Furniture, hands and a tiny key.

Wow how time flies huh? Another month already. With this in mind I’ll quote Bruce Lee;

“If you love life, don’t waste time, for time is what life is made up of.”

Been a good month, lots of progress. I have all of the furniture finished apart from the wardrobe, which is a hero prop (I’m starting on that tomorrow).

I’m finding the balsa to be nice to work with. The furniture ends up extremely light, which from a production point of view is a little unnerving, but it feels fairly strong. It’s nice to carve too, for handles etc.

I’ve found a fairly good workflow for the balsa now, and a lot of the joints are carved out and inserted just like full size furniture. Wanted to be sure it would photograph well.

Next up I made a tiny key. This is for when he unlocks his wardrobe in which he keeps his hopes and dreams locked away. I had no idea how I was going to make it, so I ended up melting some pewter on the stove and casting a blank in a mold I cut from MDF. After that I filed, drilled, and sanded it into a key. Doesn’t get much more “from scratch” than that.

I’ve also made a whole bunch of 1/6 scale paper work, reports and general paper clutter to fill his dining table to which he brings his crappy job home too. These were just printed at 1200 dpi on the laserjet then manually cut up and assembled. The printing is pretty fine so I think it should photograph nicely.

As you can see, I’ve dressed a little briefcase too. The base on which this photo was taken is actually what will be the characters bed too.

The Liquid latex build up hands (over the annealed aluminium wire, brass knuckles and heatshrink armatures) are now done too.

They don’t have fingernails, which is something I’ll learn to live with. But other than that they have a fairly organic feel to them. I did a fair few sets, this photo is of my spares alone, for the inevitable case of finger armatures fatiguing over time. One pair of hands has rare earth magnets embedded in them too.

So now I’m also working on what will be the view from his apartment window; a brick wall, with a curtained window.

I cut a whole heap of bricks out of wood;

And started gluing them the the wall;

And now I need to fill in the gaps with some sort of putty and then score it to imitate the cement, and then paint and weather it. I’ll do the window frame when I do the rest of the windows and doors for the apartment.

I actually found the wood to have a very cool texture, almost like that of bricks in fact.

On top of all of that I’ve bought a new computer to be able to handle the shooting and post production needs for this film. I’m feeling a little light in the pocket at this very moment, but it had to be done.

For those geeks who are interested; Intel 3.4gzh corei7 clocked to 4.5ghz, 16gb of 1600mhz ram, Raedon 6870HD gfx card, and about 5.5TB of hdds, with the scratch disks running in RAID0 to keep up with the high bitrate footage. Still need to get a video monitor (prob HDTV), capture card (Matrox or Blackmagic), protools & mixer, and some back up HDD’s as finances permit.

 

Until next time!