Island John Lewis Spaceships

Our long-term friends at Island Marketing asked us to help make the 2 spaceships for a John Lewis Christmas advertising promotion. Both were to be placed in two locations simultaneously, at Observation Point on the River Thames, London and at Northumberland Street, Newcastle-Upon-Tyne. As with most of the prop making projects we take on, there was very little time to make these, but we like a challenge at Spur. We began by making the metal framework and then clad this with MDF. The exhausts were sculpted and moulded and cast in fibreglass. We had to make polystyrene sculpted floor tiles that matched the flooring of the two locations the spaceships were to be placed, which wasn't the easiest of tasks as we only had photo's to go from, but we managed to get a really good match and once scenically painted, they looked almost identical and indistinguishable from the actual flooring once they were dressed on site, being seamlessly blended into their surroundings. The dressing was done by Island Marketing who installed both spaceships in the dead of night so that shoppers would stumble across the 'crashed' spaceships on their way to work the next day. We’d made the spaceships in sections so that they could be transported and placed into position easily. The lighting and smoke effects were also created by Island along with a crashed into bench for the London install and a collapsed lamppost for Newcastle, which had a very specific look and required 3-D printed elements and CNC cut parts to match the existing lampposts exactly.