Tag Archives: replica

Showcases

Dragon makes an Elysium Gun

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“Kill Phil” continues to be an interesting and informative little series over on the YouTube. The premise is simple; take a well-known prop maker and give them 3 days to recreate a prop from a film. In one of the latest episodes, they turn to Dragon Dronet of Renegade Effects, one of the top prop makers of Star Trek: The Next Generation and other sci-fi shows and movies from the 1990s onward. They task him with recreating Matt Damon’s gun from the film Elysium, which hadn’t come out yet when this was filmed.

He slams together this prop by hacking apart several toy guns and a vacuum cleaner, than refining all the details with pieces of styrene, jelutong wood and Bondo. It is also interesting to see that he works with little more than a band saw, belt and disc sander, Dremel and a drill gun.

On an unfortunate note, he does all this without any protective gear. You see him using Bondo and Zip Kicker without a respirator, sanding and cutting without a dust mask, and applying Bondo without gloves (even using his hands to smear it on!). With that in mind, watch the video for the techniques, but don’t forget about the safety.

Useful Sites

Friday Links

Only 11 more days to enter the world’s greatest Prop Building Guidebook Contest! Don’t wait until the last minute! More importantly, starting this Monday (April 22), your friends, family and colleagues can vote for your entry. The prop with the most votes on April 30th will win $100 worth of Focal Press books. You can vote once a day, so be sure your friends know to vote early, and vote often. Now, onto the links:

Harrison Krix (of Volpin Props fame) has an article up at Tested.Com detailing the making of a mask from the video game Bioshock. It’s a great example of using “slices” to help make a precise carving, and the cracked paint treatment is an interesting technique as well.

Another replica prop maker, Bill Doran (of Punished Props fame) is doing a live Google Hangout tomorrow (Saturday, April 23rd, at 3:00pm EST) where he answers your prop-making questions. With a Google Hangout, you can watch live from your computer as it happens. You can also participate if you have a webcam and questions (Bill gives you the details in the post I linked to). Finally, the whole thing is recorded, so you can watch the whole thing on YouTube after it finishes (I’ll post the link in the comments once it goes up).

Here is a blog of random medieval imagery, mostly taken from manuscripts.

Awake the Trumpet’s Lofty Sound, ca 1283-1300 BCE
Awake the Trumpet’s Lofty Sound, ca 1283-1300 BCE

Finally, Chris Schwartz ruminates on technical perfection when building something, and whether it is necessary.

 

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A Friday of Links

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This photograph of a country store from 1939 has all sorts of amazing things going on in it. I could look at it for hours. The whole website it comes from, Shorpy Historical Photo Archive, is a treasure trove of imagery like this one, and all of them can be viewed at incredibly large sizes so you can spot every little detail.

At the other end of history are Trevor Traynor’s photographs of contemporary New York City newsstands.

This short blog post up at Popular Woodworking taught me some interesting things about how British table saws are different from American ones, particularly in the safety features. I think the fence that stops at the blade is an interesting concept, and would love to try it out.

Have you heard about this? A team of people out in Tennessee are building a full-scale replica of the Millennium Falcon from Star Wars. That’s a 114 foot long spaceship for those who don’t know. What’s great is that if you look back through the blog, you can see that work began on this over six years ago, and now there is some hard-core construction going on nearly every single day. It looks fairly certain that they can pull this whole thing off.

I tweeted this earlier in the week, but if you missed it, NPR had a great story about faux food artisan Sandy Levins, who recreates historical dishes for display at George Washington’s Mount Vernon estate, New York’s Lower East Side Tenement Museum, and many other museums and historical sites.

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Link-o-Rama

Make Magazine has a great slideshow on “Ten Tips for Drilling Better Holes“. It is a good reminder that even seemingly simple tasks can have a lot of considerations in achieving a good result. While I would not take anything off the list they present, I would add one: be sure the drill bit will not hit your hand as it exits the other side of the material (or if it slips off).

I saw this over at La Bricoleuse and had to share: it’s a Rit Dye color chart. Choose the color you want, and it will tell you which Rit dye or combination of dyes will give you that color. Now, a lot of other factors go into achieving certain colors on particular fabrics, and Rit is not the best dye for all types of fabrics, but it is readily available at most local stores and easy to work with in a pinch, and this chart is a good starting point for many colors.

I just stumbled on a cool blog called the “Creaturiste’s Labatory”. He has a post on oil clay vs water clay in terms of sculpting, though many of the other posts are useful and interesting as well.

This is pretty cool: The official licensed replicas of props from Doctor Who are being manufactured by the same prop maker who builds them for the show.

Finally, here is a very cool video of Tony Swatton forging one of the swords from the series Game of Thrones. He has a number of videos showing the making of other weapons as well. It’s amazing to see the mix of tools and techniques he uses for hand-forging custom weapons at the pace which the entertainment industry requires. Though he mainly does film, TV and theme parks, I’ve heard his name mentioned in theatrical circles as well.

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Friday Prop Notes

I just finished tech on my first show this year (with opening night tonight), so the links are a bit sparse this week. But all of them are great, so enjoy!

There is a fun article up this week about Jim Bussolati, prop master at Louisiana State University. It also has a wonderful video showing off their storage and shop.

Matt Munson has a great blog post up called Materials, Time and Creativity. He talks about why custom-made props cost so much money. It’s a worthwhile read, whether you are a freelancer or work in a shop.

2StoryProps has quite the extensive post up about building a “Deadmau5 Cheese Head” (a helmet used by a Canadian DJ). There are photographs and videos galore, so it will take some time to get through this one, but it is well worth it.

It is sad, but not too surprising: New York City Opera is liquidating their warehouses. Their collection of props, costumes, lighting and other equipment from over eighty productions are being sold through an online auction until January 30th (though the website isn’t quite ready yet).