Joseph Han

Prospect is a film about folks getting by in inhospitable places and situations. I was invited to join in to conceptualize, design, and fabricate an arsenal of space guns and props.

We built a great little shop in Seattle, in an old boat building shop. We filled it with a bunch of creative professionals, a strategic selection of tools, and launched into an effort to render our vision of the Prospect Universe into a world for the actors to inhabit and interact with.

A great deal of the fun of this project was coming up with how the Throwers (space guns) “worked”. In a nutshell - A magazine of hyper-capacitors power two mechanisms. The first is a dirty version of electrical discharge machining meant to blast off atomic debris from mass of ammunition. The second is a set of particle accelerating rails, configured to form a barrel down which the particulate ammunition is flung at great velocities.

There’s a story behind the technological and manufacturing paradigms in the universe that drives the form of the “functional” components of each weapon. There’s a logic behind capacitor capacities, the number of rails, and the type of ammo stock in each weapon. The rest of each weapon’s design was derived from its character’s personality. It was a great place to play.

Now available on Blu-ray, iTunes, and Hulu. Prospect debuted at SXSW in 2018 and received the Adam Yauch Hörnblowér Award.

Prospect the Film

Evidently, folks die every year participating in races like the Baja 1000. Having lost a friend to one such event, a group of riders and engineers sought to put a device on every race vehicle that would alert teams and emergency response teams whenever someone went down in the desert expanses between the start and finish lines. 

This prototype enclosure housed an array of radios and signal broadcasters, a buzzer, an LED strip, a battery, a smartphone, some buttons, and a maintenance port.

This was printed in a high impact ABS to be mounted onto a KTM, and tested through a Baja 500 race. A hopeful application of technologies as a buffer between an accident and a fatal accident. 

Near the end of my time at Geek Chic I designed and fabricated the board-game focused successor to the "Vizier" model. I built one prototype for the shop, and one bespoke configuration for a client, seen here.  

I got to implement a lot of clever little ideas that I 'd been hoarding over the years in these tables. I'm very fond of several little details, particular the hidden stacking dice caddies and dice randomizers

A slab table I made from the off-cuts left over from lumber being processed into stock.  Sugar Maple and Cherry top with a Walnut base.

Here I was able to play with form and function within a loosely defined sandbox. Where Geek Chic's Sultan catered to mini-figure war-gaming and long term D&D campaigns, the goal here was a new flagship table aimed at the Board-gamer.

Here I've archived the build process, which I thought was just as interesting and beautiful as the completed prototype.  The successes here were rolled over into the Mogul table design which we only produced once for a Bespoke commission ahead of the launch schedule.

The Locus was a showcase for Mesa Mundi's NUIT frames - IR frames that pair with any normal screen to allow for touch interactions. The screen raised up, could hold at any angle, and could travel back away from the player for more of a viewing setup

We took this to PAX East to let the convention attendees freely explore how the NUIT touch controls allowed them to interact with software on-screen.

After seeing the NUIT touchscreen in action, one of our clients wanted the NUIT system integrated into his Vizier table to run various software to modernize how he ran his D&D campaigns.