Production on the sets started to coincide with production of the puppets about when all the silicone was finished casting for them. When it comes to set desgin, I don't like to use references. I'm a very clingy person: if I use a reference, I'll stick to close to it. By not using one, I have to go by memory, and memory always alters something. That way I feel like I create spaces that almost look like they have a basis in reality, yet something is slightly off. A second 'rule' I hold myself to, is to always try and use the material the object is supposed to be made from. A wooden closet will be made by wood, and if something is supposed to be lined with cloth, it will be lined with cloth. With this in mind, I started with the hardest, most daunting set: the train.
There were a couple of logistical problems to work around when it came to the train scene. - I wanted a wooden ceiling, but it also needed to be curved. - The walls needed to be sturdy, but also removable, so I can get the camera where I need it to be. - What will you see outside the windows?
I killed to birds with one stone when I came up with a solution for the curved wooden ceiling. In order to make the curve, I first made a boxshape out of some old beanpoles. To the top of this box, I stapeled a sheet of plastic larger than the box was wide, making it arc. To make it look wooden, I glued icecream sticks on the inside. The box also allowed me to glue the walls into it with hot glue, which made it swappable. And now I got to the biggest problem of all: what are we going to see outside the windows?
It's a train, and the first thing that came in my mind when I thought about looking outside is a landscape that speeds by, almost to fast to see what is in front of you. So, I wanted to recreate that. Then I had to decide whether to recreate it while animating, or by using post-production? I wanted to challenge myself and was also challenged by my tutor to do it in frame. This led do a little machine me and my father built, that consisted of a motor and two rollers. A cloth screen was slided over the two rollers, and moved around and around when powered by the motor. I glued photos of landscapes and houses onto the cloth, and voila! I set the exposure of the camera low enough for motion blur to show on the frame. It worked great! Just like the landscape zipping by!
When it came to the appartment set, everything was pretty straight forward: normal walls, normal closets and a normal, wooden floor. The only highlight of the set for me, was the table lamp. I had to learn soldering and basic electrics for it, and I'm pretty proud of it.
The bar set is also straight forward. The big overhead lamp was made with plexiglass with some lime paper on top of it, lit by LED's stuck on a piece of wall above it. The little glass that gets smashed to pieces is made from plexiglass, that I heated up with a heat gun. When it was hot enough, I plunged in it with the back of a drill bit, which made the plexiglass stretch and fold around the bit, making a cilinder shape, or, one might say, a glass. Not really setrelated but, to get the hazy aesthetic for this scene, I placed a glass pane in front of the camera, that I slathered with hair wax.
The last set, the room of 'The Florist', was designed to be crooked and wrong looking, with some weird lighting. I covered up a LED-strip in a way that made it look like car headlights.A skylight was made in the ceiling that looked like roadmarkings when a light shone through it. To patch up holes that formed because the walls were not of equal length, I used plasticine that I painted to match the walls. The walls have a grainy look to them due to the fact that I mixed a whole lot of sawdust in the paint. It makes it look weird and rough.