darker blue, only a teal / cynober-ish color that would look like junk.
We think of some quickhax with our speedhax on and decide to use some left over black for the pupils and add another set of eyes to the back.
I take a ridiculously long three-second nap but manage to awake in time to show off our suits to nearby spectators.
Construction time for Inky: 4 hours
it was awesome; nice hax.
(Written by the kid in the Inky costume)