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Things kept falling down and went under me, something or somewhere hard to reach. It was the same day after day for 6 months which felt like 12. There were also home shores and a bunch of stuff that would assault me and robe me off my time. Appointments that would take half or all day, getting something for mom, working on holidays like Christmas and New Year's Day (first day of the millennium, mind you), recovering motivation when it all felt out of focus, cleaning all paint and material off the floor Every night, Spending hours driving far to find fixtures, it goes on and on. In between of it all, I kept losing stuff. Is not that I'm not organized. I just don't have any space and my stuff has to be piled up with more stuff making it all a mess. It becomes fustrating rather than fun.
After discovering new details that demanded many body parts to be redone, progress was starting to show. Things were falling together. Slow, but together. The pack was built on top of the turn table I originally built for the spacer. It laid there for when I needed to move the pack around. Sometimes, I would work on the living room. Spraying would take place outside and detail tweaking, such as the stripes and mold preparation, took place in my bedroom. Once, I just had sprayed some heavy coats of resin to the pack. Suddenly, my neighbor upstairs felt like dusting his carpet and all the dust bunnies rained down heading towards the fresh resin coated pack. I jumped in over the pack and shielded it with my body from the dusty rain. The store ran out of coating spray, so I used some other brand. BAD IDEA! It made the previous coating wrinkle. There I was, with more unnecessary repair work up ahead! 5 weeks of finishing and coating went out the window. Situations that demanded redoing something popped out all the time. Patience was the tool on demand 24/7.
Working everyday in one project can get boring. A pack is many projects in one. The Bumper is a project of it's own. So is the wand and frame.
The vertical stripes for the frame, in the movie packs, were pieces of rubber-mat floor padding. James Greene once told me "You'll grow old trying to find that stuff" He was right. I attempted to recreate the stripe effect with clay. All attempts failed. Trying to find the next best alternative, I found a car engine belt with the stripe pattern. It costed me $9.00 but it worked. Almost a year later, A Hollywood propper found some of the original floor mat and sent me some. It took some work to restore it, since it was a bit used. I rescaled out a new frame out of the actual floor mat and made a new one. That new frame is one of the most accurate replicas I had ever done in my life, so far.
Another project of its own were the labels. There are many pack labels I found on the web and I thought my work was all cutout for me. I was gonna get a break! Wrong again! Most of the labels were inaccurate and the text wasn't so vector-sharp. The sizes were also wrong as they were based on stimated pack measurements. I did used them for text reference when I started drafting my own.
The Miami pack had some labels missing and you only see so much. I had photographed, in advance, straight shots of the Dc pack's labels one by one. I scaled out the measurements and started from blank. I spended a couple of days drafting the labels out in the computer. I scanned the label PICS into my computer to carefully replicate the text fonts. Adobe Photoshop brings fonts that look like the label fonts, but not exact all the way. I had to stretch, do some add ons, modify, space-out some letters and finally lineup the sentences together side by side. Finally I "Colorpicked" the label's color to my replica files. There are no neons in any of the labels, only strong basic colors. Inject printers work amazingly if you can't get a hold of a laser one.
On my second trip to DC, Norm Gagnon and I had the chance to stand on a chair (one at the time) and take a look at the red label on top of pack. The fonts were smaller than I thought. I replicated the label's text and graphics the same way as the others. Some labels were just too fun to print in chrome paper.
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