After the success of last year’s Portal Christmas Tree, which was originally inspired by Ryan Kelly’s original tree on io9.com, I needed to one-up myself this year. And as luck would have it, one of my best friends just happened to move into the place directly below mine this year, so we had the perfect set-up for a one-of-a-kind CO-OP Portal Christmas tree setup.
Using two different coloured trees that were decorated and lit very differently, we were able to create the illusion that my tree was sticking out of the ceiling in my friends apartment below me, while their tree was sticking out of our ceiling. We constructed the trees using the exact same method as described in my how-to guide, simply swapping the tops of the trees for each apartment.
Now, I’m sure someone is going to say something about the colours of the two sets of portals. I know that, in CO-OP one player gets the blue and orange pair of portals while the other gets red and purple pair. Unfortunately, I couldn’t actually find any purple LED rope lights in the limited time we had. Although if we had more time we could have wrapped some red tissue paper around the blue rope lights to create a purple glow.
To create the illusion of my friend Darryl reaching through the portal, we used a fake severed arm from halloween. We cut off part of the sleeve of an old shirt and attached it to the ceiling, and then tightened the cuff to hold the hand in place.
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