Finally I get to see the money!

I finally got to see the final comp on the pile of money we made a while back for the Manulife Financial print ad. (sometimes these things can take forever!)
If you dont remember, here's a WIP of it:

And here's the final comp:

I think photographer Tyler Gray did a great job with this one!
There is a small write up on the shoot day over at the Westside Studio blog if you want to read what happened after we delivered it:
http://www.westsidestudio.com/blog/?p=10196

We have a quick turn around job for a T.V. commercial that we have to deliver at 5 pm tomorrow. It's a good thing we got the go ahead tonight :)
It will be pretty straight forward for sure, I'll post the progress tomorrow
8)
JO

Makin' it shine!

I slept in a hair today, and didn't make it to the shop until 9 am, which now that the money job is done, was no big deal. The first thing was starting to get the chrome on the money. We use Alsa Chrome for shiny metal. It is as shiny as it gets from a paint. However, it is only as good as the gloss level of the black base-coat. As with our buffed metal powder we use, if it's applied over satin, the metal is satin, over gloss it becomes chrome. You spray it on very, very lightly. An 8 oz bottle could probably chrome a car! Which is good because 8 oz is probably  the same cost as one!

  It took a couple of hours to lightly spray the chrome, working in very small tight circles. I actually had to switch it up with Jody a few times as my arm was starting to kill me. Once the chrome was done, we moved on to picking out the dollar coins with a brush and some gold-ish paint.

 A couple more coats on the dollar coins and then it's done!

This was a pretty sweet job, all said and done. Two awesome gigs in a row.

We had a pre-pro meeting last week for a Davinci inspired flying contraption. That should be another amazing job for us. Why work when you can do this!
8)
JO

Making our money flexible

This morning I got the legs and wire lathe on the mound form. (If Rob from Indiana saw this, he'd want to cover it in concrete :) We waited on casting the coin sheets as they are very flexible when the resin kicks off. This way we could pull them from the mold and bend them over the form. They are very soft at this stage as well, and this allowed us to brad nail them to the ribs on the form.

At this point, the only thing to do was cast a sheet and nail it down. It takes about 12 minutes to mix/pour and demold a finished part. Now due to other things going on, we weren't as fast as that, but we were close.

They have already shot the fountain this will be sitting in, so the front edge doesn't need to be very clean, we just left an overhang so they can crop it where they need. They will be pouring water all over this, and as we overlapped the seams away from camera, this meant that it would shed water like a backwards shingle. So we filled the back seams with a urethane adhesive, both a glue and water resistant.

Then it was a few coats of gloss black for this huge pile.

I will leave this to dry overnight, and in the morning we will spray it with Alsa Chrome. This is as chrome as you can get from a paint. It goes on supper light, and takes the same reflective characteristics as the gloss coat under it. Should look pretty sweet once we individually pick out and paint the gold tone coins. No copper though, to bad, copper is my favourite colour!
8)
JO

The money pile grows!

On Sunday, we de-molded the small pile of change we made on Saturday. It came out really good actually. Because the coins were hot glued together, and the undercuts were filled with clay, I was to scared to move the mold to the vacuum chamber for de-gassing in fear I might open up a seam in the original and have coins get trapped in the liquid rubber. So we just left it on its own to de-gas. I was anticipating a few air bubbles around some of the edges, but there were none. Everyone gets lucky sometimes! After that Jody moved onto casting 15 piles of coins from this mold. The next step was to lay all 15 piles out, glue them to a backer board and fill all those new undercuts so the new rubber wouldn't creep where I didn't want it. We were able to de-mold this new rubber today at around noon. I could tell it should have been left a bit longer as it didn't want to release all that easily, but I needed a volume measurement to see how much resin we actually needed as opposed to what the math led us to believe. I was pretty close at 5.5 cups, but the actual volume was 5. This means we would order a 5 gallon kit, which is actually 5 gallons of part A, and 5 gallons of part B, for a total of 10 gallons. And a little left over. It's handy stuff to have around.

So with Jody out picking the resin up, I had to pickup the materials for the coin mound structure. I was able to break down some of the parts in Aspire for a better sheet yield, so I got all the parts onto 2 sheets of 5/8" plywood.

When I first got notified about this job, I modeled a quick computer render of what the piles dimensions would be. After I had the final model sizes in the computer, I spent Sunday evening sculpting the computer model into a more shapely lump.

Once I was happy with the lump, I added a flange to the base for when I slice it, this will give me a flat plane on which to lie everything in the computer.

Next I sliced the file into polylines which will become the ouline shapes of the ribs I will cut on our Techno cnc.

Once the ribs and back of the model were generated, I exported these as DXF's into Aspire, and added a few lines to make the final ribs for cutting.

 I also laid out a half circle arc for the front of the lump, and cut in pockets so the ribs would slot into the half circle ring and the back. It took about 40 minutes to cut both sheets up, and about 40 minutes to assemble it all.

 First thing tomorrow I will cover this lump in wire lathe, and we can start to get the coin sheets attached. I am really hoping by the end of day the whole mound will be silver. Lets keep our fingers crossed!
8)
JO

On a quick note, each small pile contained $15.25 worth of coins. Each large sheet was made from 15 small piles plus an additional $4 in filler coins. We will use around 20 large sheets totaling a real coin total of  $4655.00 worth of quarters and dollar coins!!!

Sometimes our jobs can let us make HUGE PILES of money!!!

Quite literally! We got a call on Friday from a repeat client who needs a mound of coins. And they need it Thursday. This mound will be comped into a fountain scene. It's a fairly big mound of money, We will only be building half the pile, as the other have will never be seen because it's a still shot. The pile is going to be around 10 feet wide, 5 feet deep and around 12-16" high. I went to the shop today with my giant change jar from my dresser and got started. They want 75% quarters and approx. 25% dollar coins. So my plan for the money portion was to create a small section of money piled up, fill all the undercuts with clay, and make a mold of this. As the silicone rubber takes around 24 hours to cure, we needed to get started right away. Once the mold for this smaller pile is ready, we will cast about 10-15 pulls, and then attach all those together. Then we will make a big rubber mold of the new pile made from the smaller piles. The mound structure will be made from plywood frames covered in lathe wire. Once we start casting the bigger sheets, we will glue these to the lathe. The plan is to have these frames come apart in sections for delivery. we will then join them up at the studio and run the plumbing for the fountain water. The job isn't overly complicated, the timings very tight though, especially when your at the mercy of drying paint and curing rubber.

Heres the pile awaiting the mold walls.

Simple walls are done and sealed for the rubber.

Pouring the rubber after mixing forever.

We also made a mold of individual coins in case we need them. We hosed a board down with spray adhesive so the rubber wouldn't creep under the coin making removal of the mold easier.
Tomorrow I will build and cast the larger mold. As the casting resin is quite pricey, and has a limited shelf life after opening, we keep minimum amounts at the shop. We won't be able to get our 10 gallons of it until Monday, which fits the mold making timeline quite well.
8)

JO