Kitchen Costuming

Earlier this year, I had the opportunity to help on a web series project with former Star Trek VFX supervisor, David Stipes. Local filmmaker, Nathan Blackwell, has been making short films for some time and has recently been showcasing his two new web series on the internet. For this project on “Normally This Weird”, David and I needed to build a death ray prop and help David’s son create a time machine from a derelict old sports car. I am going to focus on the time machine for this post, but to see the making of the death ray for the series “Normally This Weird”, see David’s blog at http://davidstipes.com/blog/?p=556.

Three days before the shoot, I was sent on location to view our prospective time machine. A grimy, un-restored Austin Healey Sprite needed to be rolled out of the garage, hosed off, and cleaned out before we could even begin to figure out what we were going to do with it.

After clean-up, the ideas began to flow…

David had a lot of ideas, but since we had a limited budget, whatever we could recycle was what we used. As with the death ray, we scavenged the trash bin for parts looking for interesting shapes and sizes. Small plastic bowls were sprayed with glass frost paint (a tip from my son, Todd) to cover holes in the dashboard. Lights were then hidden behind the dash.

I was busy covering the bare console with fun foam and distressing any “metal” pieces to look old. Sitting on hard concrete and bending over for hours can kill your back. OMG! I just had to rest for a minute! The pipes were now ready and glued in with hot glue making everything easily removable later.

Quarter-inch foam core board was painted and added to the roll bar along with anything else we could find that looked interesting. A spiral disc attached to an invisible hand crank gave the appearance when it turned that the car was going back in time.

David wanted to keep the continuity between the death ray and the time machine by creating parts to be swapped out. The night before the shoot, David and his son, Nathan, created a generator looking piece complete with lighting to fill the empty passenger side of the car. The duel canisters from the death ray would be placed on top of this when the scenes using the ray gun were completed. Unfortunately, the shooting schedule was such that these were never used in the actual scenes of the time machine.

The web series “Normally This Weird” is scheduled to resume airing in October. It will be exciting to see how Nathan Blackwell creates his magic on these shots. Until then, the first two episodes are up at http://www.normallythisweird.com/