Tron Man

Everything started with a discussion about one special custom made project in Croatia, where the client had some special requirements. The name of the project is City Show and we are still on the tour while I am writing this blog. The main difference in this project was that people can buy the tickets and we are one part of the show. Expect of us (Tron Girls) you can find there the magicians, cabaret, illusionist and the show lasts 2 hours in total.

When we discussed the whole project, the client said, he wants our show to be story-rich. Problem was that it was quite difficult to create a story with only one character that we use for Tron Girls shows. This made us decide to create a new design of LED costumes but we wanted something totally different comparing the suits that we already had. Also, to fit the design of Tron Girls costumes, we decided to do it from fiber optic cable instead of LED strips.

The main advantage of fiber optic cable is that you can bend it however you want and create any shape you can imagine. We decided to use “standard gentlemen suits” so we put fiber optic cable on textiles. When you are creating a light figure, you need to remember the fiber optic cable must trim the whole body so the dancers need to have something on their head too because without it they would be headless in the dark so we added the hats. Pants are also trimmed with the cables. This is a very difficult part of creating the costumes because it is complicated to find the best shape of the cables to it looks good but it needs to be comfortable for the dancers as well.

When the prototype was finished, we have tried the suits in dark and luckily everything was working well. The biggest issue about making the new suits was with spiral cord cables. We already had two types of spiral cords and we didn´t want to have the 3rd one. The main problem in having so many types of spiral cord cables is the bigger possibility of making a mistake during packing before the show. If you pack different types of cables you have a big problem due the incorrect cables are not compatible with the different costumes and the suits cannot work properly (spiral cords are custom made for our suits with pre-measured sizes and if you pack incorrect cables with different measures can´t fit them with the correct connectors) This was the first limitation that we had.

The second limitation was that we could use just 16 outputs for the suits. It means you can use 16 LEDs for fiber optic cable (for LED strips you have a limit – 1 meter of LED per output). Tron Girls & Tron Man are using 18 LEDs due our hands have split. This limitation comes from our receiver that we use, due it has got 64 pin connectors (16 outputs times 4 – RGB+).

When the technical part of the suit was solved, we could continue with the design aspects. The main sketch was done quite fast, we had a vision but the devil was dug in details. We have changed some things after trying the suits prototypes. When we were satisfied with everything, we have created 9 more suits, so we have 10 in total – one reason is to have spare suits in case of bigger amount of dancers (7 dancers) and the second one is to have enough suits when we have 2 events simultaneously (with 3 or 5 dancers). In case we need more suits, we can always make them quite fast as we did for Tron Girls (we started with 10 suits and now we have 15 suits).

At the moment we finishing all the necessary materials for our webpage. You can expect more about Tron Man soon.