Tuesday, November 27, 2012

Quick and Dirty Vampire Killing Kit

The talented Allen Hopps brings us this excellent tutorial on creating a vampire killing kit. The final product isn't an ornate objet d'art, but it's superior to quite a few kits being sold by "artists".

I think this is important for two reasons. One, it demonstrates that anyone can create a kit of their own using relatively cheap off the shelf parts. Two, this is going to be the new baseline. From now on kits that aren't at least as good aren't going to sell.

In the past year there has been an explosion in the number of vampire killing kits on Ebay and Etsy. Despite most of them being absolute crap they're still selling for goodly sums, creating a self-perpetuating cycle of mediocrity. Hopefully a video like this will help cause the dismally lame low end of the market to collapse.




7 comments:

Tóbal said...

Cool video , it gives good ideas for making age-looking props.
Distressing leather, fabric, crystal ...is the key for these things to work...unless you collect vintage items with time and mount a really cool "real" vampire kit!
Thanks for sharing!

Barry John said...

Great post and very true. Mediocrity and rampant consumerism is the slow painful death of any good niche. The "low" end is nothing to aspire to nor will it inspire. Nice work Propnomicon.:-)

CoastConFan said...

I tip my hat to your sir, you posted excellent information that is most useful to the prop building community and raised the bar on vampire hunting kits.

RavenCrow said...

Thanks to this tutorial, my Vampire Hunter Kit is ON... One travel to the Salvation Army and Im ready... Just one question: The stakes, handmade sharp or by machine?...

Phil said...

Allen continues to be an endless fount of crafting knowledge. I'm usually not into "standard" horror creatures like vampires and werewolves, but even I couldn't help being inspired by this vid, and have started work on my own undead repellant box.

I think I can even put a mythos spin on it.

Rhissanna said...

Thank you so much for this! When I get a chance I'm going to link to this on my Steampunk blog, because I don't know anyone who isn't trying to make a Vampire kit. Maybe they'll be the vintage curiosities of the future?

Naamah said...

The awesome thing about this is that you can take the same technique he outlines for creating the interior of the box itself, with the foam and the recessed areas, on other projects; cases for relics and the like. It REALLY bumps up the visual appeal.

I personally do use velvet or satiny fabric when I do things like this, though fleece is cheaper and easier to work with. Stretch dance fabric is a good choice because it has some give to it, but crushed velvet is really better, since the inevitable folds just look better. You can get stretchy velvet at the fabric store pretty cheap at winter sales, and also with coupons.