Another one of my projects from Sheridan. The objective: a 2D paper prop that tells a story of some kind.
Now, what is a 2D prop? Coming up with a specific definition of 2D props is like coming up with a specific definition of ‘furniture’. It’s… anything flat, usually made of paper. Documents, books, folders, branded packaging. But, you see the taxonomic problem here. Because prop food packaging is a 2D prop despite being a very 3D object. Books are also 3D objects that count as 2D props. And a book, well, a journal, was my primary submission for this project.
My professor’s example he showed us was Dr. Henry Jones’ grail diary from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. He won a replica of it in a raffle at the Toronto Prop Expo. It is fully detailed and fully thought out, every page is stuffed with information, and it all comes together to tell a complete story all by itself. Pretty impressive for something that only has a few seconds of screen time on only a few of its pages.
What I ended up doing was not a huge departure from that. Like I think the props team on Last Crusade did with the grail diary, I started with a prop the journal was about, though it was the journal of a very different PhD holder trying to understand a very different object. Mine was inspired by having just finished reading The Martian, and the unhealthy amount of time I wasted playing Kerbal Space Program that summer.
This was the first piece of this project I made. Everything was built off of this plaque.
It is very heavily inspired by the plaques on the Pioneer and Voyager deep space probes, with the clear difference that this was not co-designed by Carl Sagan, or any human for that matter. Like the plaques on those probes, this is a civilization’s attempt at writing a message that says “Hello. This is who we are. this is where we’re from.” I do know what everything on my plaque means, but I also want to leave you, the reader, guessing.
Aside from all the design and decision making, the plaque was fairly simple to put together. Once I had the SVG file, I took it over to my local library makerspace to have it laser cut out of acrylic, which I then spray painted gold. It gets the point across. I did the math, apparently, if this was made of solid gold (as it is diegetically supposed to be) it would weigh about 80 pounds.
But then I asked myself the question: how is this here? If this was on a deep space probe, why is it on the ground? Well, across all of human history, only one vessel was capable of taking satellites from orbit down to the surface…
That’s right! I get to write Space Shuttle fanfic! I did have to fudge its capabilities a little bit, but every contrivance is based on real technology. Preliminary scans showed that the probe would just barely fit in the Shuttle’s payload bay, meaning retrieval from orbit was possible. for inspiration, I had found a flight transcript from Apollo 11 and watched several Space Shuttle launch videos, copying every callout and check made in the pre-flight sequence.
The shuttle was only capable of reaching Low Earth Orbit, and this probe was found captured in a bizarre elliptical orbit, so rather than just rendezvous, the crew had to catch this probe, henceforth called ‘Fermi 1’, in a giant net. I found an article about it from ESA, this is a viable way of catching satellites.
Once it was on terra firma, Fermi 1 was shipped over to the Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena, CA. There, it was handed over to the very capable, and also quite expendable, Andrew Ng, a communications specialist currently working on the Galileo probe.
A fascinating challenge that came with this project was that I had to change my handwriting. I needed to develop a new font for my hand, and make it muscle memory. It took a couple tries, this journal here is my second draft.
It was the job of Ng and his team of interns to dissect and determine the purpose of Fermi 1. This meant I had to design a space probe. Fortunately, another one of my projects this semester was to do some 3D modelling in Fusion. So, I was able to kill two birds with one stone.
I gave Andrew a boom on the probe covered in doodads that were all geared towards the probe’s main purpose: travel to planets in other star systems, assess their habitability, and report back to the homeworld.
Andrew also learns that this probe, if its technology can be reverse-engineered, offers humanity several massive leaps forward in aerospace technology. As I was rushing to get this project done before the deadline, how this story ends became ever more clear. Fermi 1 is powered by a small fusion reactor, and Ng tries to turn it on. The building at JPL that was his workshop is now a crater, and nobody who wasn’t a victim of it knows why.
I had also scripted out a whole scene for my presentation of this project, but there was a faculty strike on that semester and those plans were interrupted. What I was going to do was run into Sheridan’s prop shop with all of this in a dossier, slam it down on my professor’s desk, and say something along the lines of “40 years ago, we discovered an alien deep space probe captured in Earth orbit, and we believe it sent some kind of message to its homeworld before we brought it down. We’ve had radio telescopes listening ever since and we just heard back. They say they’re on their way.“
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