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The tentacles of the octopus were done by stacking rings of balloons. The fatter end
of the octopus was all done with hexagons so we have six air ships tied together in
a ring and one method of joining them would be to take pairs of 260s. We’ll start by
wrapping the 260s around a knot joining two, two airships and twist it together. What we’ve
done is we’ve trapped that knot inside the 260s.
We’re going to add a pair of balloons at each point and then we are going to use these
balloons as the connecting pieces holding together all of the other rings.
The method we choose for actually building the tentacles of the octopus was a little
different than this. In retrospect, this is the approach we should have gone with.
One we have all of those 260s twisted on, we’ll take the next ring and slide it on
top, lining it up with the previous ring, and once again like before, we just twist
these balloons together, trapping that knot inside, and as we work our way around the
ring you can see how all the balloons fit stacked together, nice and tight.
Everything lines up nicely now. Everything fits, nice and smoothly. When we built the
tentacles, as we got further away from the starting point, our rings got slightly smaller.
We still use the same number of balloons in our ring most of the length of the tentacle
but size them smaller. A little less air made it possible for them to narrow and come closer
to a point. Eventually when we got towards the end we
went from hexagons down to triangles. We just started using fewer balloons because we didn’t
want to close it off reaching that fine point at the end.
One of the great things about working on anything big like this, is that multiple people can
be working on the same piece of the structure. I rotating the structure to work from, uhhh,
I’m rotating the structure so it’s easy for the camera to catch me doing this, however
in a real life situation there might be two or three people working on the same piece.
We won’t be rotating it. We would just constantly be adding rings on top, everybody staying
in one place and working vertically. .
It’s a very quick way to create things that are very large.