The third one is always the biggest!!

The last and final set for the Fisher Price commercial was to be a snowy, arctic type environment. Kind of like April was in Canada this year! Pfff... There was no CNC work on this set, it was all hot-wire bow cut styrofoam. This set was also fairly big for a toy commercial. 24 feet at the back end, 16 feet deep, and 16 feet wide at the front end.

Most of it was straight forward, rocky out-croppings, sitting on 2" slabs of white styrofoam. All supported by some basic plywood whalers.

 I hot wire cut most of the rock features, but Jody did the hard coating on the far back mountain range,

 and all the painting! I find if I work slow, Jody gets all the painting done by herself.....Does that make me a...? Maybe. Probably......... But she's awesome at it, and likes it too, and I like to make her happy :) Cause that's how I roll.

We didn't do a full final paint on the mountains, as experience tells me, it'll change on set.

She got it as far along as it needed to be, and with us having one studio build day, and one prelight day before shooting, there will be plenty of time to change anything. Idle art directors make for more work :) That's right Mr. Art Director, I know you read this blog! ;)

EVERYTHING was wild on this set, so setting it up, and adjusting stuff went really quickly. Notice any mountain range paint changes? Oh ya you do! The fore ground rocks didn't actually get any hard coat. 2 coats of latex, and 3 multi colored coats of a fine speckle, made these jump to life as granite boulders.

We used 2 kinds of snow for the scenic of the base. The very fore  ground, in your face snow, was 150 lbs of baking soda. This sculpts just like real snow, and gently blowing compressed air on it, gives it an un-matched, windswept look. The other snow we used is a fine ground styrofoam snow. It looks pretty real in your hands, as full size snow, but in the background, it gives a nice texture to things. If we used backing soda in the back, we might as well of used a white bedsheet. NO life to it at all. So the texture is what sells it!

The trees are something we have, and rent out. They take a long time to make, and are kind of expensive, so we just rent them out most of the time. :) The smaller pines are trees the we have, but bought and modified slightly a while ago.

The last step was to clamp on a miniature, remote smoker for the volcano type mountain. I don't think they actually even fired it up in the end But at least it was on standby!

And here's our student helper, Polina, Godzilla-ing her way through the set. Good times that Polina, good times!

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JWO

Oh, and as usual, 13 days left in the My Rode Reel contest, so PUH-LEASE throw a vote to Endlewood, our short, 3-minute film we entered!!

It would be AWESOME to win!

2nd of Three!

I have been spending most of my free time gearing up for filming this summer. This means that the blog is kind of a close second at the moment. We're spreading filming out across most of the summer, with the first scenes already shot last fall. This means shotlisting and blocking the remaining 30 scenes! Lots of work and thought goes into it all, and adding locations and schedules from everyone involved, also adds its set of lengthy problem solving skills. I may regret this at some point........but probably no way!!

But back to the miniature sets:
The second of three sets we built for this commercial was a tropical islandy set. This got the least documentation, because the deadline was creeping up fast, and we were soon to be without the Jody, due to her Boston Marathon race!

The main piece, where all the miniature action was going to take place, was a small island. This needed a smooth skin "beach", and rocky pieces. This was all made from hand carved styrofoam. We went with 2" foam, with the rock chunks added on top. Once carved, we coated it with a Durobond mixture, and added texture with crumpled tin foil. This resembled a kind of lava rock look.

With me working the island portion, Jody, and our student helper Polina, worked on cutting all the palm leaves, and painting them up. After they were base coated, Jody airbrushed some more coloring onto them. We had to go quite a bit darker than real palm trees, as these are all being shot against green screen. And we don't want the leaves to get keyed out by mistake, making a monstrous amount of work at the post production end! The final step was to slice them up with scissors, to get the individual fronds.

The trees came out great! Running down the center of the leaves was a piece of wire. This allowed us to be able to 'pose' the leaves as we needed, and give us something to attach to the trunk!

This was the only image I was able to grab of the set :( Just too many people and gear in the way!
I wish I had a picture of the 8'X8' water portion. It was really cool! We used a textured acrylic, similar to a ripply patio table glass. This was suspended above a really weird looking metallic blue sheeting. It looked like something Elton John would wear. But under the acrylic, it gave the water tremendous depth. When we shot it, we drifted dry ice over the surface, and the whole thing became VERY pirate-y!

AAAAAAAAND, once again, if you haven't cast a vote for my 3 minute short, Endlewood,
The link is here:

Just click "VOTE", log in fast, and your done! I would be so stoked to win this, so thanks again!!!!

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JWO

Caught up!

We got a little crammed for time on this build, and then had 3 days on set, which we weren't really expecting, so I ran out of time for posting!

Next up was the bridge that spans the opening where the kid actors stand. This was from 1/2" pvc. I used a 1/4" Ballnose cutter to cut the slots for the 1/4" acrylic rod, that will become the multiple upright supports. I went with the ballnose cutter, so the rods would fit tight and clean, as opposed to a square bottom slot from an endmill.

They fit super duper! Because this is a set, anything that doesn't face the camera, doesn't get any attention. So as this is the back side of the bridge, it will just get painted like this.

The final bits were some fencing along the "Wharf", and some ladders down to the "water"
We even made little bollard cleats for boats, but I didn't get any pictures :(

These were the only pictures on set I could get of it. Cause the second the crew arrived, the toys were placed on it, then no pictures allowed!
This was fairly big. At a total of 16 feet wide, by 9 feet deep. Just the way I like it :)


8)
JWO

The World, in miniature!

I looove miniatures! The best part is that they leave the shop when were done!
This build has us working on 3 separate environments. Some of the build portions in the shop, might not get covered very well, but I will show the finals in the studio.

The first build is a city landscape for the commercial. That means buildings, and a few at that.
4.5, 4x8 sheets of 1/4" styrene to be exact! These building are relatively low detail, as they can't overshadow the kids toy that their filming. They range in height from 8" to 48" tall. Our Techno cnc made short work of all the pieces. I cut all the 1/4" styrene with the single flute Amana cutter from Tools Today. I have been using this cutter for everything plastic, over the last year, and it's still kick n' ass!

This is about as complicated as the buildings get! They're only 3 sided though. Largely for budget reasons, but mostly cause they gotta stick a bunch of lights in them all.
I had the cnc cut the panels to size, then used our angle jig to router the mitre corners. Some tape as a mitre fold, flooded with methelyne, and BAM, a new building!

All said and done, it took about 3 days to cut, assemble, make windows, and eventually paint. Beat that Trump!

The windows were all numbered, so it would make sense after painting, as a lot of them were individuals. For the most part, I used .030" PETG sheets, with the standard peel and stick window frosting. After that, we used clear shipping tape to fasten them to the inside.

On the larger buildings, I used translucent coroplast. I really liked the corrugated lines from it!
Man, we got a lot to do..........

But while I'm doing that, If you haven't voted for my short film Endlewood, PLEASE head on over to the  My Road Reel website, and vote!!! I'm gearing up to shoot my 40 minute film, and winning this competition would change this next film for me! Just click on the title card below, and it'll whisk you on over there!

Thanks for stopping by, and THANKS for voting for us!!
8)
JWO

The little things are the coolest!

Inside our miniature ice-cream store will be some chairs and tables, a counter, and a wall shelving. Very store like! They sent me the 3d model for the chairs they want, and I brought it into Hexagon for layout and scaling. The final size worked out to be just over 2.25" in height.

Because these will get double side machined, it was easiest to nest them, with sprues, in Hexagon. The sprues are there just to make sure they don't all fall apart once the cutter starts attacking them!

The imported nesting was 1.673" thick, so I'll be cutting these from 2" HDU. I brought the model into Aspire, did some quick math to center them in the material thickness, then added a base component, so the cutter wouldn't have to travel all the way down to the machine bed. I kept the base component shy of the middle of the block by about 1/4". This way the cutter would at least travel past the center block seam on each side, eliminating any onion skin that would be left attached to the model, if I had the component set at the halfway, or 1" height.

42 minutes total, including flipping the material! Pretty fast turnaround for 6 chairs, and 2 table bases!

 I did have to clean of the sprues, and some machine marks, but HDU is pretty quick to deal with that sort of thing. The table tops were cut from 1/8" styrene plastic.

The next asset to deal with was the large ice-cream cone that will sit out front of the miniature store.
This scaled out at about 8" tall, and 3.625" deep. This I will cut in two halves, from 2" HDU, and glue up.

Here the cone has been cut, cleaned and primed. It's sitting next to our super-cool cartoon trees that will also populate the model base. The tree's I designed in Hexagon, machined from 40lb urethane. The sphere's are just craft foam balls from the craft store, with painted corsage pins stuck in for some color!
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JWO

Finally, a miniature build again!!!

What can I say! I love miniatures. The only thing better than miniatures, is CARTOON miniatures!
And that's the current build!
We have to build a small toon-ish village for a tv spot. This makes me VERY happy indeed!!!
We were supplied a lot of 3d assets, which I will be pulling from heavily. Non of this will be 3d printed. the scale makes this a bit to big for printing, and I can machine almost any of this 100 times faster than 3d printing. I still think that 3d printing is a little over rated for a lot of what we do. It certainly has its place, but not for this gig!

This is the main building. This will scale out at approximately 13 inches wide. I decided the best way to tackle this for 3d machining is to split it out, both in Aspire, and Hexagon. I hid the text portion of the sign, as I will laser cut that from craft foam.

I know that the wall panels will be machined from 3/4" pvc, so I blocked out a cube, set back from the farthest point on the wall by 3/4". I don't care about the large sign depth at this point, because I'll just cut it off in Aspire. This method seems to be the fastest way from A to B.

The reason for the cube, is really just to give me a surface plane when I import the model into Aspire. The model will get sunk into the zero plane, right up to the pink face, then I'll discard everything below the zero plane, effectively just giving me what I need to machine. I will also be cutting the window trim, and bricks as separate pieces. Which is why I have hidden them, so they don't get exported with the building. This will make for a really clean model. And at 4k, that's what I want to deliver!

With the file brought into Aspire, and sunken to the correct depth, I sliced off the top molding, and hid it for use later.

At this point, I brought in the door and window trim, so I could vectorize them for both cutting them out, and laser cutting the trim later.

Cutting the raw wall panels was really quick. 40 minutes for all 3. I'm not mitering the corners, they'll be butt joints. But with some primer and sanding, they'll be golden.

The assembled walls came together perfectly.

A couple coats of filler primer, some sanding, and they looked great. I did use a spray texture on them in the end. This was done to match the other things we'll be fabricating, which will be stipple painted with a brush. This way they all look like they belong in the same environment.

Once the upper trim was machined, Jody set to work on the painting.

This is pretty much the final building structure. The upper molding will get attached to the base with a strip of aluminum tape. The tape is just to eliminate any light leaks when they eventually light the interior on set. We're doing frosted windows for this this from clear PETG, with a frosted vinyl decal.
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JWO

Picking back up!

I'm gonna try and pick this up from where I last left off on the miniatures build!

I have found over the years, that printing as much as we can, versus painting and masking, can shave measurable amounts of time off of a short deadline! These miniature sets are a prime example! The walls and floors are all printed vinyl. I can spend the time in the evenings drawing up the files, instead of wasting valuable build time at the shop. We did edge-paint all the MDF floor slabs though.

You can see by the X-acto knife the overall size of the room. The gumball machine was finished, and filled with plastic "gumball" beads. I made the turn dial from PVC and styrene plastic, with a silver lacquer paint finish.

And in the background, the multi-candy dispenser was finished, and filled with actual dessert sprinkles! Although the store looks REALLY bare, once they jam it full of the little toys for the commercial, it'll be busting with excitement!

The movie theater lobby set was the biggest of them all. Again the floor and walls were graphic prints I drew up. The exception was the red carpet. I cut a .060" styrene template on our Techno, then once the fit was established, I used it as a knife guide, and cut the carpet from red craft foam. I wanted a thickness to it, and the ultra-matt finish contrasted nicely against the satin finish print of the rest of the flooring.

We also made a scale popcorn-dispenser for the back wall. Miniature popcorn had me scratching my head a bit! In the end, I bought a yellow kitchen sponge, and picked it apart, to make the top all rough, and I think it worked awesome for a background element. Then we matched the counter-top color to the popcorn color, so it would be a smooth flow along the back wall.

The final touches were adding the real popcorn to the "oversized" element popcorn box, and the brass poles with red rope. The red rope we used was a piece of red pipe cleaner. It held it's shape great, and didn't place any tipping stress on the poles. The poles all had to be wild, so they could place them where ever they may need!
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JWO