How My Friends & I Built a Miniature Stage for Lil Cosmos the Alien Rapper
Each summer our company organizes a large one-night camping event. It’s like a private festival; there are 3 stages, live artists, fireworks, secret bars and more. My friends & I wanted to pull off a secret stunt this year so we created our own miniature stage.
The idea was to have a tiny alien rapper do a live performance. We even made an original music album with 9 songs for the stunt. Everyone who saw the stage loved it and we’re very happy with the reactions.
Final result
Daytime picture of the final version of the miniature stage. The stage is made with a 3D printed truss frame, a handmade UFO (cardboard & masking tape), Pepper’s ghost to create a hologram for Lil Cosmos, custom VFX & lighting (TouchDesigner), and an original music album with 9 songs.
Watch it in action (explicit language):
Each song has its own visuals (screen on the back & on the sides) as well as custom lighting, all of which is driven by TouchDesigner. The dance moves you see are all motion captured from our friends who voluntereed to dance for Lil Cosmos.
Listen to the full original album on SoundCloud:
The Making Of
In our design we wanted 4 screens: one on each side of the stage, one behind the stage and one as the floor of stage to create the Pepper’s ghost effect. Our intention was to 3D print the stage truss and the UFO, and add a few lasers around the front of the stage that would be controlled by TouchDesigner to react to the music.
The original plan for our stage. We’ve since reduced the size slightly and replaced the lasers with LEDs but otherwise we’re very close to the original intent.
In the orignal design we had 42 middle male pieces; in the final version we reduced it to 30. All the other piece counts are accurate.
Full truss assembled (columns are not glued yet). You can see some of the tie-wraps I used to hold everything together while the expoxy was drying.
Painting the wood base and frame in black and priming the truss to prepare it for painting.
Originally we wanted to glue the columns to the truss on site to make it easier to transport. However, the trusses were more fragile than anticipated and the expoy took a long time to fully cure. For both of those reasons, we decided to do the full assembly in advance even though it’d be more difficult to fit in a car.
The columns are being fixed in place with some tape & wood beams to keep everything square while the epoxy dries.
We wanted Lil Cosmos to look like a real live performer; we wanted him to appear in front of the stage. To achieve that, we used a Pepper’s ghost to create an illusion of him being a 3D character at the front of the stage. The effect relies on having a reflective film angled at 45 degrees to reflect an image on the floor. You can see how it works here:
Once the Pepper’s ghost was fixed to the frame, we started testing out early versions of the visuals and music.
We initially wanted to 3D print the UFO but it turned out to be too big to print convienently and the shape we wanted was basic enough that I thought we’d be able to pull it off by hand.
Building the UFO with some cardboard paper, masking tape and circular objects from the dollar store.
As a final touch, we wanted to add small props around the stage. I 3D printed some speakers and painted them.
We found a good spot to place the stage at the camping site and installed a tarp above it all because we had a lot of rain.
The final result: