Painting the Police Spinners: Behind the Scenes on Blade Runner 2049
How the paint effects on the K-spinners were designed, approved, and delivered—from a test panel at Pinewood to an all-night build in Budapest.
The original Blade Runner is one of the great masterpieces of motion picture history—a film worth experiencing at least once in your life. One of my top five. So when the sequel, Blade Runner 2049, came to Pinewood Studios in the UK, I was already thinking about closing out my film career on a project that meant something to me. As it turned out, I was in the right place at the right time, despite the personal cost to me and others.
The test panel
The work began with the aesthetics of the Police Spinners—the iconic flying cars that were stars of the original film in their own right.
The first paint test I was shown was serviceable but drab: a dull graphite grey, flat, with little variation or broken effect to give the Spinner any character. So the mould shop cast a fiberglass side panel from the Police Spinner mould, and I built the finish from scratch.
The panel was primed and base-coated in silver acrylic loaded with metal powder. Over that I laid a glaze—the same silver, deepened with just enough black acrylic, cut with a waterproofing agent I knew would bond hard to the coat. I applied the glaze, then subtracted it in places to produce worn, broken paint effects. Silver highlights along the Spinner’s edges suggested chipped paint revealing the base metal beneath.
The last pass was a classic dirty-down wash, sprayed on sporadically and then subtracted again to reveal the glazes underneath. That layering is what creates depth and tonal range — the difference between a car that looks painted and a car that looks used. The finished panel read as authentic: a vehicle that had taken knocks and scrapes running down whatever it was chasing.
The production passed my paint effects design on that sample panel. That approval is what put this finish on the screen—and it made me the sole paint effects artist responsible for the finished Police Spinners’ look, a fact since corroborated by the professional prop community that documents and verifies this work.
The build
The Spinner crew was already deep in work. Body parts flowed out of the mould workshop; frames were welded up in trellis fashion; the LED strip lighting was being tested and looked superb. When the first Police Spinner came together at Pinewood, it earned its persona—an aggressive body line, moody slim lighting, and a paint finish that fit the machine.
We had a meeting with our boss, putting me at a boardroom table with six other Spinner crew members—a combined several dozen years of film-industry experience between us—and the announcement: we were moving to Origo Film Studios in Budapest.
We crated every tool we owned and shipped out.
Budapest: arrive, suffer, conquer
The challenge waiting for us in Hungary was brutal: a small British crew, tasked with delivering the Police Spinners, limo spinners, and Luv’s spinner in under six weeks—fully completed vehicles, ready to film, the limo types, built to be submerged in water. The German special-effects crew stationed next door clearly doubted we’d hit the deadline.
The days stretched, then merged. We split into day and night shifts and ran sixteen-hour days, sometimes longer, until we resembled ghosts. What carried us through was the crew tightening into a single unit with an us-against-the-impossible feeling—a sheer refusal to surrender to the deadline.
Six weeks later, the Police Spinners were done, but yes, with some extra hands for good measure.
I watched K’s Police Spinner roll out of our workshop and felt a quiet, indulgent pride. The crew looked like wilting flowers, but relief outweighed exhaustion. The director loved the Spinners. The first Police Spinner was set down on a landscape of reddish sand dotted with strange sculptures. I remember seeing the director and the cameras rolling.
Looking back, the Spinners weren’t just working vehicles. They were objects of art. Three acts: we arrived, we suffered, and we conquered.
The techniques behind this finish — the metal-loaded base coats, the subtractive glazing, the layered dirty-down washes — are the same methods I now apply to original canvas work. The same hands that were the sole paint effects artist on the Blade Runner 2049 Police Spinners. Not film-inspired. Film artwork, executed the same way it was done for the cameras.
This account was originally published in Make Magazine (US), January 2020.
