Eight years ago I thought of one of the only good ideas I’ve ever had: I should make a ship in a bottle depicting the ship from Fitzcarraldo, Werner Herzog’s 1982 film about a deranged but determined opera lover played by Klaus Kinski.

In attempt to raise money to build an opera house in a small Peruvian city, the titular character tries to gain access to an untapped source of rubber trees by dragging his steam ship across land to another portion of the river. The production was fabulously calamitous — there were multiple plane crashes, Mick Jagger shot a whole part and then dropped out, the thousands of native extras were questionably cared for, a guy sawed off his foot when he was bit by a snake, Kinski was a bigtime freako — but the film is best remembered from the scenes depicting the ship being dragged up a hill. Not a model of a ship or anything like that — they just literally did the thing to film it, portaging a massive 320-ton ship across land, uphill, in the jungle.

It’s one of my favorite movies.

I also love ships in bottles. Not specifically the mystery of their construction, but the complexity and tedium required to create that mystery around an object that is completely useless. They’re little works of sculptural art that also perform a magic trick by existing in an impossible space. That being said, just depicting the Fitzcarraldo scene was more important to me than constructing it with any guise of traditional ship-in-a-bottle trickery. I was particularly inspired by this bottle depicting Jaws. A movie! In a bottle! A movie-ship-in-a-bottle!

In 2013 I drew this on a post-it note:

I briefly looked for existing model kits of similar ships but didn’t find anything that would work. So I modelled this ship in Autodesk 123D (a free design app which no longer exists):

Six years later in 2019 I printed the model about three inches long using Shapeways:

There were two factors in deciding that scale: first of all, it needed to fit through the neck of a bottle. And secondly, a smaller print is cheaper (this cost $21.69 and scale increases price exponentially-ish). In 2013 I did toy with the idea of slicing the model so that it would be glued back together inside the bottle, piece by piece, but as I said, performing the traditional construction magic trick wasn’t that important to me.

And I didn’t have a bottle yet anyway. No rush.

This month I happened to have a glass jar from a soy candle that was just about right for this scale. (What’s… the deal... with soy candles? Are normal candles a big problem we need to solve? Are soy candles…. edible?) Jars are obviously less compelling than narrow-necked bottles but it was good for the purpose. A little clay and a bag of miniature trees (insert referral link here) and I had this:

I’m not over the moon with the outcome but I am over the hill. It looks fine; if you know the movie you know what I’m depicting. I don’t plan on working on it anymore unless I happen across a good model kit that compels me enough to increase the scale of the whole thing.

Why did it take eight years? Did my creative vision persevere through years of setbacks? Did I need time to germinate the idea until a plan bloomed? No! It was a low priority and time was abundant.

There are no lessons about stick-with-it-ness here, pal. This isn’t even a pandemic project; I just have the stupidest long-term goals around.

In 2013, I had an idea to make Fitzcarraldo’s ship in a bottle. I had planned to 3D print a model, maybe in modular parts so it could actually fit in a bottle, and designed a fairly simple model of the ship in one of Autodesk’s free apps. Then I got a little busy in the intervening years. I am now less busy.

(Fitzcarraldo, a film by Werner Herzog, follows a fanatic’s dream of funding an opera house in the jungle by harvesting rubber from trees in an untapped territory, but to reach them, he needs to drag a boat across land where two rivers almost meet. Herzog famously filmed the sequence by actually doing what’s depicted: dragging a giant boat up a hill.)

So obviously the bottle would depict that scene, with the boat mid-hill.

I got to thinking about it again, and decided to see what sort of new 3D printing materials Shapeways has added since I last tinkered. They now offer a “fine detail plastic” that’s particularly well-suited for scale models and miniatures.

Another reason I hadn’t done any more work on it in six years ago simply was the price; at the time I uploaded a 6″ version, but printing a nearly banana-sized boat would cost $100 today (and significantly more back then, but I don’t remember how much).

So I tried a 3″ version, and it only cost $21.69 in fine detail plastic. Sure, why not. (Plus shipping and taxes and a expedition fee unless you are very patient, making it thirty something dollars altogether.) That’s where I am now.

I haven’t found the perfect bottle yet. The boat is specifically 2.7″ and .99″ tall at its highest point, the smokestack thing. I’m thinking about something like this:

That’s about 3″ long; it would be a pretty tight fit if I want a substantial hill in there. A little bigger and I might be able to fit some little trees in there too. And the wide neck is essential, since I’m not actually bothering to assemble the boat in the bottle. More of a ship in a jar.

So now I’m just thinking about jars, looking at jars. I can go ahead and paint the ship (although the translucent plastic is itself fascinating, maybe good for a ghost ship).

But I’m in no rush, so it might be another six years before I stick a cork in this idea.

Adam Savage occasionally mentions what he calls “everyday cosplay,” a casual use of movie-related clothing in everyday life. Sometimes he wears replicas of Captain America’s gloves, for example, as just normal gloves. Sometimes he wears NASA jackets. And of course Savage often wears a wide-brimmed hat, no doubt influenced by Indiana Jones. I have my own bit of Dr. Jones kit that I use almost every day: the bag.

Jones wears it in all the movies (somewhat curiously under his jacket; I guess that keeps it from swinging around too much while he’s doing all that adventuring). It’s probably most clearly seen and utilized in The Temple of Doom when he’s carrying the Sankara stones and they burn through the bag. You might call it a satchel bag or side bag or whatever, but it’s actually a specific, unique thing: a British World War II gas mask bag called a Mark VII. If you google it you can find dozens of places to buy various reproductions, as Indy is a pretty easy and popular costume to put together. I got one from Todd’s Costumes. (It’s not a vintage bag from the war, but an accurate recreation of one.)

Is a gas mask bag really the best option to carry around my bits of daily junk? Not really. There are a few odd quirks in its interior design, being that it’s literally for gas masks. There are odd metal gaskets at the bottom for ventilation (though useful for a wet umbrella!), and a few bits and bobs of ambiguous metal and string.

I had to modify the interior a little bit to make it actually usable; the interior was separated into two horizontal pockets–obviously for whatever mask device it was designed for–so I cut the bifurcating flap of material to create a single, open space. It also has a couple of little other pockets that can hold earphones or a pen. Otherwise it’s just a small tote bag. But it looks cool. It’s too small for something like a laptop or even a full-sized magazine. But it looks cool. It can hold a book! You bet I toss a Chipotle burrito in there like it’s an ancient fertility idol.

At first I used a strap from another bag I own–a vintage Soviet map case that I happen to have–but I didn’t have an elegant way to attach it so I eventually bought the leather strap from Todd’s Costumes as well. But! The leather was bright and clean and new when it arrived; of course it was new, but I didn’t want something that looked brand new. So I flexed around to loosen the rigidity of the leather, roughed it up with sand paper a little bit, and stained it a darker brown color that seemed truer to the movie, or at least more like a vintage object. And it’s corny, but I like that it’s unique that way; my stupid Indiana Jones gas mask bag is now one of a kind, and looks the way it does because I weathered it that way.

So what’s the point of using part of a movie costume that is less usable than a bag that’s actually designed to be a daily bag? Does it make me feel like Indiana Jones when I’m buying batteries at Walgreens and carrying them home in my accurate gas mask bag? Yes.

About three years ago I digitally sculpted the fertility idol from the opening of Raiders of the Lost Ark. Why not! Throw me the idol! Doctah Jones! It was just a fairly simple, familiar, and interesting object for me to create.

There are a number of ways to approach 3D modeling, but starting a model from scratch is usually more akin to drawing architectural plans than getting your fists into a lump of clay. It’s also much easier with traditional 3D modeling software to create hard objects with simple geometric forms (a cube, a cylinder, etc.) than it is to create a believable organic form. But there are some applications that take a completely different approach to 3D modeling. With Sculptris, designing an object is quite literally like manipulating clay. You start with a base shape like a sphere in the simulated 3D space and add and subtract from it, just as you would with a real life malleable medium. (Sculptris is the free, simplified version of Pixologic’s ZBrush, which is their professional-grade offering. No need for ZBrush when I’m a Play-Doh level sculptor.)

It goes without saying that I have no actual, real world experience with sculpting. But I do have a pair of eyes that can see what’s right and what’s not, so I just slowly manipulated my imaginary clay to roughly approximate the various reference images I had gather of the Chachapoyan idol. I don’t remember how long that took–quite a few hours of clumsy digital sculpting over multiple days.

And then I let it sit on a hard drive for three years.

I thought about ordering a 3D print from Shapeways, but printing a 1-to-1 scale replica was prohibitively expensive. I’d be better off buying an actual lump of clay if I wanted a life-sized version (or I could just get one Amazon, but the idol itself wasn’t the point.) Even half scale was much more money that I would spend on a mere trinket of curiosity.

But it just happened to cross my mind recently. Small objects are quite to cheap to print of Shapeways, and they have more material and color options than ever (including actual gold). So I settled on a little 2 in. figure, in yellow plastic, for $25.

Not bad! Quite good! I had ordered “polished” plastic, and it ain’t polished, but I’m guessing that’s because the details were too fine to be polished, and the Shapeways staff were smart enough to know polishing it would reduce my idol to a meaningless peanut. Instead, it has the rough sandy surface that comes as a default to that sort of printing. Plus the yellow–which I think is just on the surface.

So there you have it, a genuine 3D-printed Chachapoyan fertility idol. It belongs in a museum, but I’m keeping this one on my desk.

Cross post from Kinja.