Set building Week 1

This week we began the process of building our set. We had three walls available to us, and chose one of these to be one that already had the window space cut out of it, which will save us time and help us to visualise our film when it comes to wanting to create the green screen aspect. We began the process by looking at the space available to us and working out as a group how best to position the three walls. We decided to make it less box-like in terms of the structure, as we thought about where the camera would go and how this would appear on screen. Instead, we chose to position one of the outer walls at a slight angle, so that when it comes to filming the camera is not restricted by a confined space.

The first task that we were faced with once the walls were up was to remove any excess wallpaper and paint left from the last set that had been created. This was quite time consuming, however because all of our group of six were present, we managed to work together to split into smaller groups and work on different walls each.

After enough of the existing wallpaper and paint was scraped off, we then had the task of wallpapering our own set. We took our time with this, as we had not previously done this before and we wanted to ensure that we did a good job of it, as this was the first layer that was being built onto our set. We did come into a few problems with this however, which I think came down to us being too careful over it and therefore not getting much completed during the seminar session. The wallpaper that we bought also naturally has a bumpy texture to it, which made it slightly more difficult to tell whether we were adding too much wallpaper paste and making it bumpy or whether this was just down to the appearance of the wallpaper. I think considering it was our first time wallpapering a set, we did an alright job of it, and we have all spent a lot of time coming into the studio during the rest of the week since the seminar to finish and neaten it, however I would still consider this not to be our strongest set building task as a group.

After completing the wallpapering process on the remaining walls, we waited for 24 hours for it to fully dry, whilst communicating in our group throughout the week to arrange a suitable time to meet up and start on the paint work. On Thursday, myself, Sarah, Ryan and Billy met up at the studio and began to paint the set. Because our set is going to be a wooden shack in the woods, our intention was not for the paint to be perfectly neat, but instead to create a scattered look, as our aim is to fill the walls with sticks after the paint has dried. This is something that we are bearing in mind throughout the set building process - the idea of creating a messy look, which fits with not only our film idea and theme, but also within the overall subject of the 'uncanny' that forms the module brief.


                                                      

On Friday morning, Sarah and I were the only ones that came into the studio again, which was a little disappointing as we still had a lot left to do with our set, however we spent a good few hours in there doing what we could and made further arrangements to contact our group to ensure we gave them advance notice when planning to do the same next week. We spent the time starting to put the final layer onto the walls - the sticks that will make up the wooden shack building. We realised that we forgot to keep the PVA glue out of the props cupboard, so we firstly went to buy some so that we could get started on this on the day, rather than wait until Monday and give ourselves even less time to complete the task. Whilst we feel like our set will look great visually if we could fill the entire thing with sticks, we hit a bit of a creative problem whilst starting out with this. Although spending hours in the studio, we actually made little progress due to the sticks falling down continuously. We tried the best that we could to solve this problem in a number of ways, from holding them down for a few minutes, to trying less and then more glue and using smaller twigs instead of larger sticks, and eventually did end up with an almost solid section that has not yet fallen. However, we were aware of how time consuming this task was, and knew we needed to rethink how best to approach it in order to still create the visuals we had in mind for our finished set. We decided to email Susannah to ask for some advice on the type of glue we were using, and also organised a plan for next week in terms of the times that we will be booking the studio key out that are outside of the scheduled seminar session. I think that although this is a bit of a concern at the moment in terms of the tight timed schedule we have to complete the module, the set building process is still going well and we are all determined to overcome this to make the best set that we can, as well as committed to the project by coming into the studio at any available opportunity that we have outside of the timetabled sessions.