The hardcore wheelers are off to Moab, Utah today for a week of fun, and although Matt Brown did his best to put together the club’s scheduled alternative (cheap) trip to Fulton (or anywhere else) it doesn’t look like it’s happening.  Sorry Matt.

Our next scheduled event is the Louie Louie parade in downtown Peoria on Friday, May 25.  Plan on meeting in the Civic Center’s Fulton Street lot (enter from Fulton) by 3:00 at the latest.  The folks manning the gate will tell you where to line up.  The parade starts at 3:30.  The $100 entry fee we paid goes to St. Jude so it’s a great cause.  It’s a pretty short parade; we’ll be blocking downtown traffic for about 15 minutes as we jog over to Main Street and disperse at the riverfront.  Bring candy to throw!  Post up if you’re coming.

Saturday, April 30, 2011 (3 hours)

Today I did some actual work on my Jeep, which was putting together my newly-painted windshield frame in preparation for getting some glass for it.  I’m not counting that, however.  The big accomplishment today was completing the flux capacitor.  The chaser LED Christmas lights I ordered from Hong Kong for $1 finally arrived (these are about $30 if you buy them here), so I started working on the three tubes of light that animate towards the center of the flux capacitor.

In the movie as well as some of the homebrew flux capacitors I’ve seen made online, people shoved lights into a translucent tube.  The real prop for the movie has three lights in each tube, lit sequentially to animate towards the center.  The blue LED’s I got were very much focused to shine outward, and had very little luminance when viewed from the side.  So after a few test shoving three of them into the tube sideways and being completely underwhelmed at the brightness, I opted to use 8 lights right next to each other, poked through the underside of the tubing.  This proved to provide the most spectacular look and should show up well on camera.

The tubing I used is clear plastic 5/16” ID stuff I got from Lowe’s.  I drilled slightly undersized holes along one edge of the spine for the LED’s (for a tight fit) and sanded the tubing a bit to make it more opaque.  I wrapped the “stalks” of the LED’s and the excess wiring underneath the tube in black gaffer’s tape and used some clamps to hold the tubing down onto the video heads.  I then shoved the ends of the three tubes through the center hole and taped them down on the backside of the inner panel.

Since I wasn’t sure whether cutting off the other 100 or so extra LED’s in the Christmas light string would affect the remaining ones, I stuffed the rest of them behind the inner panel.  It’s quite a light show back there without the panel mounted.  I also hacked into the LED’s controller box and wired up a new mode-change button on the side of the circuit box along with a power switch.  The flux capacitor runs on standard 120VAC so we’ll plug it into the 12VDC to 120VAC inverter I have for mobile use in the Jeep.

The inverter may not handle 1.21 gigawatts though…

Friday, April 22 through Sunday, April 24 – (15 hours)

Got LOTS of stuff done this weekend.  On Friday I shopped for the raw materials I would need for doing the “time machine conversion” on my Jeep.  On Saturday and Sunday I painted parts, worked on the flux capacitor and bent up the electrical conduit for the “conductor” (for lack of a better term… it’s the material that follows the contour of the rear of the vehicle; it lights up when the time circuits are activated).  It was quite a job bending the pipe and getting the two pipes to contour the same line.

The flux capacitor uses an off-the-shelf circuit breaker box, some sheet metal, spark plug wires, and some VHS video heads.  I’m still waiting for the LED chaser lights I ordered to create the light-up tubes inside.  I did install the LED rope light on the conductor and that looks pretty cool.  I’m still debating on what material to put on the front of the light.  I bought some decorative perforated aluminum sheeting but I think that might block too much of the light.  I’m also considering a double layer of regular window screen too.  I’ll do some simulations and see which one I like.  If I don’t have to cut into that decorative aluminum that would be good… that stuff is expensive!

I also made some really cool capacitor banks for the sides of the Jeep.  They’ll sit on the rear fender wells and will look similar to objects found on the real DeLorean.  I made the “capacitors” from 2” PVC pipe sections, some electrical conduit clamps I found in the trash at work (plus a few hose clamps), and some big PVC caps painted silver.  The tops of the capacitors are electrical knockout panel hole fillers with some ¼” bolts mounted in them for terminals.  All the wire was from my junk drawer.  I think the really thick stuff was from when I moved the solenoid pack for my winch under the hood.  These things turned out REALLY cool and cost just a few dollars to make.  I considered buying real capacitors online, but even used ones were $15-20 apiece.  These will look just as good on camera.

Tuesday, April 19, 2011 – 2 hours

I borrowed a little time from work today to work on “the time circuits”… some old camera control panels that look techy enough to be the controls for a time machine.  The panels are from a studio camera from the mid-1970’s and would allow a camera “shader” (someone who manually matches multiple cameras to each other) to adjust the exposure, color balance and other parameters of the camera’s image from a remote position.  The camera is long gone but I kept the control panel because it looked cool.

Trivia note: The camera system would have also originally had a 6-foot equipment rack full of power supplies, encoder boards and other equipment to make the camera work.  Although solid-state (non-tube) equipment was common by the 70’s, miniaturization of electronic components had yet to be developed, so everything took up a lot of space and generated a lot of heat.  Tubes were still used in the actual image pickup portion of video cameras well into the 1980’s before microchips were finally developed enough to take their place.

Jon had an idea the other day to make the buttons light up for additional realism, so I figured out the voltage of the lamps (24 volts, if you’re keeping score), hacked into the wiring a bit and got them working.  I actually wired power to the buttons themselves so the lamps can be turned on and off, so they can look as if they are doing something.  Most of the lamps were burned out, but I found some spares in some other old TV equipment I had lying around so all eight of them work now.  I guess it pays to keep everything!  Now I’ll just need to make a frame to hold them somewhere in the Jeep.

I tried the lamps at 12 volts, hoping to run them directly off the Jeep’s electrical system, but they were too dim.  So I found an old printer power supply at work that produced the necessary 24 volts from standard household current.  I’ll need to have a 12vdc to 110vac inverter on board anyway for some other equipment related to the “time machine conversion”, so this will just be one more thing to plug into it.

Apparently Russell Sauve, new member from February, slipped through the cracks… his member page is also now up.  Welcome, Russell!

Saturday, April 16, 2011 (3 hours)

Today I worked on the script for a few hours; I got the first scene done, up until the first music video.  I found a transcript of the original movie online that will help with writing the dialogue while keeping it faithful to the original movie.  I also started ripping the movie from a DVD to a file so that I can use it while editing as well as scan through it for a reference.  I also plan on creating a storyboard with screenshots from the original film to aid in shooting.

I’ve now hit a wall since I need to watch some scenes from the movie and the disc is still ripping in my computer, so I’m going to stop for now.  I looked online for the scenes I needed to watch but could only find fan-shot re-enactments at the Puente Hills Mall in California, which was where the Twin Pines Mall scenes were shot for the original movie.  People have too much time on their hands!  Oh, wait…

4-15-11 (2 hours)

Spent a couple hours today researching and ordering materials for the movie online.  Among the items: parts for a flux capacitor, Tyvek hazmat suits for Marty and Doc, and some rope LED’s for the Jeep time machine conversion.  When Carrie and I were in Gatlinburg, Tennessee last summer we visited a Cars of the Stars museum and I took quite a few pictures of a genuine Back To The Future DeLorean, so I got those out to see what I would need to do a reasonably convincing look.  See my photos below… I was limited to staying behind the ropes and the car was essentially sitting in a bay window, so the photos are not the best.My plan is to bend up some electrical conduit to follow the rear cage hoop and down the sides of the Jeep, cover it with metal mesh and put rope light behind it.  I also have some plans to mock up some giant capacitors out of PVC pipe.  The hardest part will probably be making the large vents for the back.

I’m thinking the new seat belt attachment point in the rear will make it easy to bolt a lot of this stuff on using exhaust clamps.  The idea would be to be able to fairly easily remove the “conversion” so that I can still have use of the Jeep throughout the wheeling season.

You might remember that I started posting entries from the Production Log for the 2011 MIJC video back in February.  I removed them because I wasn’t sure of what kind of interest there was.  But today, I decided to start posting them again.  If you don’t want to read them, my feelings won’t be hurt.  But if you’re interested in how much work it takes to put one of these videos together and all the great stories that go along with it, read on.

I had initially planned to post one entry per week; I have about 50 total so that would have taken most of 2012.  But now since we’re behind by a few months, I’m going to be posting an entry every other day until we get caught back up to where we should be, then I’ll ease back to one per week for the remainder of the year.  Needless to say, there will be lots of reading to do in the coming weeks.

Just a reminder that this website belongs to all of us… if you’re working on a fun project and can take a few pictures and write a bit about what you’re doing, let me know.  It would be great to have more than just trip and meeting announcements on the site.

Before I get into the first production log entry, I’ll give you a little background.

“Back To The Future” was a great idea from the get-go, but the complexity kept scaring us away.  The first time we talked about the idea was in the spring of 2006, on the heels of our first movie-based parody, The Offroad Warrior.  Daren and I did a “pitch video” for Jon that included possibilities for two other themes as well.  The other two  ideas were never used, so they’re not included in the clip below (we might still do them someday) but it’s interesting to see the similarities and differences between our original pitch and the way the video actually turned out.

Back To The Future - Pitch 2006

Fast forward four years to June of 2010.  Jon, Frank, Daren, and myself and Carrie met at Frank’s house and watched the movie.  We discussed which scenes we might do and how we would adapt it for the MIJC.  Although we had plenty of time and good weather left in the year, Jon and Jill’s wedding (and preparations) made it impossible to  do something of that magnitude.  In September we shelved the idea in favor of doing the Mythbusters parody (Jeepbusters), which was much less effect-intensive and easier to shoot and edit.  And that video turned out great in spite of a cold-weather start… although there is sadly no production log from that year, I’m pretty sure shooting didn’t start until late November or early December.

Anyway, the third time’s a charm.  The real production log starts with the following entry:

Saturday, April 2, 2011 (2.5 hours)

Frank, Jon, Carrie and I watched Back To The Future and roughed out a series of scenes we thought could plausibly be shot.  This viewing went far better than last year’s, and we got a lot of things pretty well nailed down.  Instead of approaching it as creating a full story based on the movie, we simply picked highlights we thought we could shoot.  The movie is so well known that people will understand the rest of the plot without necessarily seeing every scene.

So what we ended up excising were all the scenes dealing with the setup before Marty goes back, along with everything referring to Marty having to get his parents back together in 1955.  That gets it down to a simple set of scenes where Marty meets Doc at the mall, goes back to 1955, talks to 1955 Doc about getting back to 1985, then goes back.  Should work fine for our purposes.

Action items were to start procuring props and other equipment, work on a script and shooting order, and determine shooting locations.  Jon is in charge of locations, as usual.  I think we’ll be calling in some favors down in Carlinville.  We’ll also need to start fabrication on my Jeep to turn it into a plausible time machine.  The hardest part will be fabricating the large vents on the back as well as making a flux capacitor, although there are plans for that easily found on the net.

Casting so far is Daren as Marty McFly, Frank as Doc Brown and possibly Joe Gibbens as George McFly in a very brief scene.  Dan Brown will hopefully play “Old Man Peabody” whose barn is crashed into by Marty in 1955.  I’m sure we’ll need others.

I’m looking forward to getting an early start this year.

Take a moment to visit the member pages for Rose Bortolussi, Brent Berg, Dave Blair and Howard Stanton, our newest members.  If you’d like changes to your own member page, drop me a line.