Studio Practice: Building My Set!

The Design I came up with.

I first began building my set by gathering the wood I needed and then working out the scales of the door and window in Illustrator to then lasercut the wood. This was the most precise way for me to cut the wood into the exact design I wanted, especially considering the window above the door.

I wanted the set to be very stripped back and basic, so I painted each wall with white emulsion. I thought that having a white set and off-white puppets would help emphasise the coloured strings in my animation.

Here I just saved the cutting from the laser cut and sanded down the sides and created the door from that original piece of wood so it fit pretty much perfect!

I decided on this teal colour for the door, I felt it would compliment the red hearts on the puppets and the colours of the string.

Very basic foamboard hooks for my curtain pole.

Slowly coming together!

Originally, I thought it would be best to use hinges on my set so that I could easily move the walls around and get in and around the set. However, this turned into a problem quickly as I glued the hinges on wrong and made quite a mess of it!

I managed to solve this problem after a trip down to woodwork to see what they could suggest. They advised me to use a "cloth hinge" instead and that this would work a lot better for the kind of thing I was doing. This is basically making use of duct tape and masking tape to form a hinge out of. I never even knew this existed and above is the first try on some scrap wood to see how it would work.

Here is my final set with lighting! As you can see I painted over the cloth hinges and they are pretty much unnoticeable! I ended up switching the side the door was on so that it would work our better when animating, then when the door opens there is only black instead of seeing the Mac computer.