Because easy options were left at the door a long time ago.
Common wisdom would probably dictate that if you’re low on time and cash you should take every shortcut possible to get the props you need for your film: buy, borrow or glue together some random crap off the shelf and call it a day. It’s a reasonable thought and I would agree. And then disagree.
I almost did exactly that back when I was researching options for the guns needed for the story. I bought a pair of nerf guns and spray painted them black and thought that it would be enough and I would move onto the next thing. Except that I felt bad about this decision. I felt that I had betrayed the story that I had worked so hard to get right by using some generic sci-fi guns. Think of it this way: you spend a year writing, couple of years getting the stuff built and the film shot and then you screen it and someone makes a comment “hey those are nerf guns there!”. No way!
So I ended up starting to build a custom gun about (which will have it’s own post later) and the process of building the gun either A) opened up new world of opportunities or B) created many more problems depending on your general view on things. Now that I had set the visual language with the gun, then EVERYTHING should follow that same example so that things would blend into a believable world.
Work in progress with the gun
Last weekend I was supposed to work on the creature effects but found out at the workshop that I had left some parts and tools back at home in Helsinki. The downside of having a fully equipped workshop in the countryside is that it is 2h drive away. So, in order to not waste an entire weekend I picked up a small prop from my todo-list and started working on it. The original thought for that had been to just use some existing pieces and put it together as quick as possible. But by accident I had the whole weekend just for this and it was such a lucky break. While working on it I realised (or remembered, downside of a stretched production is that one tends to lose sight of the big picture and forget details) that this prop is one of the first ones that we will see in the beginning of the film and it is also very integral to one of the central concepts in the story. So I should take this chance to make this particular thing as interesting and exciting as I could. Doing otherwise would be missing an opportunity.
In the end it took the whole weekend to get the basic object right and I still need to find time to install couple of missing things and add finishing layers to polish it up. First, I built a version based on my original sketch that I had drawn back in the summer. The object is supposed to be an instrument that can be hooked into a portable computer/tablet to inspect certain creatures/objects that inhabit the world of the film. It has some steel rods, a knob for fine tuning the parameters and a cable for connecting to the computer which will be an iPad with a custom app.
Original concept sketch
The first version did not somehow feel right. I made it with three rods and that just felt too much. To find out the right configuration I did a couple of variations, got feedback from my brother and also shot couple of short clips with iPhone to test how each of them would register on screen.
Too much. Too little. Perfect!
Now that I had figured out the right amount of rods/spikes, I was ready to build the final piece. The handle now had three holes in it thus making it unusable so I had to build another one from scratch. I then found a beautiful piece of pine from the shelf to use as building material that had much more beautiful texture than the one I used for the prototype, another detail that I had overlooked. Then I worked to make the spikes more irregular and thinner to amp up the look.
And here we are now as of this writing.
Final version!
I need to work on it still but so far I’m pretty happy with it. It looks weird and foreign and interesting and I’m pretty sure that using anything off-the-shelf would not have achieved this. Thankfully I had the time to basically build this two times, first the prototype and then the final version based on the learnings of the prototype.
Building the custom props is a lot of extra work and trouble but it also gives certain feeling that no matter what happens with the film it at least wont look generic. Another good thing has been that it allows me to spend some extra time ruminating on the concepts of the film and the purpose each prop serves and that can sometimes spark ideas that end up nice tweaks in the screenplay adding some little spice that would have otherwise been left unexplored.