Since Jawas can't always be trusted and sandcrawlers may not frequent your neighborhood, San Diego Droid Builders offers Comic-Con attendees an opportunity to learn how to build and maintain their own R2 units.
That said, John Boisvert’s garage looks like the inside of a sandcrawler with droid parts tucked into every nook and cranny, and cables hanging from the ceiling and a Jawa working on an astromech dome sitting by the door.
“I like junk and so I'm kind of a Jawa,” Boisvert said surrounded by clutter. “I enjoy building stuff. I'll get a hold of things and I'll make them into props. I like hanging out in here.”
Boisvert is always on the lookout for cool things at the swap meet or scavenging the Internet for someone selling a pallet of cables and hoses for $10. He enjoys having a stockpile of stuff so when people come over for a droid building party they can take something that inspires them. That's not far off from how many of the props and droids were created for George Lucas’ first “Star Wars” film. Lucas didn't have a big budget so his crew had to use a lot of ingenuity to make the film happen.
Boisvert has built about 20 droids inspired by the Star Wars universe. He saw “Star Wars” when it opened in 1977 and became an instant fan. Like many, he fell in love with the plucky little astromech droid known as R2D2. But becoming a droid engineer himself did not come until later, when he got introduced to an R2 builders group.
“I went there, and I was just hooked. I'm like, 'I didn't know I always wanted to build an R2,'” Boisvert said. “And then once I joined the forums and I got to meet everybody online because that’s what it was back then, it just kind of snowballed. It's just such a great community, and everyone's so helpful, and you make all kinds of friends and all kinds of connections from all around the world, and it's awesome.”
Boisvert has a degree in electronics engineering, and loves to take stuff apart. Putting together his first droid took him about three years.
“A lot of that was parts gathering,” Boisvert said. “I started building one from a wood frame and I really liked that. But right as I was getting started, another gentleman came out with an all aluminum frame that was much easier since a lot of things would bolt to it better.”
There are several builders group but Astromech.net is the place where you will find forums, build logs, blueprint schematics and lots of help. There are also R2 builder groups on Facebook including the one Boisvert belongs to called San Diego Droid Builders. The group will have a panel Thursday morning at Comic-Con called Droid Building 101 that will lay out the basics of droid building. The goal is to make everyone realize that they too, could build an R2 from scratch.
Ruben Camerino is also part of the group and agrees that Astromech.net is “your bible for droid building. Go there first and then read for a couple of years. You start just poring over these forums and figuring out what you want to build. Of course, it starts off with, ‘I just want it to kind of roll and maybe make some sounds.’ And then you see someone else that has thing pop up and come out of the dome, and these arms come out. And that'd be cool. Let's do that.”
Camerino was inspired to make his own R2 after meeting Boisvert at a Star Wars Celebration convention and “I sat in the lobby of the Hilton Anaheim with John for maybe four hours. We didn't go to bed till 4 a.m. We're just talking about droids. And then I got back to Cory (Camerino’s brother-in-law) and I'm like, I just talked to John and I think we could make this happen.”
The goal of Comic-Con panel is to inspire others in the same way.
“The panel will be for discussing how to get in on any budget,” Boisvert said. “And it's all kinds of droids not just astromech (the kind R2 is). We'll be talking about mouse droids, gonk droids, scrubber droids, just anything you can think of and all the different ways and how to hopefully shoehorn it into your budget.”
And of course that’s the question everyone asks. How much will this cost? Do I have to mortgage the house or take on a second job? The answer depends on what you want your droid to do and what do you want to make it out of.
“Do you need it to have the doors open because that adds more complicated parts and more money. But if it's just going to sit in the corner in your game room and doesn't need to move, you can build him out of a less sturdy material because he's not going to be running around,” Boisvert explained. “So the price range is $100 to $20,000 or $30,000. There's not an upper limit.”
But there’s no prefabricated kit. That’s the second question he is often asked.
Camerino confesses he has zero electronics or engineering background. He looks to his brother-in-law Cory Hall for that.
“We kind of divided and conquered,” Hall said. “I have more the automotive, electronics background. I'd say the most challenging is the different programming languages that people use for these things. But basically, this is just a big overpriced RC car.”
That costs as much as a car, Hall added. But that’s because he and Camerino added a lot of bells and whistles.
“When you start getting all the crazy stuff, you're doing that for the other droid builders because they're the ones that are going to go, ‘oh, I know how much work that took.’ It's one-upmanship at some point where you want to make yours better than, than the next guy. It's a pride thing, too," Camerino said.
Camerino brings a graphics design background to droid building and focuses his attention on how R2 should look. But for his first R2 he powered through a build in six months with Hall.
“I think that's unheard of in the droid building community, and I really don't know how it happened, but we did it,” Camerino said.
In contrast to Boisvert’s sandcrawler garage, Camerino has what he calls an armor factory because he is also part of the 501st Legion and has a number of stormtroppers in his garage.
“We host armor parties here. We build stormtrooper costumes,” Camerino said. “I also have a Chewbacca, and now we're building droids, and we're thinking of building several other droids. But yeah, obsession has become just a love for this art of building and creating this Star Wars universe. Just love it.”
And it is also about spreading that love. As with the 501st Legion, R2 builders do a lot of charity work at Rady Children's Hospital or with Alex’s Lemonade Stand.
“We enjoy seeing the people's faces. I mean, it's amazing,” Boisvert said. “I mean, people just light up. Grown adults turn into kids. I mean, who doesn't love the droid?”
“That really just makes everything so worth it because you see the joy these kids faces,” Camerino added. “You see them light up, you see them trying to interact with the droid and thinking that there's actually someone in there and you're just kind of standing off to the side with the little controllers and they don't see you and they're not paying attention to you because he's the star of the show. It's cool to have it in your driveway, but once you bring it out and it's for a charity event and you see the reactions of the people who are interacting with it just makes it so much worth it.”
But if you plan to bring your droid to events where kids want to touch him and try to pry compartments open, then you have to build him “essentially bulletproof” Camerino noted. “There are some droids who maybe should not be handled that way. They maybe don't have aluminum dome like ours or maybe the Hollow Projector does not have springs on the back to allow it to rotate freely. That's part of the interaction.”
Which brings up another point about these builders. Their droids work. R2 rolls around the convention floor and talks and pops an arm out to shake hands. In some of the movies, there had to be a different R2 for each screen action required.
“In the movie, it’s a guy with a stick popping out of the swamp. It doesn't really work,” Boisvert said. “So the fun thing about the club is somebody has figured out how to make that happen. We have a CPU arm that comes up. The life form scanner comes up. There's actually one gentleman out of Utah that has a carousel of all the tools. And so the door will open up and the tool will come out, and it goes up and down and gets all crazy. “
Camerino added, “there’s a saying, you want it to look like it just stepped off the screen versus it just stepped off the set.”
In the case of Camerino’s R2, he looks like he just walked away from the awards ceremony at the end of “A New Hope,” so he’s all clean and shiny.
“And you just don't want them to look pretty on the outside. You want them to be pretty on the inside,” Hall added. “I like good wire management. I don't want to open him up and somebody go, ‘oh my God, what's going on in here?’ You want them to go, ‘oh, hey, nice.’ It's always just pride and workmanship.”
Boisvert’s R2 looks more weather beaten and battle weary, which is why Camerino’s R2 will be the one making his Comic-Con debut next week to dazzle attendees at the panel and booth. But he will be joined by plenty of other droids.
