Recreating a Cockpit Control Console From Project Hail Mary

Project Hail Mary just hit the big screen a few days ago and it is pretty good. The movie is mostly faithful to the book and Ryan Gosling is as charming as he always is. Most of his onscreen time takes place inside the spaceship, so the set designers and prop makers had their work cut out for them. And they did a great job — so much so that Matt of Creative Geekery decided to recreate a Project Hail Mary cockpit control console based on trailer imagery alone.

Matt published this video the day after Project Hail Mary’s release, so he didn’t have time to study the film and analyze the cockpit frame-by-frame. His only real reference was a very short clip from the movie trailer. But that was sufficient to give him the ability to recreate enough of the design elements to make a fairly accurate control console.

The control console consists of a tablet-sized screen, several surrounding buttons protected by guards, a couple of rotary dials, and a keyboard attached underneath. Matt wasn’t concerned about making all of those inputs functional, but he wanted at least some interactivity.

Many of us, when tasked with a project like this, would immediately turn to a Raspberry Pi or similar SBC (Single-Board Computer). Or maybe even an Arduino or similar MDB (Microcontroller Development Board). But Matt was smarter than that. He realized that the control console didn’t need to “work” at all, it just needed to look like it works.

To achieve that, he simply used a 7” HDMI display connected to small Neumi Atom 4K media player. It plays video of an interface on the display, rather than a real, working interface. But some of the buttons control playback, so it is still interactive.

Matt made the enclosure for those components using 3D-printed and laser-cut parts. Then he worked his prop building magic to give the enclosure a weathered paint job — something that is critical for making onscreen props look like they exist in a real world. An old broken keyboard stuck to the bottom completed the design.

The resulting control panel looks fantastic and you could easily swap it out with the real deal on the movie set and nobody would notice.