Animatronic Facehugger Shadow Puppet

One of the gags of the Aliens kiosk we designed and built was to show the facehugger growing inside the egg, prior to the jump scare effect. The hero or mother egg was cast in clear silicone, to be translucent. Our original idea was to use a small LED video projector to project an image of the facehugger swirling around inside the egg.

This proved to be problematic so I explored other ideas, using a spotlight to create a shadow. This is one of the times that we solved a problem within the first couple iterations. It ended up being super simple, yet extremely effective.

Using our Glowforge laser cutter, I created some simple silhouettes of facehuggers in various positions and attached them to a servo arm to move them around. By connecting a hacked LED flashlight and controlling it through a PWM output on the Arduino, we could control the light brightness and fading easily. We built multiple TIP120/122 fading circuits as they were used on the other kiosks as well. These allowed us to use various off the shelf spotlights/flashlights, etc with varied power sources of 9V or 12V.

Rigging the flashlight was easy with some off the shelf clamps. There are so many mechanisms and wiring all over the inside of this for all of the various effects. It was challenging to get all of this working together and be solid enough to ship across the the country.

Author: Brian Dressel