Guardians of the Galaxy: Volume 3
Guardians of the Galaxy, vol 3 - May 5, 2023
In late 2021, while working at Blue Whale Studios, we had the opportunity to work on the third installment of the Guardians of the Galaxy franchise. Most of our contributions were with props and scenic - supporting the art department to fill out a couple key sets.
Thank you Laura Cox for recommending us on this project. It was an absolute pleasure working with you and your team.
Tabletop Grill, Spider Lamps
To fill out the bar on Knowhere we helped build several table-top grills (known as “Space Weber's” in shop) that would make the universe feel more lived in. The art department provided us with a very solid concept and a good number of Mcmaster-Kerr parts as a BOM. I pitched the idea to have an internally lit burner so that the grills could appear to be functioning but these props ended up being a very minor bit of set dressing. I was really hoping for an opening scene with the cast gathered around, grilling weird alien meats on this space bbq but it just wasn’t meant to be.
We needed to build multiple versions of the grill so after rapid prototyping, several large 2-part molds were made to produce fiberglass castings. For that grimy pirate scofflaw feel we applied a bondo stipple to the surface so that it would read as carbon build-up and wear & tear. I particularly enjoyed doing a ‘heat bluing’ treatment to the upper portion of the grill. That was a fun dive into blending Createx candy O2 dyes on a high shine metallic surface.
For the spider lamps, a decorative slip collar and shroud were designed to fit around an off-the-shelf articulated lamp. SLA resin was not quite durable enough for these thin-walled assemblies so we ended up molding and casting the frames in Smooth-cast 65D for impact resistance. The shade was made from a heavy steel mesh and gave the piece a real cyberpunk/industrial feel. Replicate this a dozen times, add a ‘speaker ball’, and you have one seriously cool space chandelier.
Costuming and Specialty fabrication
In addition to the prop and set-dec work, we assisted the costuming department with a few auxiliary pieces. The production crew, tasked with building an incredible number of unique costumes (often times in multiple sizes), brought us in to scan and resize an armor set for the Orgo guards. While the shoulder bells (and belts?) prototypes I modelled made it into the final cut, due to the blistering pace of this shoot the chest armor was ultimately done by the in-house team. At the time we were running a good number of our 3d printed parts on a large format Peopoly Phenom.
We also fabricated the updated logos for the Ravager factions and absolutely had to include a tiny Rocket-Racoon sized badge.
