A motorised wearable hat with a fully functional model railway running around its brim, commissioned for a Great Western Railway Cheltenham Ladies' Day campaign through Plunge Creations. Featured by BBC Gloucestershire and reaching over 3 million views within 48 hours of broadcast on their Instagram.
Great Western Railway commissioned a statement prop for their Cheltenham Ladies' Day campaign via Plunge Creations. A wearable hat that needed to function as both fashion and engineering. The train had to actually move. The hat had to be wearable. And the whole object needed to read as a coherent, finished thing rather than a novelty with wires showing.
The brief was part of a complete outfit commission, with the hat colour-matched to a full coordinated look. Fabrication and wardrobe had to work in parallel from the outset.
On location at the station, the hat colour-matched to the full GWR-green outfit. Photography: Jack Boskett.
The mechanism came first. A lazy susan bearing was fitted with a concealed motor housed inside a fabricated tunnel structure, the tunnel being a scenic element of the miniature landscape and the casing for the drive system. A custom mount held the motor precisely against the bearing, with a timing belt transferring drive cleanly. The train ran on a circular track around the full brim of the hat.
With the mechanism proven and mounted, the terrain was built up around it: grass flocking, model trees, flowering shrubs, the stone tunnel portal, miniature people and horses, all scaled and positioned to read as a convincing miniature environment. Every scenic element was placed in relation to what was underneath it. The landscape had to accommodate the mechanism without revealing it. The internal battery was NeMH which is safer than lithium for a wearable, and placed at the front of the hat to counter balance the motor mechanism at the back.
Control was kept simple and reliable: a power switch and a potentiometer at the back of the hat, accessible to the wearer, allowing the train to be started and its speed adjusted without any external controller. For a broadcast shoot, predictable and operator-controlled beats a wireless system that can drop out.
Studio build, the terrain constructed around the completed drive mechanism.
The hat was worn at Cheltenham Racecourse for the GWR Ladies' Day campaign. BBC Gloucestershire featured the piece and the content reached over 3 million views within 48 hours of being posted to their social channels, a figure that reflects how well the object performed on camera as something genuinely surprising and precisely made.
Watch the BBC Gloucestershire reel →
At the event. Photography: Jack Boskett.
Full outfit, Cheltenham Racecourse. Photography: Jack Boskett.
Kinetic wearable fabrication with embedded drive electronics and integrated scenic build, delivered to broadcast brief for a national brand client, producing content that reached 3 million views within 48 hours.
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