Set building week 2

During the past week, our set has made good progress which has been down to us making use of being able to book out the studio key outside of our timetabled sessions at times when any two of us have been available, being organised as a group and having planned out our set design in detail before we started the full build. After Sarah and I spent a good few hours attempting to get the sticks to remain on the wall with PVA glue on Friday, we found out on Monday morning that there was a glue gun available to us in the store room, which made the rest of the wall focused stage of the build a lot less time consuming and efficient to complete.

Having most of the group present in this week's session also allowed us to be more productive in terms of how much we managed to achieve within the timetabled studio session, as well as taking the pressure of Sarah and I to complete a lot of the work between the two of us.

Within Monday's three hour session, we managed to complete the walls and begin on looking through some of the potential possibilities for props for our set. Because the theme of our film is quite dark and mysterious, and the subject 'the uncanny', we aimed from the beginning to keep our props relatively simplistic and not overcrowd the detail of the four walls with too many distractions. Instead, we wanted to remain close to our idea of having a wooden shack building, but bring some old looking items from 'the inside' (of a room) to 'the outdoors', to create the impression that someone was possibly living in this shack building and that there was some history to the items within it.

On Thursday, Sarah, Billy and I spent a few extra hours filling up the remaining gaps on the walls with extra sticks we had collected, as well as added the texture of the red paint splats/handprints for the blood effect to a few parts of the set. This ensured that the set's walls were definitely up to the standard we wanted to achieve ready for Monday's session where the filming of the action was to take place.

The main props that we found worked really well on our set were:

 

• Floor surface - Cushions, rugs, creating a messy but lived in appearance.
• Furniture items - old, antique looking shelves, some kind of covered up box to resemble a seat.
• Decoration - painting of abandoned place, taxidermy (deer head, rabbit), old flowers, curtains?, weather clock.
• Character - blood splattered/handprinted on a few areas of walls, ornaments of people, wood to make fire - suggesting a lonely character but also quite creepy in terms of the blood etc.

Here are some photographs of our updated set: