When I lent my services to a collegue who was working on a film about 12 years ago, I was introduced to the world of cnc. I remember watching this huge machining centre milling out a slab of mdf and turning it into a fantastic set of gears. I knew that it would have taken me hours to achieve the same thing with traditional power tools. I decided then that I would invest in a cnc router for my own business Oxenham Design. At that time I could turn on a computer, but even to check email seemed like a crazy set of operations. I persevered and learned every piece of relevant software I could get my hands on. I am now fortunate enough to be using Vectric's ASPIRE software, and Techno cnc routers, which has helped us to create some amazing projects, both in part, or in full. I thought that this blog would be a great place to share "behind the scenes" adventures with the software, materials and equipment we use, as well as the projects we build.

Monday 4 April 2011

The Death Machine




We have been slowly working on a couple of projects here at Oxenham Design. Both are in the design stages and are for 2 separate movies. So the next bunch of posts will bounce back and forth. The first one we are fabricating is a Death Machine! This machine will be influenced heavily by the Steam-punk movement. In a nutshell, this old rusted machine has it's victims strapped down and slowly tattoos them to death. There will be a harrow that has 100's of tattoo needles that slowly tattoo your crime onto your body, until you FEEL your sentence in your soul. That sounds like something I got to have. We started the initial designs in the 3d modelling program Sketch-up, which is great for quickly massing an idea out. The next few weeks will be spent figuring out what exactly is going to move and how. At the end of the movie, this machine needs to "break down" and collapse on it's victim. This will also be a big design challenge, having it look like it's breaking down, but still staying quite safe. Safety is always first priority. There will be lots of rusted gears and pipes, my favorite. Below is the initial design concept, and you can see the harrow in the middle. I think we are going to have the tattoo needles attached to a simple crank-shaft design. This should allow an entire row of needles move off of 1 drive unit.


At this point in the design, the components don't really need to function. It's more about massing and design. After the final approval, we can get started. I can hardly wait to have a Death Machine just outside the office.


JO

No comments:

Post a Comment