Project 4: Scripts, Sets, and Costumes

We decided to start meeting at Andrea's apartment to design the sets and costumes. Dan, John, and I brought cardboard over and I bought different colors of black light paint and glow in the dark paint as well as a black light. We went over all the scenes we had chosen to include in our film and decided upon the characters and set elements that we needed to create. Andrea stenciled out designs in pencil onto the cardboard for the characters and sets and as a group we painted them. The set elements that weren't painted were done with Christmas lights which required no preparation, both I and Mia brought in some that we already had. The only costume element that remained to be completed was the LED ruby slippers.

First for the LED ruby slippers I had done research online to determine different prices and shipping times as well as learning how to create LED circuits. Shipping times from most places online were going to take too long and would delay our schedule for finishing the project and they couldn't offer us any personal advice so John and I went to check out the different options offered by RadioShack.

Our first trip to RadioShack John and I talked with two employees about our project and photographed all the different LED's we considered using, noting their prices and specifications as well.


We returned to the group who was painting sets at the time and filled them in on what we learned. No one in our group had real experience with circuitry. I had done a minimal amount of soldering and John, Dan, and I had taken Physics II years ago where we learned concepts of circuitry.

Dan and I drew out a diagram of the circuit on paper and analyzing the shoes we determined that we could only supply 18 Volts of energy since only two 9 Volt batteries would fit on the shoe. We wanted as many LED's as possible on the shoe and the lowest voltage LED's we found were 1.8 Volts. This meant that we could only use 9 LED's which took a total voltage of 16.2 Volts so we could leave a potential drop in voltage for a resistor so the LED's wouldn't blow.

We then used Ohm's Law to determine the resistor we needed to use. We have nine 5mm 1.8 volt 20mA high intensity red LEDs, two 9 volt batteries, a 100 Ohm resistor, and a slide switch circuited in sequence on each shoe. Ohm’s Law states that V=IR where V is voltage in unit Volts(V), I is current in unit Amperes(A), and R is resistance in unit Ohm’s(Ω). To determine which resistor we needed we changed the equation and plugged in the following values:

V=IR

=> R = V/I

=> R = (2*9V – 9*1.8V)/20mA

=> R = (18V – 16.2V)/20mA

=> R = 1.8V/0.02A

=> R = 90 V/A

=> R = 90 Ω

A 100 Ω resistor is the closest value and it does not need to be too precise. Also note that V in this equation is the potential drop between the voltages of the batteries and the LED’s (2*9V – 9*1.8V=1.8V).

We attached the LED’s to the shoes through the holes in the sequins and soldered red electrical wire to create the sequential circuit. We duct taped the batteries to the base of the shoes to hold them in place.