Process (a low down on the physical construction)

It's hard to break down 8 months of work into a digestable format, but lets have a go anyways. This also helps give an idea of why the starting price for a non-animatronic Genpet is $800, the material cost alone for each Genpet is about $200, and as you can see, there's a lot of work to assemble and build each sculpture.
Everything you see, times 19 units.

1. White layer base plastic

1a. Clay sculpt of base plastic	1b. Silicon mould of sculpt

1c. Positive plastic cast + sanding. This part becomes the mould for vacuum forming thin plastic overtop of.	1d. Vacuum forming of styrene plastic and then cutting, finishing etc.

 

2. Creature

2a. Sculpt of creature	2b. 2 part silicon mould of creature+ 2 part plaster mother shell.
2c. foam latex or liquid latex casting of creature. (Yeilds hollow versus not, depending on what sort of movement is desired)

 

3. sculpt of top plastic

3a. A sculpt is made over the white layer to ensure a fast and perfect fit. (rough stage pictured)	3b. A silicon mould is then taken of this combined piece.

3c. The positive plaster is cast + hours & hours of sanding.	3d. The clear plastic is vacuum formed over the plaster mould and then cut/finished.

 

4. Circuitry

One main circuit for control of the animal, and one sub board for control of the heart monitor

4a. Design of circuits	4b. Print process of 38 circuit boards
4c. Drilling of 1839 holes	4d. Soldering and completion (heart monitors pictured)

 

5. micorchip programming.

In first and second year college we experimented with the basic stamp. it's an easy platform, but limited and costly, thus for genpets I moved onto normal, production grade chips. My friend Rob Sherwin taught me the basics and got me going.

5a. Program for controlling fresh strip, heart monitor and animatronics.	5b. physical code dump onto blank chips. (test, recode as neccassary. repeat.)

 

6. Graphic design of packages

6a. Design (7 different colour versions)	6b. Print + cut

 

7. Screen printing of LED mask

The LED mask sits UNDER the printed graphics and controls the flow of light coming through the paper. Printing on acetate with a laser printer did not yeild dark enough prints and light came right through, so it required actual screen printing (forgot to take photos, but just imagine me and a giant metal frame, and green goo eveywhere). This yeilds a much more professional appearance as letters and numbers illuminate instead of just a blur of light from behind the graphics.

7a. Design 7b. Print 7c. Cut, tape and place behind printed graphics.

 

8. cast misc plastic parts

sculpt + mould tube mount (coming soon...)

 

 

9. paint + makeup on creatures

9a. Base coat	9b. Airbrush	9c. Makeup details
Crystal Pallister, a wonderful and brilliant makeup artist gave the Genpets their first breath of life. I must admit, it is the one part of the project I did not wholly do myself, but that's ok, becuase it made for an interesting second date. Bruising is added around the wrists where the twist ties come into contact. Hair is then added to armpits.

10. Animatronics + robotics

comming soon...

 

 

11. Final assembly.

Cutting a couple hundred twist ties (I think 250) to various lengths, glueing, etc.

There were of course other little things, like building the display unit, power supply setup, lcd stuff, dvd video, website, catalogue, I got my friend rob to help me blow wires through the tubing to power them and that alone took us an entire afternoon of looking like idiots. you get the point though.

more extended info. Vacuform Photos Electronic Circuits Conceptual Renderings (More images coming soon)

How the design evolved (Wal-Mart + Medical)

Plastics
What if you were to take biomedical equipment and packaging out of the lab, and place it in Wal-Mart? How would a package with these inspirations look? The originating design goal was to create packaging that would give this feel. Thus, the packages are smooth and white, with simplistic biomedical graphics.
While I struggled with whether or not embedded LED’s would be pushing it (when we compare these packages too todays cardboard + plastic), from the standpoint of a large corporation the LED lights do not equate to much of an additional cost but make the packs far more exciting and eye catching. Even the packages with embedded LCD screens for video clips, prices are dropping so fast I wager we’ll be seeing them outside of current uses in the very near future.

Animatronics
While the pieces are animatronic, the movement for most units is subtle. Early on it became clear that having all 19 animals moving would look very busy and would be very difficult for me and my budget. Thus 12 are 'sleeping' with only their chests rising up and down, as the other units move and struggle.
This also made logical sense from the stand point of a company as having the animals asleep would be easier on the animal, as well as more acceptable to a consumer audience.
In the end, it forgoes any problems with animatronics that move jerky or unrealistically. Its accepted that the animals are asleep, and thus no one expects them to move a great deal, and the small bit of movement that they do have gets a far greater reaction and looks more realistic than I myself even expected.

Creature design
As for the bioengineered creatures themselves, Hollywood really screwed me over. Anything not mammalian generally looks alien. Reptile features? Alien. Tentacles or flippers? Alien. It limited me into making something that doesn’t look all that genetically altered. Ultimately, I chose to make something puppy like, but more like a toy doll. Logically speaking, how would a living toy be marketed? Why create a new market when you can use and extend an already proven one? Dolls are timeless, what better than a real living one that closely imitates a human child (that's the devils advocate speaking again...).