Prospect, the film I worked on last year building and finishing props and sets, premiered nationwide this weekend and is now even available to pre-order on Blu-ray or on iTunes! With that, I’ve been given the okay to do a handful of behind-the-scenes posts about a couple of the things I made for the movie. I’m only going to share some of my photos of items that appeared in the trailer for now because I don’t want to spoil anything!
Cee’s Helmet was made by someone else, but it was my job to do some of the final finishing on the helmet to meet the director’s aesthetic. When I got the helmet, there were a lot of shiny “metal” parts that looked out-of-place in our far future, gritty frontier, and I was tasked to make them look more matte black and beat up. I relied on my trusty old friend, Plasti-Dip!
After masking everything off, I coated the metal looking parts in Plasti-Dip then careful scraped edges and bits to reveal the original metallic paint for scuffing and wear and tear.
I also added these cool screw heads onto the helmet so these pieces didn’t just look stuck on to the face plates.
Because these were hero helmets that would be worn a lot, the face shields were actually made in triplicate. This allowed for cleaning and easy swapping between takes and as emergency backups. However, for the sake of continuity, all the weathering had to match. It was a lot of fun ensuring that all three had identical wear and tear and dirt.
The final element of the helmets were lights. Almost all of the helmets in the film had removable flashlights/headlamps, and I was tasked with finishing and figuring out how to attach them. Cee, Damon, and Ezra all had this same style of light. For both Cee and Damon’s helmets they attached via magnet. Ezra’s helmet was a bit more difficult and I ended up making a custom clip for it to slide onto the frame of his facemask while looking like it wasn’t clipped on. (Sorry I didn’t manage to get a photo of that). As far as techniques go, I used one of my favorite for scratched, painted metal – make it as real as possible! Instead of painting silver/metallic over the paint where I wanted chipping, I actually painted the entire thing with metallic paint first, then the outside layers of paint, then very carefully scratched and chipped off paint where I wanted wear and tear. It gives a lot more realistic chipping and wear in my opinion. The dirt and grime are just a variety of acrylic paints.
Leave a Reply