Making the No Face Frame

Once the mask was finished, it was time to figure out how to make No Face’s main shape. I’d seen many ways of doing this, but all of them seemed somewhat complex to me. I like simple! The goal for me was to make No Face really tall. But I also wanted to make my No Face cosplay comfortable to wear at conventions.

My first thought was that I could wear the rig on top of my head. But a little bit of Google research, and I discovered that the best way for me to make a tall, wearable rig would be to use a backpack with an aluminum frame. I found an old, inexpensive one over at ebay. With that part in hand, next I had to figure out how I was going to not only attach the mask, but also how I was going to create something with a lot of height.

I don’t know where I came up with the idea to use a hard hat helmet, but that’s what I ended up using as my “base” for the mask. I ordered a black one off of Amazon. The idea was not to wear the helmet, but instead to have the helmet rigged above my head. I did this by securing the helmet to a length of 2×2 wood with two bolts. This securely attaches the helmet to the wood, and there isn’t any issue of the helmet going anywhere. It can handle a lot of weight, in fact!

Still, just because the helmet can take a lot of weight, I wanted to keep things as light as possible. I have a lot of thick EVA foam from other projects, so I cut up four pieces of 2″ foam to make a tall box that was hot glued to the top of the helmet. This is a very strong and light foundation for the mask. I cut the bottom of the pieces to fit the curves of the hard hat and to allow for good glue surface adhesion. I stuck some extra thick pieces of EVA foam to the front of the box. Then I used some cut up pipe foam to create a curved shape around the top.

Once I had the hat-on-a-stick finished, I attached it to my aluminum backpack frame using lots and lots of gaffer’s tape. This allowed me to make the height of the rig exactly as tall as I wanted it to be. And believe it or not, it’s incredibly light and very comfortable to wear! The hip belt attachment keeps the entire setup secured so it doesn’t feel top-heavy.

The reason why I built out the front of the box on top of the helmet was so that I would have a place to invisibly secure the mask. I had decided that rare earth magnets would work best for this application. The inside of the mask is curved, so I built up the inside of it so I would have a place to install the magnets. Using E6000, I glued three pair of n50 magnets into the foam, letting it cure over several days.

I carved out recessed areas in the foam opposite where the mask was going to be installed on the hat. I wanted the magnets to have more surface area to stick. I let those cure for several days as well. Here is what the eventual rig turned into!

With the rig finished, it was time to make the shroud next!