I first heard of Wall-E in spring of 2007.
Like so many ‘things’ that come our way along the pipes of gossip, hearsay and just plain rumors, I was not impressed with what I had heard.
Being a member of the R2 Builder’s group on Yahoo! Groups (making fanmade R2-D2’s from Star Wars) for a while, and having started my own R2 unit, I was already in the middle of a robotics project that was all too time consuming for me to even consider another, so I dismissed the thoughts of Wall-E.
Some friends of mine happened to get the Ratatouille video game by Pixar / Disney, which came from the movie of the same name.
They had unlocked a secret ‘video’ on the game and shared it with me. It was a sneak peek of Wall-E the Movie.
I was amazed!
Here was this little robot (well, not that little we found out later), who seemed to be a mix of R2-D2 and Johnny 5 from Short Circuit, with a personality to match!
Hmmm….
It appeared to me at that time I was going to have to research this matter deeper.
So I immediately did some research of the net and found there was NOTHING to find.
So in October (on my birthday actually) of 2007 I created The Wall-E Builder’s Group in Google Groups.
Why Google Groups you ask? Well, personally I didn’t really care for the Google Groups format and control panel, BUT…I used Flickr, and Picasa and also Blogger, and they all seemed to work together without any extra effort…so I went that route.
Within a couple months we had grown to over 500 members!
I began taking screenshots from the video sneak peek, and started working on some dimensions.
Little by little information was released by Disney & Pixar about the film.
This information included video shorts, promotional videos, previews from the movie, stills, hi-res promo shots, etc…
We grabbed everything that was released!
We soon discovered that our group and what we planned on doing was much too big for the limitations of a Google or Yahoo! Group format…we were going to need a website!
So in early 2008 I started working with a few friends I made in the Group, Tinman and GuyofSound, whom both were very instrumental in the design and development of the much needed website.
By this time, with a month or two of opening the doors to the new website, the membership grew to over 1,000.
When we first set the website up, our Alexa ranking was 42 million. Our member grew in 6 months to over 2,400 members, and we climbed from being the 42 millionth website on the internet, to being in the top 300,000.
Not too shabby for a few months of existance!
Now that we had a website, and we had the people, we needed the numbers.
We spent those six months working from pictures, hi-res stills, movie promo shots, etc… trying to calculate the dimensions of Wall-E for building him.
With the help of some members who are in-the-know, we have developed a full set of dimensions, and we are currently building Wall-E from these dimensions.
I am going to continue to write articles, depicting the build, showing pictures and talking about some of the hurdles and pitfalls, as well as sharing news and updates from the website and Group.
My hope is that you will all find this information interesting, and hopefully even stop by the group website to check us out!
The membership there is FREE, and to register you simply pick a screen name, and give your birthday, and set your password…that’s it! No long forms or gathering of personal info.
We have so many features, I will spare you the details, but will give you a quick rundown of some of the biggest features.
We currently have the BIGGEST collection of Wall-E videos, shorts, promo’s and trailers found on the internet in our Video Archives, where you can also see videos from some of our members showing off thier builds, projects and goofing off.
We have a Download section FULL of designs, plans, pictures adn more, all of which are 100% FREE to download.
We have a group drawing section full of the Group drawings, which are updated weekly as we actually build and test deigns BEFORE posting the finished drawings, so members KNOW when they get a set of drawings from the site…these drawings will fit and work with previous parts.
And there is so much more!
Our group is deisgned for MORE than JUST Wall-E too…we have a Lego robotics builders section (which Nowpublic member Jmenomeno is the Modorator of), a Papercraft forum, a CAD forum and much, much more!
So check it out today at www.Wall-EBuilders.com
Stay tuned for Part 2 of Wall-e Design to Fabrication where I will share how we discovered some of the initial dimensions which helped me create the FIRST Wall-E part ever built buy a fan!
