School Blog: Production: Building the sets

Production begins and I am now building the sets. I'll have three sets: Main space ship, capsule, and cockpit. I never built a spaceship before so hopefully this turns out well!

I will be using soda cans and aluminum bottles as my main base for my space ships, since they are light and round. (Yes, I fetched these out of the trash. Don't worry I cleaned them)

I will also being using watercolor paper to wrap around the cans to make it easier to paint and color and give it the sleek designs of actual space ships. Water color is a bit thicker than ordinary paper, so it should not easily crumple or leave any dents.

For the main space ship, I taped electrical tape around it since electrical tape looks cleaner than just using black paint.

For the rocket caps at the bottom, I used black bottle caps and glued them to a piece of cardboard before gluing them under the main shaft of the rocket.

Then I painted two bottle caps grey and glued it onto the top of the rocket. This'll be the scaled down version of the capsule.

For the capsule, I taped two soda cans together before gluing it onto a bowl. I used more cardboard to make it thicker and give it a proper shape.

I used blue paper tape since paint will better attach to it than ordinary office or duct tape. I then used electrical tape to cover any crevices which might make it harder to paint (Leaving any holes while taping will lead to the area under it unpainted, and lead to further careful painting afterwards).

Then comes the most fun part: painting.

I used a metallic gunmetal grey paint, similar to the color of stainless steel. And for the names Pioneer and Hammer, I simply used red and orange paint.

I originally was not going to put the name of the ship on the capsule, but I was inspired by the Japanese robot Mechagodzilla. I thought it was cool how it had its title imprinted in bright color on its arm.

(Reference)

For the cockpit, I simply took apart a box, cut out two trapezoids for the windows, painted it grey, then added a small piece of cardboard as the main control panel. For the windows I simply taped transparent plastic in them. To cover the cardboard holes in the windows, I used paper tape to cover it up before painting over them (Still pretty visible but in low lighting it should be unnoticeable).