Here's a little side project I worked on for my office.
There are several in-universe liquor bottles seen all throughout the film. Apart from the Johnnie Walker bottle that was custom made, there are various other real bottles that were modified and used.
This specific bottle has been coined "The Mystery Bottle" because it's origin was unknown for so long.
Turns out, this bottle has been found under a variety of uses. The same basic shape/design is there in all cases, but there are slight variations in detail crispness, and overall size and glass color between found examples.
Searching for the bottle can be quite tedious because there's no real "source" for it, so there are no solid terms to use when looking for one other than "decorative bottle", "made in Spain" etc. It seems as though the bottle design was cast and copied over and over, and mass produced for different purposes, so the details are lost over time. I've found evidence that it may originally have been a Williams-Sonoma bottle but not really sure of its purpose. (Olive oil bottle has been thrown around a bit).
Then there's the question of the labels used for it. This is the kind of thing I absolutely love about prop building.
The label was originally made from a photo copy of the label from a bottle of Chinese wine called Wu Chia Pi Chiew.
They took this label, cut out the English text and backed it with what appears to be lined paper. They then made many photo copies of that altered label to slap onto the prop bottles. Here's a photo of some production made labels that were sold through a Propstore auction.
You can see that the labels all have the same wrinkles and photocopy artifacts from being scanned from the original modified label.
There have been a few attempts to recreate this label but I couldn't find one that I liked, so I decided to make my own.
I found a scan of an original Wu Chia Pi Chiew label online but in its raw form it looks very different from what ended up being used on the bottles. I thought about making a vector of it from scratch so that the label would be super clean but decided I liked the idea of copying it from a real bottle to give it some character, similar to the way they did for the prop bottles.
I started by cutting out the English text, matching the shape of the production made labels, recreated the lined paper, color matching it as well as getting the line spacing accurate, and overlaid the label, lining up the positioning of the lines.
Then I trimmed label out, did some color adjustment and clean up (the red and gold colors were way off)
and manually adjusted some minor details like the symbols to the left and right of the bell that didn't match what is on the production made labels.
I did the same with the neck label, although not much cleanup there. Lastly, I scaled and trimmed them to match the prop bottles, turned them into vinyl decals, and Bob's your uncle!
And the finished bottle!
There are several in-universe liquor bottles seen all throughout the film. Apart from the Johnnie Walker bottle that was custom made, there are various other real bottles that were modified and used.
This specific bottle has been coined "The Mystery Bottle" because it's origin was unknown for so long.
Turns out, this bottle has been found under a variety of uses. The same basic shape/design is there in all cases, but there are slight variations in detail crispness, and overall size and glass color between found examples.
Searching for the bottle can be quite tedious because there's no real "source" for it, so there are no solid terms to use when looking for one other than "decorative bottle", "made in Spain" etc. It seems as though the bottle design was cast and copied over and over, and mass produced for different purposes, so the details are lost over time. I've found evidence that it may originally have been a Williams-Sonoma bottle but not really sure of its purpose. (Olive oil bottle has been thrown around a bit).
Then there's the question of the labels used for it. This is the kind of thing I absolutely love about prop building.
The label was originally made from a photo copy of the label from a bottle of Chinese wine called Wu Chia Pi Chiew.
They took this label, cut out the English text and backed it with what appears to be lined paper. They then made many photo copies of that altered label to slap onto the prop bottles. Here's a photo of some production made labels that were sold through a Propstore auction.
You can see that the labels all have the same wrinkles and photocopy artifacts from being scanned from the original modified label.
There have been a few attempts to recreate this label but I couldn't find one that I liked, so I decided to make my own.
I found a scan of an original Wu Chia Pi Chiew label online but in its raw form it looks very different from what ended up being used on the bottles. I thought about making a vector of it from scratch so that the label would be super clean but decided I liked the idea of copying it from a real bottle to give it some character, similar to the way they did for the prop bottles.
I started by cutting out the English text, matching the shape of the production made labels, recreated the lined paper, color matching it as well as getting the line spacing accurate, and overlaid the label, lining up the positioning of the lines.
Then I trimmed label out, did some color adjustment and clean up (the red and gold colors were way off)
and manually adjusted some minor details like the symbols to the left and right of the bell that didn't match what is on the production made labels.
I did the same with the neck label, although not much cleanup there. Lastly, I scaled and trimmed them to match the prop bottles, turned them into vinyl decals, and Bob's your uncle!
And the finished bottle!
