My Christmas Lights Delight

Tis the season for enchantment on an ebony winter night, the world ablaze with Christmas lights. It's better yet when the lights are laced with a bit of razzle dazzle that bids wonderment about the creator. In this blog, I'll tell you about my son, Chas Llewellyn, who lit up my holidays with his sorcery.

This year, my Christmas delight was found in a jingle bells singing Elk that welcomes visitors to the NC Arboretum Winter Lights Festival in Asheville, NC. The computerized elk was engineered by my son, Chas Llewellyn, and Sara Sanders at the UNC-A STEAM Lab, along with John Sauvigne and Matt Taboada, two STEAM student workers, several engineering mechatronics students completing a senior design project, and two volunteers from the costume department.

The Story Behind the Animatronic Elk at NC Arboretum's Winter Lights 2021

My son, Chas, is a last minute kind of guy when it comes to Christmas gifts, but always and just in the nick of time, he delivers the glitter on Christmas morning. I'll tell you about his clever 2020 construction, uniquely designed for Katerina Don, but then replicated for his parents and sister. This year's 2021 holiday gift, a computerized elk, was designed for thousands of visitors at the Asheville Winter Lights Holiday event.

Chas spent September 2020 in Ukraine with his special lady, Katerina Don. Katerina is Ukrainian but has lived most of her life in Bangladesh. As a teen, Chas lived in Bangladesh from 2000-2005 where both Chas and Katerina attended the American International School. They were high school sweethearts.

Chas loved Ukraine, both Kiev and the countryside. The two of them hiked in the Carpathian Mountains to enjoy the natural beauty and to search for an iconic religious relic, an old wooden church built in the 18th century. The church is considered a masterpiece of wooden architecture. (You can check it out using the link at the end of this story.)

Finally, they found the historic church in the mountains and a delightful caretaker who gave them a tour. With this special memory for the two of them, Chas returned to Asheville and Katerina to Bangladesh where she is producing an online educational program to help kids have fun mastering the national curriculum.

When Christmas 2020 neared, Chas wondered what awesome gift he could make for Katerina, one clever enough to cover Christmas and her birthday on December 26. It would not be possible to mail it to Bangladesh, not just because of cost, but because, as mentioned, Chas is an "in the nick of time" kind of guy, staying up all night on Christmas Eve to finish his complex creations.

On Christmas Day he went to What's App Video with her boxed gift. By video, he asked her how he should open it. Out poured 54 puzzle pieces onto the table. Katerina was instructed to tell him how to build it, and following her instructions, he inserted one piece after the next, with a bit of trial and error on her part, to marvel at an exact replica of that very special wood church in the Huklyvyi Village of Ukraine. Overwhelmed, Katerina burst into tears. That meant that she loved it.

Chas's 2021 Christmas creation took over two years to build.

Chas works as a special projects technician for the UNC Asheville STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Art and Math) Laboratory, alongside Sara Sanders, the director. The work includes production of commissioned pieces that exemplify all aspects of the studio, and provides laboratory experiences for engineering students and multi-media art students.

In 2020 the NC Arboretum in Asheville commissioned STEAM to build the first in a series of woodland creatures to display at the Winter Lights Festival. Seven UNC-A mechatronics students were tasked to do some of the initial design work to produce a life-like elk that sings and moves to holiday tunes as part of their senior project design class. Then COVID hit and classes shut down or went Zoom.

Chas and Sara went to work bringing the elk to life. John Sauvigne and Matt Taboada, two of STEAM's talented student workers, teamed up with Chas and Sara to produce the elk.

Chas designed the Elk's body and mobility functions on his computer. He produced a 3D model of the antlers, fabricated the steel skeleton, and rendered it life-like with sculpting epoxy. The antlers weighed 5-7 pounds, which required a neck strong enough to move the head and antlers in a life-like way. Puppeteer, Hobey Ford used specialty foam to help Chas produce the neck that is carved in such a way to allow the range of motion needed.

The computerized elk has 12 motors and performs many realistic movements. For example, the eye can produce ten interactions. The life-like ears move, as well.

Chas developed some of these skills while in undergraduate studies at UNC-A working with mentor John Payne who produced life-sized, moving dinosaurs out of metal. John Payne, who is now deceased, taught Chas that to build a realistic puppet, the designer has to emulate the anatomy of the animal. Start with the skeleton and study the natural movements of the subject, and understand the pivots and joints that are the source of movement, as well as the range of movement. To produce the elk's robotics, Chas used some open source software and custom designed the remainder required to make it perform as he intended.

Sara Sanders, STEAM Director, designed the elk's form, shaping slices of foam into interior panels from the computerized model to create an accurate shape. Student worker, Matt, designed 3-D fitted panels for the face using Fusion 360 software. Chas and Matt used a CNC router to carve the foam to create a realistic body. Carrie, a UNC-A costume instructor, along with her student, Alex, produced patterns from the body's shape and sewed together the multi-colored fur pieces that match those of the elk in the wild.

Chas explained that the Elk receives commands from a central control computer. Eventually, other animatronic woodland creatures will be synchronized, with multiple programs talking to each other and producing coordinated movements.

My husband and I saw the elk under construction at the STEAM laboratory in September. It was fascinating to see the "guts", with the motor box, skeleton, and foam shape exposed. We looked forward to seeing it completed and exhibited at the Winter Lights 2021 event. In December we drove to Asheville for a pre-Christmas visit to see Chas and the completed elk performing at the NC Arboretum.

Winter Lights visitors pass through 500,000 lights at the Arboretum to reach the elk behind glass paneling outside the education center. The elk is the first creature in a new Winter Lights exhibit that will include a host of woodland animals telling a story to inspire children to think about wildlife.

Charles, and I had a hard time pulling ourselves away from the display. This beautiful creature with its sweet movements of head, neck, mouth, ears, eyes and leg looked just like a live elk. But, on the other hand, I doubt that few elk sing Jingle Bells in the wild.

I wondered why the Arboretum requested an elk instead of a traditional Christmas reindeer. Then I learned that elk were reintroduced in the mountains of NC. When talking to biologist friends, Leslie and James Costa, they shared a photo of an elk in the wild that they recently saw at Purchase Knob in the Great Smoky Mountains. This photo convinced me that Chas, Sara and their team did their homework to produce a replica of a wild elk.

Over our pre-Christmas dinner with Chas, I asked him how he felt about the elk. He said, "It was one of the most challenging things I ever created, but also one of the most fulfilling."

Chas is never "center stage", but likes for people to wander off the beaten path and find something magical. He said, "While I am on the set at the Arboretum, I enjoy watching children peek inside the window checking it out and then watching their jaws drop with delight when the elk begins to move. I like that the elk catches the audience by surprise."

Chas will spend this Christmas in Bangladesh with Katerina. While he will not be with us when we open stockings by the fire, our memories of his Christmas creation will still light up our holiday. His inventive spirit dazzles us with the unexpected, and reminds us of our great fortune to be his parents.

I hope readers enjoyed my story and that my holiday memories trigger your own, bringing you comfort and joy.

Credits and links:

NC Arboretum Winter Lights and Elk photos taken by Deborah Llewellyn and Chas Llewellyn

Computerized models of the church and the elk developed and photographed by Chas Llewellyn

Ukrainian historic wooden churches https://ukrainetrek.com/blog/architecture/church-of-the-holy-spirit-in-the-village-of-huklyvyi

NC Arboretum Winter Lights Festival https://www.ncarboretum.org/winter-lights/