By Marcel Damen and Steve Fronczek
11 February 2008

Future-Past.com in partnership with Galactica.tv was granted the opportunity to interview Ken Hawryliw who is Property Master for the hit Scifi series Battlestar Galactica. Ken shares insight into the processes involved with developing props for the show and the behind-the-scenes magic he performs to make them so believable. This exclusive interview was made possible by the great folks from Intersun Luxury Liners, Caprica City, Caprica.

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Well, a prop designer, strictly speaking, just designs props. Now, in my capacity on Battlestar Galactica, and in some other shows I've worked on, I do both. I actually design the props for the most part. Probably ninety nine percent of them I design with guidance from the art department and with their approval. If there's something really specific they want in terms of a look then we discuss it and I relinquish to them. They'll come up with a design and we work on it together because there's nothing worse than coming up with a design that's not workable. A really good example of that are the flight helmets we had in the first season that came from the Miniseries. Unfortunately they weren't designed by the art department or the prop department. They didn't work and had to be replaced.

So, I do both. A prop master's job is basically... I'm responsible for obtaining all of the props for the show -- whatever that entails -- be that design and build, purchased or rented or whatever. I break down the script and determine what the needs are in consultation with the director, producers and sometimes the writers. Then if something needs to be built, I design it (usualy) and build it.

I have people I work with who do drafting. I'm not a draft person so I usually do my sketch of what I think it looks like and I hand it over to someone who can actually draft it up or it goes straight to the person who's going to manufacture it. They do up a CAD drawing if it's something that's going to be machined. We have some really good people we work with one of which is a company called Rocket Visual Effects, who does a lot of our prop building. They do a great job. There is a really good short hand between myself and these people because they are pretty good at interpreting my vision, for lack of a better word, and making it into a three dimensional object.

I started off actually as an actor in the theatre. I got offered a job right out of drama school. This theatre needed somebody who could act as well as do props. (chuckle) I always wanted to do props because I loved props. I was a big fan of '60s sci-fi shows. All the Irwin Allen shows and Batman. All the really proppy shows from the '60s. I was a huge fan of Westerns too. I was a big fan of, and really interested in, anything that had really interesting props. When this theatre job came up I would get to be the prop master in charge of designing and building -- as well as procuring the props -- and also be an actor to do bit parts. It was sort of the perfect job for me, and that's how I got started. From there, I went into film and TV.

Oh yeah sure. I made everything and anything I could from the original Batman series. I made batarangs and all that kind of stuff. I tried to make replicas of all the stuff from The Time Tunnel and Lost in Space when I was a kid. I was lucky because my dad had a welding shop so he was able to help out with some of it. I did all that stuff. It's a shame some of those original Batman props have disappeared.

Oh yeah absolutely. I knew I wanted to do props from the time I was very young.

No. Pretty well self taught. Taught on the run. It's trial by fire, you just learn because you have to. I studied design and read any book I could find on design. Particularly industrial design because it really helps with designing objects that have to be functional as opposed to have to look good.

Well, there's been a couple actually. Richard Hudolin who's our production designer. I worked with Richard on one of my very first film jobs over twenty years ago, and we've worked off and on for decades. Between him and the other person who really influenced me, and was actually on a show I worked on with Richard. Richard was the Art Designer. The Production Designer was a fellow named Harry Lange, who was quite a famous Production Designer, who's first movie job was designing 2001: A Space Odyssey. He was also one of the art directors/designers on the first few Star Wars movies. He was very influential.

His influence really helps in Battlestar Galactica because he was really big on using found objects and taking advantage of other peoples design work and incorporating them into designs. I would just go out in the car with him for about a week and we'd go to different hardware stores or department stores and just grab found objects. He would tell me "I used this part for part of the Millennium Falcon." and "This is what I used for Luke's this, and Han Solo's that." What he taught me is the attitude that someone has spent a huge amount of money, sometimes hundreds of thousands maybe millions of dollars, to design an object that you can now buy for a few dollars. Why not take that object and use it; build it into a prop because the design is great already. You're incorporating it into something that has to function and the ergonomics are already built into it, so it makes a lot of sense to do things that way. It's very economical.

When I worked on The X-Files, almost everything was designed from scratch that was built props. Very little was found object kind of stuff and I'm kind of getting back to my roots in a lot of ways by doing this show. I can appreciate that.

They actually asked me to do the Miniseries, which unfortunately I wasn't available for. I really regret that cause I really would have loved to have done the Miniseries. Then when the series came I was available and I jumped on the opportunity to do it. It's a great group to work with. Like I said, I worked with Richard for years so it was a natural. We have shorthand. He trusts me and gives me a fair bit of leeway in terms of what I can do. I'm pretty good at reading his mind in terms of what the design sensibilities are for this particular show. A lot of times somebody coming in who didn't know the look of the show would have a very difficult time I think. It's a bit of an education curve for a lot of people that work on the show and some people didn't survive because they just never got it. It was easy for me.

No, I really didn't speak with Dan. I spoke with one of his buyers who helped us out with re-sourcing some of the stuff they did. A lot of the stuff they did for the Miniseries had to be rebuilt as it was only designed to last for a short amount of time. I needed to design something that would last for four to five years or more. We had to go back over their tracks a little bit. Some things had to be redesigned because they were only designed for only one application.

We used the original Colonial sidearms from the Miniseries in the first season and they were very limited in what they would do. They were designed for a specific purpose for the Miniseries. Now, all of a sudden, we get in a situation where the director wants to see the characters loading a magazine on camera or they even just want to flip a safety off. There's no functionality what-so-ever to the originals so we had to redesign the guns from scratch.

We don't have an in-house prop shop as such. We contract out the stuff. Our construction department sometimes will do some of the things for us if there's some sculpting or some wood working involved they'll do some of that work for us. We job it out. I've got three main companies we work with who build our props. One of which is called White Monkey Design, another is Rocket Visual Effects and another one is Clarey Prop Works. They do all the work for us. If you add it up we have a dozen people over all.

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