With less than 2 weeks to go before The Urban Chalkboard opens to the public, (I am starting to write this on Nov 3rd) I have been busy with getting the pedestal fabricated and in place and getting the tree unwrapped and mapped. For the pedestal I turned to my friend and neighbor Mike Lyons, an artist and fabricator with a business called Wow-Huh? in the Circle City Industrial Complex. He has a CNC milling machine and suggested stacking cut plywood to form the pedestal. I was immediately convinced that was the way to go. So I made a contour outline with masking tape of the base of the tree and gave it to Mike to put in his computer program. Then we designed the contour of the base of the pedestal to look like spreading roots and let the computer extrude it and cut it into 3/4″ segments.
Once fabricated we headed to the location on Friday (Oct 31st) to get it installed.
A few hours later and things were looking good. Next up: Installing the projector and starting the mapping.
It is now Thanksgiving and I finished up the tree installation last week. Here is video of the last couple of weeks.