Ready to Drop

So the HALO short film I made all those props and costumes for last summer is finally going to be released online.  

Tomorrow!

Check it out at helljumper.com.

HALO: Helljumper Update

Those of you following along at home will remember that a while back I was asked to make some props and costumes for a fan-made HALO short film titled HALO: Helljumper.


The other day, they released a new poster:



More impressive, they've also finally released a full theatrical trailer:



I was pretty excited to see the finished product before. Now I'm on the edge of my seat. The pilot is scheduled to drop in January of next year. Meanwhile, I'm just tickled to see my name in the credits and on the poster. You can follow the production on their website or on facebook.

First Teaser for HALO: Helljumper

The whole entire short film is supposed to be finished in January. For now, they've released a brief teaser.

Very brief:

Enough said.

Building Spike Grenades from HALO 3

I've made oodles and gobs of UNSC weapons from HALO3.  So when Dan Wang, director of the upcoming HALO fan film Helljumper, put it to me to make some the Brute spike grenades I thought, "why not?"  For those of you who don't play video games, here's what this particular device looks like in the game:

According to the references I've found, this thing is supposed to be 36 inches long.  To me, that seems a bit on the ridiculous side.  There's an image from halo.bungie.org that gives you a bit of an idea of approximately how ridiculous it is.

With that in mind, I cobbled together a mockup to help me figure out what would look and feel big without making me look like an infant playing with grandpa's collection of antique German potato masher grenades.  Here's what I came up with.

Since the mock-up looked slightly less than screen accurate, I scribbled down some measurements, chopped up an old fencepost, and started turning down a prototype on the lathe:

After about an hour, it looked like so:

I was working with a really crappy piece of wood with lots of knots and splits, so this is what the good side looked like:

The next step was to seal up the surface and coat it so I could get a smoother surface.  I used Bondo:

Here I am smoothing out the bondo with some 100-grit sandpaper:

This is about the time I noticed that I still had a big chunk of rotten fencepost left over and I was mostly just using one hand to work on the spike grenade prototype.  This left my other hand to start work on the main body of a frag grenade as well:

With a bit more work and some hammered-finish paint, here's what I had:

I textured the top too:

Same process for butt end of grip:

The spikes were cut from scraps of plastic sheet I had laying around:

Once they were cut out, I went ahead and beveled the edges to make them look sharp.  In the process I covered myself and everything around me with white plastic dust:

Each spike grenade has 20 different spikes. They are four different shapes (one is used twice), so I only would've made one of each if I had time to kill. Unfortunately, I was in a rush. So instead of molding four sets of five blades for each grenade, I decided on one big box mold to make the blades 20 at a time. Here's all of the blades lined up and prepped for molding:

After I'd built molds and poured the first casting in foam, here's what it looked like:

The head and butt ends were cast in a fairy dense flexfoam.  This way, the grenade can take a bit of abuse without being destroyed.  I planned to make the blades out of foam too, but they just looked too floppy that way.  The next best thing was to make them out of rigid resin and hope the foam they were attached to would flex enough to bounce.

I used 1" PVC conduit for the shafts.  To bond everything together, I place the conduit into the mold for the head as the foam is curing, then flip it and put the other end into the mold for the butt end.  When the foam for the second end cured, all that was left was to glue on the spikes, paint and weather the whole thing, then wrap the shaft with some dark brown upholstery vinyl.

Here's one of them all painted up:

Here's the first pair all together:

Success!

The frag grenades came out pretty good too:

Sooner or later I'll find someone who can juggle these so I can shoot some video.

Stay tuned...

HALO: Helljumper

A while back I was contacted by an aspiring film maker in New York who was looking to start work on a HALO short film.  Here's a promo poster he's been posting around NYC for the casting call:

You can read more about the project in the blog: http://blog.helljumper.com/  He'd heard somewhere that I could make prop and costume items and contacted me about building a few things for the project.  So I'm mentioned as the guy that's making the Marine armor and helmets as well as some of the weapons.  

The other two guys mentioned as making props and costumes are the very talented Sean Bradley and the equally skilled Lee Calhoun. They're both great guys and I actually own some of their work as well.

What I'm really looking forward to is some of the test footage showing off people actually wearing my stuff.  For now I have to be satisfied with his pitch video:

While they're rounding up funding I'm doing all sorts of things, such as putting the finishing touches on this beauty:


I'm pretty proud of this particular sniper rifle.  I'll be sad to see it go.

Check out the Helljumper blog and stay tuned for more...


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