Prospect, the film we worked on in 2017 building and finishing props and sets, is now out on Netflix in the US! Prospect is a sci-fi western full of practical effects starring Pedro Pascal in a helmet. It is also available on Blu-ray if you want a physical copy! This 8-part series of posts does not contain any spoilers so you can check them all out without fear of ruining anything if you haven’t seen the film yet!
The first charger I built was a hand crank portable charger for Damon’s thrower. This thrower uses small ammo cartridges that can be recharged with kinetic energy. As a starting point, I used a plastic housing from our junk bin and found a piece of old electronics that had a burned out motor on it. The motor isn’t functional but I liked it to give the charger weight and to make the cranking mechanism have some realism to it because of the resistance. I glued it into my box and then sealed up the sides.
I then cut and drilled out a piece of scrap aluminum for the handle shaft. (You’ll see where that scrap aluminum came from in a later post!)
I attached a few other assorted connectors from our greeble bins, made the handle out of EVA foam, painted it to match the thrower case (which you’ll see in Part Six of this series), and then cut three clip channels out of EVA foam for the top (this was with everything done except for sealing and painting the EVA foam – unfortunately I don’t have a photo of the final look – but you can see it in the movie!) You can also get a good look at what the ammo clips looked like. You don’t get to see them close up in the movie but all of the weapons that had ammo (ballistic or energy) had multiple clips that were interchangeable.
The second charger I made was a larger, external, more universal charger. The box as made from some pieces of scrap sheet metal and some pieces of MDF I cut down from scraps. On the top of the box are the ammo ports – The first 3 rows are for ammo clips we designed, 3D modeled, and I printed on my printer at home (we didn’t have one in the shop). The back ports are for several tube style ammo we had on some of the weapons. I ripped all of those off of some old circuit boards we had (there were a ton of different sizes but these happened to match up in size to the ammo we’d already created).
Because this charger box was meant to be rugged for camp/travel use, I dirtied it up real good. I made sure to get a few splatters as if it had been dropped down into some mud too. You can also see how one of the sample clips slides into the front charging ports.
Once it was all done, the director needed it to be less blue. I made a light wash with some acryclics and went over the entire thing to change the hue without having to repaint anything else. It changed the color enough without really impacting the weathering.
I then connected a giant, long cable to it and on set, it was plugged into the merc’s ship. This is a photo I took of it on set, its much harder to find in the film but you CAN see it if you are looking. Have a fun game of Where’s Waldo with the chargers!
The Prospect Collector’s Pack, available in limited quantities, includes, along with a bunch of other cool stuff, a really cool knolling poster of a bunch of props from the movie, including the large ammo charger!
We hope you enjoyed Part Five of our Prospect behind the scenes series. We’ll be posting a new behind the scenes build every day. In the meantime, go watch Prospect!
If you’d like to help us continue making great stuff and content, you can support us by donating via our ko-fi or by shopping on our Amazon page where we list all of our favorite and most used tools and supplies! And as always, we are available to do set, prop, and costume design & fabrication.
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