The Electric State
The Electric State - Netflix, March 2025
A big thank you to Doug Madison for bringing us on to fabricate several hero and stunt weapons for the film. These props were designed and fabricated while at Blue Whale Studios.
The most notable prop that shows up in the hands of Ke Huy Quan and Chris Pratt’s character was the Amhearst Rifle. From the well thought out concept art provided, the weapon was designed as a rail gun that fired explosive discs. This made for some fun fabrication mods as we worked through how this gun would actually function in the real world.
The original paint scheme gave off distinct “District 9” vibes and was a bit too similar to the guns of the enemy droids so a quick reshoot in black and silver made this prop stand out as a unique item.
While it unfortunately didn’t get any screen time, the ammo packs were fully modular and could be hot-swapped in and out of the frame as needed for reloading. With each disc being its own multi-piece assembly we opted to gang mold the lot and resin cast the pieces by the dozen.
Prop Master - Doug Madison
Amhearst Rifle
The Marshall’s Pistol
For the Marshall, played by Giancarlo Esposito, his original weapon was conceptualized as a retro-futurism colt revolver. I was given a long runway and a solid budget to develop this build so we pulled out all the stops. We added milled hardwood grips, polished brass pin inlays, black button-head hardware, and an LED lit magnetic cylinder that allowed for quick ammo swaps. Hidden in the lower receiver of the revolver was a microcontroller that handled several color and animation styles for the barrel flash. Running along the upper and lower barrel are two strips of high density addressable LEDs that allowed us to program some really fun chase sequences when the trigger was pulled.
Color me surprised when I watched the film and the Marshall turned out to be a fully CGI character! Not only was this prop not used, but the design of the weapon was changed to that of a generic, “shoots red lightning”, sci-fi pistol. Rarely does any prop make it all the way through filming without at least a few changes, but for the time and budget spent on several sets of these revolvers (and their stunt rubbers!) I’m sorely disappointed that they didn’t get any screentime. Regardless of how things ended up on the cutting room floor I’m super proud of this piece and I picked up a few new fabrication tricks in the process that will absolutely show up in some future build.
An initial concept for the revolver was to have the shells individually loadable into cylinder, which would then be clicked into the gun. This idea got scrapped early on but the challenge of making a modular, light-up prop the size of a .22 caliber shell really sunk it’s hooks into me. I’d never fabricated an LED element that small but with a few rounds of printing and tweaking, we had a viable prototype. The latching toggle switch for the circuit is built into the bullet head and is activated by pinching the housing together. While the LED housed where primer cap should be is just a bit bigger than a grain of sand, it throws an incredible amount of light and I could not be happier with the results. Here’s to another tool going into the toolbox for later use.
