the sun's a ball of butter
Jul. 18th, 2009 07:58 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
Semester is over! I survived and everything, and I'm free until the first or second week of September now \o/
And now, have a ton of photos. I don't know if anyone wants to see them, but I want to post them, so there.
First of all, that set design project I spent a million hours on.
The assignment was to do a set model based on a dream; this was actually based on a comic book concept I'd been poking at that was originally based on a dream. It's meant to be suggestive of an extremely distant-future Chicago, in the same kind of way that England is an extremely distant-future Middle-Earth.
We were given eight class hours to finish this thing. I'm pretty sure I spent at least thirty, not counting the time I spent in Dick Blick running around trying to figure out how to make things and scribbling scale calculations on every bit of scrap paper I could find and probably making the employees extremely nervous. It still came out with kind of shoddy workmanship, for which I apologize in advance, but I got my idea across.

This is the stage house, which I also had to build from scratch, because I deliberately wanted to make the set on an absurdly huge scale. It's 14x14x36" at 3/32" to the foot, which translates to a space about 150x150x400'. I would be half an inch tall at this scale, so I very quickly gave up trying to calculate in feet and just decided to assume that 1" = one story.


This is the scaffolding on which most of the action would take place. In theory it would be normal-looking scaffolding with actual right angles involved, with the flat surfaces at 30', 40', and 50' to be level with the audience seating, which is also all in the 30-50' height range. In practice, six hours of work produced this completely useless but awesome-looking wire sculpture thing, so I quit while I was ahead and took a few photos for posterity before cutting holes in it to accomodate the taller scenery. Translated into an actual set it wouldn't be practical, but I honestly think that aesthetically it looks better with the rest of the model; much like other scenery I made, it looks organic despite being made of metal, which is important.

It took me something like an hour and a half to make these :( I suck at origami. But the pack of origami foils I bought for the purpose had a bunch of colored ones I didn't expect to need, and that turned out to be useful later on.

More sculptures! Photographed from below, to give a bit of a better idea of how this would look to someone on a full-size set, Remember, 3/32" scale; that tree there would be almost a hundred feet tall, and the pile of cubes and the rounded thing would be 25-30 feet. The tree is a good example of what I mean by things looking organic, too; these things have been around longer than history can remember, and for all people know they simply grew there. You can get a bit of an idea of what I did with those colored foils, too; a set designer I talked to suggested that I use more color with the rounded thing and the tree to set off the bright gold and copper of some of those cubes. So the tree has little green flowers, and there are some pieces of blue and aqua foil under the rounded thing to suggest a pool of water.

The Art Institute! Sort of. In the actual setting, there's a whole area of absurdly huge generically-classical buildings that serve as the library and the school and, in the case of one coliseum, to contain an entire neighborhood. But for set purposes, even a set this huge, I needed to abbreviate that into a single area at one end of the stage. The backdrop is deliberately way huger than scale, again at the suggestion of the set designer who thought it would better parallel the dreamworldy hugeness of the sculptures in the middle. I wish you could see the floor better; it's a piece of really cool gift wrap I bought and spent about a million years accenting with a gold paint pen, because without metallic bits at the ends of the stage to connect with all the metal in the middle the whole thing looked awful.

Other end of the stage-- same general idea, using the U Chicago quadrangle to represent what are, within the setting, a bunch of government buildings. Accented with a silver pen on this end-- you can see that some of the stones on the floor are shiny.

The whole thing! Hooray. When we presented it, we stuck it under some lights and got to play around with color and focus and I'm sorry I couldn't get photos of it that way; my professor and I ended up shining yellow towards the Art Institute end and green towards the U Chicago end, and the way they fragmented on all the metallic parts in the middle was really really cool.
In the interim here I also did a costume design assignment and a sound design assignment. Sound design I can't show pictures of, obviously, but it was a passage from World War Z read to Nine Inch Nails' "A Warm Place"; the costume design assignment was done on a second consecutive all-nighter while watching cartoons, so the idea is sound but the quality of the work was awful. You guys don't get to see that either.
Instead, have the costume designs I did for the group final. These are about a million times better, because I inked them and had decent colored pencils and paid attention to shading and put a lot more thought into showing people's relationships with color and material and so on. Plus I got into the costume shop so they got swatches, goddamn. My drawing skills still leave a lot to be desired, but given that I'm really pretty proud of these.
These are for Sophocles's Electra, but not a terribly historically accurate version.



We agreed as a group to do a really gaudy geometric set and fairly monochrome soft flowy costumes, so instead of using actual contrasting colors to indicate dissent I ended up having to play more with the quality of the color, and with choice of material. Thus, Electra and Chrysothemis are both still upset over their fathers' death, so they wear extremely dark colors to suggest mourning without being full mourning. Chrysothemis is on better terms with their mother and stepfather, though, so her dress is more reddish-- closer to the bright magenta of Clytemnestra's dress-- and a nice soft drapy fabric, whereas Electra's is duller and made of a pretty rough cheap-looking fabric. Clytemnestra, on the other hand, is pretty happy with her life, so she gets lots of jewelry and a nice shiny bright purple outfit that just goes trailing off forever and ever behind her.

Orestes shows up at first pretending to be a simple traveler, and one bringing Clytemnestra and Aegisthus good news at that; thus he gets a travelling cloak of fairly rough material-- a lot like that of Electra's dress, actually-- trimmed with the same bright purple as the queen's dress. Underneath, though, he's got a darker tunic-- that material was close to what Chrysothemis is wearing, and I really wish you guys could feel how awesomely drapy this stuff is-- and it's trimmed in the same dark purple Electra's wearing.
Apparently I not only survived the semester but got an A, but it's four years since I got through an academic semester without severe embarrassment and more than that since I got an A in a class I wasn't repeating, so chances are high that I will wake up soon into the real world where I flunked. In the meantime I'm relatively free for the next six weeks, so brb buying a tank of coffee and writing all the fanfiction in the world.
And now, have a ton of photos. I don't know if anyone wants to see them, but I want to post them, so there.
First of all, that set design project I spent a million hours on.
The assignment was to do a set model based on a dream; this was actually based on a comic book concept I'd been poking at that was originally based on a dream. It's meant to be suggestive of an extremely distant-future Chicago, in the same kind of way that England is an extremely distant-future Middle-Earth.
We were given eight class hours to finish this thing. I'm pretty sure I spent at least thirty, not counting the time I spent in Dick Blick running around trying to figure out how to make things and scribbling scale calculations on every bit of scrap paper I could find and probably making the employees extremely nervous. It still came out with kind of shoddy workmanship, for which I apologize in advance, but I got my idea across.

This is the stage house, which I also had to build from scratch, because I deliberately wanted to make the set on an absurdly huge scale. It's 14x14x36" at 3/32" to the foot, which translates to a space about 150x150x400'. I would be half an inch tall at this scale, so I very quickly gave up trying to calculate in feet and just decided to assume that 1" = one story.


This is the scaffolding on which most of the action would take place. In theory it would be normal-looking scaffolding with actual right angles involved, with the flat surfaces at 30', 40', and 50' to be level with the audience seating, which is also all in the 30-50' height range. In practice, six hours of work produced this completely useless but awesome-looking wire sculpture thing, so I quit while I was ahead and took a few photos for posterity before cutting holes in it to accomodate the taller scenery. Translated into an actual set it wouldn't be practical, but I honestly think that aesthetically it looks better with the rest of the model; much like other scenery I made, it looks organic despite being made of metal, which is important.

It took me something like an hour and a half to make these :( I suck at origami. But the pack of origami foils I bought for the purpose had a bunch of colored ones I didn't expect to need, and that turned out to be useful later on.

More sculptures! Photographed from below, to give a bit of a better idea of how this would look to someone on a full-size set, Remember, 3/32" scale; that tree there would be almost a hundred feet tall, and the pile of cubes and the rounded thing would be 25-30 feet. The tree is a good example of what I mean by things looking organic, too; these things have been around longer than history can remember, and for all people know they simply grew there. You can get a bit of an idea of what I did with those colored foils, too; a set designer I talked to suggested that I use more color with the rounded thing and the tree to set off the bright gold and copper of some of those cubes. So the tree has little green flowers, and there are some pieces of blue and aqua foil under the rounded thing to suggest a pool of water.

The Art Institute! Sort of. In the actual setting, there's a whole area of absurdly huge generically-classical buildings that serve as the library and the school and, in the case of one coliseum, to contain an entire neighborhood. But for set purposes, even a set this huge, I needed to abbreviate that into a single area at one end of the stage. The backdrop is deliberately way huger than scale, again at the suggestion of the set designer who thought it would better parallel the dreamworldy hugeness of the sculptures in the middle. I wish you could see the floor better; it's a piece of really cool gift wrap I bought and spent about a million years accenting with a gold paint pen, because without metallic bits at the ends of the stage to connect with all the metal in the middle the whole thing looked awful.

Other end of the stage-- same general idea, using the U Chicago quadrangle to represent what are, within the setting, a bunch of government buildings. Accented with a silver pen on this end-- you can see that some of the stones on the floor are shiny.

The whole thing! Hooray. When we presented it, we stuck it under some lights and got to play around with color and focus and I'm sorry I couldn't get photos of it that way; my professor and I ended up shining yellow towards the Art Institute end and green towards the U Chicago end, and the way they fragmented on all the metallic parts in the middle was really really cool.
In the interim here I also did a costume design assignment and a sound design assignment. Sound design I can't show pictures of, obviously, but it was a passage from World War Z read to Nine Inch Nails' "A Warm Place"; the costume design assignment was done on a second consecutive all-nighter while watching cartoons, so the idea is sound but the quality of the work was awful. You guys don't get to see that either.
Instead, have the costume designs I did for the group final. These are about a million times better, because I inked them and had decent colored pencils and paid attention to shading and put a lot more thought into showing people's relationships with color and material and so on. Plus I got into the costume shop so they got swatches, goddamn. My drawing skills still leave a lot to be desired, but given that I'm really pretty proud of these.
These are for Sophocles's Electra, but not a terribly historically accurate version.



We agreed as a group to do a really gaudy geometric set and fairly monochrome soft flowy costumes, so instead of using actual contrasting colors to indicate dissent I ended up having to play more with the quality of the color, and with choice of material. Thus, Electra and Chrysothemis are both still upset over their fathers' death, so they wear extremely dark colors to suggest mourning without being full mourning. Chrysothemis is on better terms with their mother and stepfather, though, so her dress is more reddish-- closer to the bright magenta of Clytemnestra's dress-- and a nice soft drapy fabric, whereas Electra's is duller and made of a pretty rough cheap-looking fabric. Clytemnestra, on the other hand, is pretty happy with her life, so she gets lots of jewelry and a nice shiny bright purple outfit that just goes trailing off forever and ever behind her.

Orestes shows up at first pretending to be a simple traveler, and one bringing Clytemnestra and Aegisthus good news at that; thus he gets a travelling cloak of fairly rough material-- a lot like that of Electra's dress, actually-- trimmed with the same bright purple as the queen's dress. Underneath, though, he's got a darker tunic-- that material was close to what Chrysothemis is wearing, and I really wish you guys could feel how awesomely drapy this stuff is-- and it's trimmed in the same dark purple Electra's wearing.
Apparently I not only survived the semester but got an A, but it's four years since I got through an academic semester without severe embarrassment and more than that since I got an A in a class I wasn't repeating, so chances are high that I will wake up soon into the real world where I flunked. In the meantime I'm relatively free for the next six weeks, so brb buying a tank of coffee and writing all the fanfiction in the world.