It Aint the Size of Your Kitchen That Matters to the Ladies!

Before I get to the next post, I thought I would post a small behind the scenes video of our last location shoot for my next short film! Woot! Woot!

Believe it or not, this shoot ran from 7:30pm to 2am, last Saturday night. It was soo much fun to do. It's kind of fun for me to watch, as I missed a lot of what was going down! But the pre-pro takes a lot of time and effort, and ate up most of my free time. Securing a location, doing the graphic design for the fake newspaper, getting it printed, breaking out the shot lists, and making sure the schedules work with everyone involved!
All in all, I had such a great time! I have met a ton of new people, whom I hope to continue to have relationships with long after the shooting wraps. So here's to all of you guys, and all your hard work!

But while all this was goin' down, we were working at the shop on a kitchen set for a popular kids toy. I can't mention the toy, but I can document the build! The set was something that I designed, based off of a couple of artist concepts, and color designs. The set, and all it's pieces, are a fairly basic set, and all of it was drawn up in either Corel, or Aspire, depending on where I wanted to end up.

The first step, as always, was to nail out a floor plan, then I could base all the elevations off of this basic map. All of this will be 2-D profile cuts from both 1/4" and 1/8" styrene sheets. 1/4 and 1/8" styrene sheets you say?!? What?!? That's right, this is a miniature kitchen! At a total size of 3 feet X 3 feet!

First up was the fridge. Not for any other reason, except that those were the parts that our Techno CNC finished first! I actually split this job off onto both machine at the same time. The smaller pieces were all cut on the table top one, while our big machine cut the larger sections like the walls and floors.

The little counter stools were all cut on the small machine, from 1/4" styrene. I used 1/4" acrylic rod for the stool posts, set into the appropriate sized hole in the bases and stool tops.

With the fridge and stools done, I moved on to the kitchen sink. Again, all simple 2D stuff. The faucet spout was fashioned from 1/8" brass rod, with the oversized sprayer head made from half an acrylic sphere bead, that we somehow have a bazillion of. The little tap handle were ground down miniature wire marettes.

 It wasn't long before these guys were ready for some paint! I really like to use ABS lacquer on anything styrene that we make. It eats right into the material, and can be sanded, if need be, in less than 10 minutes! This makes for some fast turn arounds!

8)
JWO

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!

8)
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!!!!

8)
JWO