How to Turn Any Room into a Starship
Space, the final frontier. Accompany us as we guide you on a journey to
transform your room into a starship! If you're a fan of Star Trek, or Star Wars,
or have an aspiring astronaut at home, you'll definitely want to try this out!
It's a five-step mission to explore the creation of a starship bridge to boldly
go where no DIYer has gone before. Let's begin.
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Materials
In this blog, we're going to be talking about how you can customize your room
to appear as if you're in a starship in a budget-friendly way. You can use
whatever you have lying around your home. Or if you aren't too concerned about
budget check out "materials" section to get an idea of what you should use.
- Captain's Chair - An office chair or gaming chair should suffice to
simulate the rising and lowering mechanism of a starship captain's chat.
- Crew Chairs - Your crew will need seats to monitor their respective
stations
- Glass Table - Simulate the advance holographs that show up on the
displays by utilizing a glass table.
- Monitors and TVs - You can't have a Starship without visual aids for
your transmissions and security cameras identifying approaching enemy ships!
- Vinyl - This will help your starship to life. From silvers, blacks and
space themes, use a variety of vinyls to get immersed.
- Dustpans - For control panels.
- Carboard/Magazine Holders - For the monitors if you want to save money.
- Tape and Spray Paint - To help blend in your colors and hold stuff down.
- Craft Jewels/Bottle Caps - To create buttons for the control panels.
- Bulletin Board Paper (Gray) - To create dark flooring.
- Calculator - Accessory for Captain's chair.
The first thing you'll want to do is take your chosen captain's chair and
place it in the center of the room and surrounded it with glass tables, each
holding two crew members. Once you get this layout established, it is time to
decide how to actually dress up the room. Choose an aesthetic consisting of
silvers, blacks, and glass for your overall color scheme and design. This
particular color scheme will give you cohesion to your layout so that when
visitors look at it, they're not necessarily seeing that things are different
styles, but they're just seeing everything matches color-wise, and so they
accept it as reality.
It's also important to remember that in the low budget, you're boiling your
room
down to its very essence, the absolute minimum that you can get away with to
convey an idea of something. Every single crew member should have a
workstation that is made up of one screen and one control panel if you want to
convey having a crew. If you want to save money, and not buy multiple monitors,
you can also create some, made with one of those fold-out collapsible magazine
holders. You fold it in, put it together, and it looks like this. When you flip
them outside, however, and take off the metal panel, put two of them together,
and you suddenly have a very interesting control monitor screen.
Next,
wrap the entire thing in tape and then spray painted it silver. Now, if you're
tech-savvy, you can blackout lines of electrical tape and put a green neon piece
of poster board in it so that you can put a special effect of something going on
on the monitor via your computer if you want to make a film.
The control
panels are made up of dustpans, and each one is sprayed pan silver with a black
trimmer on the bottom and electrical tape. And then all the buttons on top are
either craft jewels or they are made of bottle caps painted in various colors.
Flooring
Depending on which starship you're trying to emulate from your favorite
sci-fi series, we'll use Star Trek as an example. If you're trying to emulate
the original Star Trek series, one of our biggest challenges to emulate is
probably the floor. If you have a hardwood floor in your room, that's obviously
not going to work for a starship, but unless you want to uproot your floors and
make things match, there's a cheaper, temporary option. Bulletin board paper
will suffice. Bulletin board paper around 10ft long or so should suffice but get
as much as you need for your floor. Get several rolls of it and roll it out,
make four or five pieces of it, and that will make an entire gray floor. Next,
tape it to the floor, and it will serve perfectly. Just be cautious as you walk
on it.
Captain's Chair and Lighting
One of the most important aspects of a starship is the captain's chair. An
office chair will suffice, but if you want something on top of it to make it
more control panel-like and official looking for the armrests, then we've got
you covered.
So, once again, take out your magazine holders. Slip them
onto the existing armrests. Now, take some dollar store calculators, set them up
on top of it, and bam, you will be able to easily just sit there and punch
numbers into it. Sometimes the aspects that people notice most are things that
you just happen to randomly find. If you have multiple crew members, you will
want to ensure that your science officer's section has some kind of binocular
scope to look into or any kind of a microscope-looking thing. Find anything
cheap to fill that part, it works. Even things from your local thrift store. So,
once you find your gadget, once again, use your magazine holders, and set it on
top of it. It will make a little panel to go at the bottom to hide that it was a
magazine holder, and it will look great. Just keep a lookout for just anything
you think might be usable. It's also important to remember that sometimes people
get a concept if you provide them with something that might not be true to the
canon, but they think should be there.
Star Trek pilots never use a
joystick, but if you find something that appears futuristic looking, it will
really make the bridge look a little bit more important when the pilot was
actually doing something with her hand. So lastly, on the bridge, you can decide
to include several Led light systems which would just accent different places in
your room. You can also use birthday cake lights, they're very cheap and small.
Put them on the edges of desks or at the top of your right screens, just to give
it a little bit more light, a little bit of an accent, and try to make it a
little bit more spacey and modern and Sci-Fi like.
Backgrounds
Lastly, you'll need backgrounds and interiors. We have an assortment of
metal films to recreate your starship's hull. And
galaxy-themed backgrounds
for you to frame and utilize to recreate traveling through space. And with
that, you're ready to get traveling! So get planning, and check out our vinyl! Get yours today!