WE BUILT OUR GAME’S SPACE STATION IN MY GARAGE FOR A LIVE ACTION TRAILER

THE IDEA

I don’t think a lot of people believed I was serious when I said I wanted to build a space station in my garage. But deep down I'm just like, nah, I feel it. We goin to space!

Flash forward, I'm in the hardware store with my good friend Kobe and a ton of wood in my cart. As we left the store I just remember thinking, welp… there's no going back now.

MAKING THE STATION

We framed things out and made our own janky system to cut wood. One by one the wall went up:

I painted the frames with spray paint for the first coat, but found a foam roller to be much more effective for that second coat:

I was told by my friend that I needed to weather the wall otherwise it would look terrible under the lights. So I made a black wash and went crazy with it. Here is the before and after… he was def right:

DUMPSTER DIVE

Right outside of where I work they were gutting a building and I was totally ready to dumpster dive. I asked my boss if they had any PVC pipe in there. He said nah, but he was kind enough to give me leftover PVC he had in his barn. I spray painted it metallic, and just like that we had our conduit pipe. Thank you Andrew!

WE HAVE A DEAL

Many months ago I built my friend James a website for his film company. As a trade deal, he offered to help me film our journey to space. The guy is an absolute beast with a camera. Huge shoutout to him, and Kobe for all the film magic that made this possible.

THE SPACE SUIT

I couldn't find any helmets that matched the Devoid vibe so I turned to cosplay. When doing research people were sayin you gotta get a resperator… I'm just like uhhh what am I getting into?! Basically the glue and such can be toxic. So yeah I picked that up. Got some EVA foam and put this together:

DOLLAR GENERAL, MY SAVIOUR

The helmets were looking good, but there was still one major issue. The visor. I searched far and wide for a material that the pilots can look through, but outsiders can’t. Not being able to see faces was important to me because I want you to be able to imagine yourself as the pilot out there.

And I tried a ton of stuff. Even a shower curtain.

With 24hrs till launch day, I was stressin. I had nothing. You could see the face right through the gels I bought.

As a last ditch effort I scavenged the halls of our local Dollar General in the middle of nowhere for anything. My town has a population of like 2,000. The store is small. And hope was dwindling.

Then I saw it. Frosty binder dividers tucked away on the bottom shelf. I was hyped. I left that Dollar General feeling like a million dollars!

The helmets were retried shortly after the shoot because they started to fall apart. But those cheap binder dividers got us through our mission.

SKI MASKS IN THE SUMMER

I don’t know how the cashier at my local hardware store kept a straight face as I bought 4 black ski masks… IN THE MIDDLE OF SUMMER. Like, don't worry I'm not robbing anyone haha. I still can't believe they had that in stock. That was also a day before thing I picked up. I didn't want the pilots' showing through the space suit.

THE CREW

After putting out a blast on social media, and asking some friends I found 3 brave individuals who were willing to fly with me. Thank you to Jolie, Nabil, and Paul for suiting up and entering the space dungeon. Thank you to Keaton for joining mission control to capture the moment. And thank you to Northtribe for letting us use one of your legendary tracker tracks!

MISSION ACCOMPLISHED

So yeah, that's the story of how we built a space station in my garage. If you haven't already watched the trailer, I'll drop it below:

Until next time,

-Charlie Dill