MindFreedom Lane County held a skit called “The Normathon” involving worship of an enormous five-foot giant pill capsule. Here are simple instructions about how you may make your own “Big Giant Pill.”
Jeremy in the MindFreedom office invented a brilliantly easy way to make a big giant pill, or more accurately, a capsule. His secret is in how to make the ends of the capsule round and smooth.
Inbetween skits, we are hanging our big giant pill strapped up on our office wall, here is a photo of it, though you can’t see the ends.
Okay, here’s how to make your capsule!
Key ingredients:
- Two (2) beach balls or better yet those thicker rubber-type balls that come already-inflated.
- Chickenwire
- Cardboard – nice and smooth
- Duct tape – lots of it
- Primer
- Two different colored paints – preferably paint that would not wash off in the rain.
Instructions:
Sketch out the size of your capsule.
You can make smaller capsule with two smaller beach balls (leave nozzle accessible for re-inflation!). We made a couple of those as prototypes.
Or you can make huge ones by using those inexpensive rubber-type pre-inflated balls or even those exercise balls, though those are more expensive.
Whatever size capsule you make, you take those two balls, and those are the ENDS of your capsule.
Now all you need is a cylinder, to “hold” one-half of each of the two balls! We used really firm but fairly light chicken wire…. though tape up those ends because they can pop your ball, which happened to one of ours!
Then wrap the chicken wire in nice smooth cardboard. We actually used inexpensive cardboard from the art store.
Then use lots and lots of good duct tape to hold everything together nice and solid.
Then paint the whole combined thing with a good white primer. This primer forms a base, covers up your duct tape, etc. Plus the white primer helps “hold” the cardboard together.
When the primer paint is dry, paint the capsule two colors — one on top and one on bottom.
We first wrapped mid-section of capsule all the way around with a thin line of masking tape before painting the final colors. Then we painted and painted… and touched up… When dry and we removed the masking tape… presto we had a nice neat ‘white’ line marking the middle between the two bright colors.
For a humorous theatrical flourish Debra painted the words in large print:
BIG GIANT PILL.
But how to worship if on the ground? And ours was a little heavy so it would be tiring to hold too long.
So…
We also made a nice solid stand within minutes, consisting of two “tripods.”
Ingredients:
- Six pieces of very firm PVC…
- Lots of — what else — duct tape!
- String
Take three of those PVC tubes ’em at time, duct tape your tripod “joint” for all three two thirds the way up….
Then stretch out the bottom of the three ‘legs’ (duct tape forms a kind of hinge).
Then ‘connect’ the base of the each “tripod leg” with string and tape to assure the whole thing does not collapse
And you have a tripod!
Two tripods held up the Big Giant Pill in the air high enough to be seen very nicely.
Here are some photos of neuroleptic pills to inspire or frighten you. We modeled ours after the capsules at the bottom. We have also made many big giant hypodermic needles!