Mad Eye Moody & Snitch

Another consequence of housecleaning this week was rediscovery of the “Mad Eye” I made just prior to Delilah’s birth at Halloween 2016. Team Amanda & Delilah made a great “Golden Snitch” costume that fit right into the pregnancy. This particular halloween was woefully documented, so I’m putting a little extra effort into detailing this prop as I’m looking at it now and remembering what a hassle it ended up being. I’d do a few things differently these days.

Challenge:

Create a wearable animated eyeball with only a partial hemisphere to work with.

The solution I came up with:

Plant a 3d printed Iris into a flexible silicone base. Mount said iris on a stalk that can be moved via tiny electromagnets and a control pad. There is a little iron square that the magnets act upon mounted to the iris stalk.

The eyeball outside is printed and polished 3d printed resin. There are some tricks to maintaining the transparency of this particular resin, and one of the tricks that I was hesitant to commit to in 2016 was filling the interior with mineral oil(nobody wants to spend a cool holiday with a dripping eyeball). But now that I’m documenting it and have the opportunity I went ahead and fulfilled that spec- though I couldn’t find my mineral oil so went with propylene glycol instead- close enough. It actually was sealed up better than I expected but due to a little crack in the frame there was a small leak that I didn’t bother fixing.

It worked out really well and did the job I’d hoped of really filling out the transparency of the eye and giving it some depth. It also helped fight off gravity by making the iris float a bit.

So… all in all, pretty good, if maybe a bit too subtle. It was a good learning experience though so if I get some motivation to do another hemisphere eye, this might be the plan. I can’t find the files right now, but the printed parts aren’t really the hard part about this assembly. If you really want/need them though feel free to hassle me and I’ll search some more.

Happy Halloween 4.3 yrs belated!