VI: Replicating HAL

My HAL replica

So, based on all this HAL 9000 research, I was fortunate enough to have the opportunity to make a version of the faceplate for the official Kubrick Exhibition. I went into it with the goal of making the most screen-accurate replica of HAL’s faceplate yet created, and I think I succeeded.

The replica has been shown at the Kubrick Exhibitions in Madrid and Istanbul.

The plan

So. To make this thing happen, I formulated a cunning plan.

• I would use a custom-machined aluminium frame and mounting ring. All dimensions to match the Ordway/Johnson blueprint. The outer bars would be undercut to create an overhang on the outer edge, and all bars would be slotted to fit the panel and grille components neatly. This is precise and delicate work.

• I would use a genuine Nikkor fisheye lens. Yes, they’re crazy expensive but you can’t beat the look of the real thing. It's kind of funny that they have such high collector value – they aren’t useful to photographers because of their antiquated optical design. You can’t, for example, use one of these lenses easily on a modern digital camera.

• I would replicate the front panel, speaker grille, and logo label to resemble the original movie props as closely as possible.

• It would be internally lit with an LED for low power consumption and longevity. Warm white with a red filter to replicate the filtered tungsten light used in the film.

Of course, it wasn't an easy project. Despite its apparent minimalism, there’s more to the design than meets the eye. Plus, of course, it had to be utterly perfect and precise in its construction.

And naturally, lots went wrong as I tried to make the deadline for the exhibition. The first machinist I hired managed to lose all the finished parts. I had to scramble to find two more machinists to redo the frame and ring parts at the last minute. I tested around 10 black and grey paints.  I printed piles of test prints to get a grille with the right wave height, and went through several custom-cut Dibond panel pieces and dozens of MDF blocks that the frame would be screwed into. And I had to modify the Nikkor lens – extremely carefully – to get it to look like the static HAL shot used in the movie.

But in the end I think it was worth it!

Dimensions

We don't know the precise vertical elevations of the prop. I had to make guesses based on side views of the faceplate, especially the one in the pod bay.

I’m still unsure about the ring height, and I feel that my version might be a millimetre or two too high.

The frame

The frame was definitely aluminium, and I had my replica made from machined metal.

We don't know for sure if the top edges of the outer aluminium frame were chamfered or not. I believe they were, given how the props appear in photos, and so my faceplace has a roughly 5 degree inwards chamfer on the outer frame. This was extra work and expense, and I doubt anyone will notice it!

How polished was the aluminium? I suspect it was lightly brushed, and definitely not polished to a mirror finish. I used 0000 grade steel wool to give it a lovely smooth finish that looks manufactured, but doesn't have a ton of visible brush lines. I think it's a bit shinier than the original props were, but it looks good, so I'm happy with that.

PAINT

We don't know the precise colours used for the panel and grille. The shades of black and grey look different from shot to shot owing to lighting and camera angles. Therefore any colour choices are a best guess, and to taste. All we do know is that the grille wasn't bare metal, no glossy finishes were used, and in most shots the panel was very dark and the grille a bit lighter.

Another funny thing about the greys and blacks is how they vary depending on light angle. For example, my replica has a black panel that looks lighter than the grey panel in some photos. To the naked eye, and from most angles, it's the reverse.

After testing around ten different paints and a couple of spray matte finishes, I ended up using Citadel Chaos Black for the main body panel. It lays down smooth and flat, and is just slightly shinier than matte. It’s not quite as black as I’d like, but it’s okay. Tamiya TS-6 matt black was a runner-up, but it doesn’t lay down as smoothly.

For the grille I used MTN 94 Metropolis graffiti art paint. It’s so dark grey as to be nearly black, but it was a huge pain to use. Very difficult to get a sputter-free and even finish, and achieve the same reflectivity across the surface. Still, its slightly grainy finish does resemble some industrial metal-painting processes.

I don't think the colours I settled on are exactly right, but they work for me. I also ran out of testing time and had to commit to something in order to get my replica out the door! It was also tough finding a good grey. The problem with virtually all grey paints is that they have pronounced casts to them - often greenish or bluish.

The panel

We know that the black panel holding the lens had a subtle brushed texture. So I used brushed black Dibond (a product consisting of two thin sheets of aluminium glued to a plastic core), instead of building the whole thing around a solid metal block.  However, the brushing was too obvious, and there was a slightly brown tint to the raised areas.

Painting solved both problems by knocking back the height of the brush marks and making the colour perfectly consistent. I also tried lightly sanding the Dibond before painting it, and that improved things slightly but it wasn't really that noticeable.

The grille

We know the speaker grille was quite possibly a found object, taken from a commercial product, but that's about it. We don't have any really good closeup views. The common opinion is that a horizontal wave-like pattern probably existed on the metal, as evidenced in some screenshots and photos.

But it’s not easy to know exactly what the thing looked like, since we only have a frontal view of the panel. We don’t know how high the “waves” of the corrugations were, or exactly how they were shaped.

The waves seem relatively low in amplitude. In other words, the panel was fairly flat, with subtle waves and troughs. The tops of the waves don’t seem to have been flat. It looks like a gentle, even, and symmetrical curve. Or perhaps the troughs were flat for a narrow section.

The holes appear to have been drilled or punched into the slope of each corrugation. They don’t, in the 4K photo, appear to have been either at the crest of the wave or in the trough. We don’t know if the holes were drilled or punched into the material before or after the metal had been shaped into corrugations. In other words, were the holes round when seen from the top, or slightly oval? The 4K photo suggests they were round.

It’s not certain what the grilles were made from. They appear to be thin aluminium sheet, mostly painted a dark grey. It seems unlikely that plastic was used, since the grilles were extremely thin.

In the end I printed a whole pile of test prints using a resin printer, trying different heights. I found that a subtle wave, with a trough to crest height of incredibly shallow 0.2mm, comes close to matching the photos of the screen-used props. Make the waves any higher than that and you get horizontal stripes of light and dark, from shadowing. Those aren’t in the film. Any lower than that and the waves disappear.

Anyway. The only problem is that the hole placement vertically differs just slightly from the film prop - I was out by about 0.5mm on each side, and I didn't have time to reprint to fix it.

The logo

For cost and production reasons, I decided to use a custom-printed adhesive vinyl logo rather than the waterslide decal used in the original production. The logo would employ the correct typeface (Monotype Grotesque No. 9) and was constructed using an art program.

We don't know the shade of blue used on the HAL 9000 logo. On film it looks a bit lighter or paler than the prop probably looked in real life. I've gone for a slightly more saturated blue than you see in the film, mainly because that's how you sort of remember it. Adam Johnson has a copy of three unused production decals, which appear quite blue, but of course we don't know if the decal colour has shifted at all over the years.

However I wish that the test print I made with a slightly paler blue had worked out, since I think the blue I used is just a tiny bit too saturated. The vinyl stickers also aren't as high-rez as I'd like, and look a bit inkjetty when examined closely. I sprayed them with a semi-matt finish since the movie prop logos weren't obviously reflective. Kind of a shame as they looked better slightly shiny.

The Lens

As noted, I used a genuine Nikkor 8mm f/8 lens for this project, because there just isn't anything as good as the real thing. To achieve the glowing red look I removed most of the internal lens elements.

Making a Lens replica

The biggest problem with making your own replica is getting the lens to look right. If you can't afford a real Nikkor lens it's a tricky thing to pull off. So, what are some alternatives?

A magnifier

Well, most are too flat. There’s a depth to the real lens that’s readily apparent. The Nikon 8mm lens is also much more bulging and protuberant than most lenses. It’s also difficult to find a lens of the correct size. The exposed glass of the Nikon is about 74mm in diameter, and the curved part of the lens is about 18.25mm tall.

A domed lens

There are highly convex lenses found in projectors or used as stamp magnifiers, and so on. Those can sometimes look okay from a distance, though they tend to look too hemispherical.

Also, real fisheye lenses have a complex characteristic look. All the enormous curved lens elements used in the lens (camera lenses almost always consist of multiple “elements,” or more than one piece of glass inside) reflect light internally in crazy and distorting ways when you look at it from the front or the side. A single projector lens doesn't have quite the same effect. It’s also hard to find a 74mm diameter lens.

A 3D printed lens

It’s possible to print a replica lens using clear plastics, then polish the print to glass-like smoothness. However, it’s a ton of work to get it to look like glass, and even then it never looks quite right. This one is tough unless you get a really high-end 3D printing machine to do it for you.

The “eBay” lens

A certain seller on eBay responsible for the Artifactory and Master Replicas Group prop replica companies sold a batch of around 40-50 glass HAL replica lenses in 2021. These were apparently left over from manufacturing the Artifactory HAL 9000 prop product, and were fairly accurate. They were carefully cast and polished glass, just like a real lens, and had almost the same proportions as the original Nikkor lens. The main difference seems to be that they’re about 1mm wider in diameter, and aren’t optically coated.

These lenses are an excellent solution for HAL prop builders, but of course, are no longer available. There is also a lot of controversy associated with the seller, since the Master Replicas Group company took considerable sums of money from people promising a glossy and flashy HAL replica, but then never delivered any actual merchandise at the end of the day, and offered no refunds. The company is now bankrupt, and those people who weren’t able to get compensation from their credit cards have been left high and dry.

A contemporary fisheye lens or adapter

Modern lenses, such as a real fisheyes, are almost always multicoated these days. This will result in coloured reflections that look quite different from the HALs in the film. Still – real lenses do give you that depth if you can find one that's roughly the right size.

Moebius HAL kit problems

American model kit maker Moebius released a Chinese-manufactured plastic model kit of HAL in 2020. It’s simple to make and relatively affordable, but has a lot of inaccuracies mostly caused by keeping production costs down.

I’m sure most people will be happy with it, but for those trying to get something more screen-accurate, here are some areas that need addressing:

• • The sides of the frame are not parallel but angled in slightly – there’s an injection-moulding “draft”. That makes it look like the plastic box that it is, rather than a machined metal object.

  • The frame also has a rectangular cutout for a slide switch, making it look like a 1960s transistor radio.

  • The top deck has exaggerated brushed texturing.

  • Not just that, but the top deck was cheaply moulded and has visible sink marks revealing where the internal frame and the “Moebius” logo appear on the interior. Ugly.

  • The top deck is one piece with the side frames, making it a nuisance to paint, since you have to mess around masking it off. Had they made them separate parts they wouldn’t have required masking, and it would have looked perfect.

  • There’s a flat untextured recess for the decal, but it’s kind of deeply set, making the decal look a bit odd.

  • A superfluous extra groove/round recess was added to the inside of the simulated aluminium ring, for no reason I can tell. This looks pretty bad.

  • The top of the aluminium ring is also too high. ie: the visible part of the ring sticks out too high past the black plate.  (fortunately this does mean you can get the aluminium ring a bit closer to prototype by carefully cutting off the protruding outer edge of the aluminium ring, and sanding the top surface smooth and flat)

  • The aluminium ring interior isn’t deep enough. The bottom of the ring interior should be below the level of the black plate. As a result the Moebius lens isn’t recessed correctly.

  • The lens barrel doesn’t have engraved lettering on it – they just supply a waterslide decal because of the limitations of injection moulding technology.

  • The decal for the lettering doesn’t emulate the original engraved lettering. It looks to me like the decal uses Rocko, a cheap font from the 1990s which is a sort of round typeface. That's pretty half-ass in my opinion. Even VAG Rounded (the old Volkswagen font) would've been closer since it has even strokes.
    Though one clever trick – they didn’t include the word “NIKKOR” on the lens decal since that’s a trademark of Nikon. So instead they put the word “NIKKO” instead. Then, over to the side, they have the spurious word “RESET”. So the idea is you can use the letter R and stick it next to the brand name to get it right.

  • The two thin clear plastic “lenses” aren’t very convincing and don’t look much like the original, which was obviously an actual camera lens with solid glass.

  • The “lens” rings don’t have the correct threads in them. These threads were used by the lens cap on the original Nikon 8mm fisheye lens.

  • The kit "lens" is a shallow dish, and doesn't look much like the real lens, which is actually quite deep.

  • There's a spurious rectangular tab sticking out the top of the outer ring. This has to be cut off, and the remaining area has to be carefully rounded to match the rest of the ring.

  • The supplied LED is red. The real HAL had a white tungsten light with a red filter, which looks subtly different.

  • The speaker grille has little recesses in it rather than actual holes. Drilling out each recess to make proper holes is a humongous and tedious pain.

  • The ridges on the grille are too deep and pronounced.

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