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!
This is the Boscelot Frontiersman page from the Green Moon Guide, now available as part of the Prospect Collector’s Pack. The collector pack also includes a really cool knolling poster of a bunch of props from the movie, including the thrower! This page in the guide is all about all about Damon’s thrower and features the case I made for it. This is the same thrower that we mentioned the ammo charger for previously (you can see the ammo clip in most of the images in this post).
To start out I gathered up all of the available thrower pieces (I had to work in parallel with the weaponsmith so I had to guesstimate on a few pieces) and figured out a good layout for them inside the case and to get an idea of the overall size of the case. I traced everything out onto the butcher paper to get a template for my foam. Unfortunately, I don’t have photos of the next steps, but with the overall size and layout planned, I cut out the base of the case from foam board. I scored it and made it so it would lay flat and fold up to the dimensions needed.
I then covered the entire foam core box by laminating some extra fabric to it that the wardrobe department had laying about that was almost the same as the fabric on the thrower. Using the paper template, I hand cut out the insert from EVA foam using the same technique mentioned on the Aurelac Case – scoring the foam where I wanted cut outs then heating it to make them pop and get a crisp line. What made this trickier is that not all of the pieces are the same thickness but we wanted everything laying flat. You can’t really tell in this photo, but all of the pieces are indented to different levels. To accomplish that I cut all of the pieces out all the way through and then glued the cutouts back in at the right depth before trimming the excess off of the back. A thin, flat piece of EVA foam was glued into the lid to help protect the thrower once in the case. And lastly, I added a strap into the lid to hold the manual because of course the team created a full manual for our fake space gun 
Yes, even in the distant future, branding is important! I needed to add a little holder to the outside for the tag the graphic folks had designed. I used some scrap fabric and a piece of clear vinyl to make a luggage tag-like holder.
Although I had embedded magnets in the case flaps, we were worried about the contents being too heavy and the case accidentally flopping open and spilling stuff during shooting so I added two straps using the same fabric as the case and the same snaps that were used on the thrower itself to tie the two together more. The fabric I used for the case didn’t exactly match the color of the fabric that had been used on the thrower itself, but we wanted it to, so I lightly sprayed the fabric with 2 different Montana Gold spray paints to get the color just right (I really enjoy two-handed real-time mixing of rattle can paints). Then I grimed it up with some charcoal and colored chalk dust (one of my favorite weathering techniques especially on porous/textured fabric).
Once the case was complete, I loaded it up with the (almost) complete thrower parts. Everything fit perfectly!
And lastly, here is a photo of the case fully loaded with the hero prop taken on set (which you may have noticed is the same photo used in the Green Moon Manual).
We hope you enjoyed Part Six 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.
