Two Gents Part Three: Letters and Ink

Texturing the Columns was probably the smoothest part of the whole set! The cardboard material took the plaster the best! Painting them tho, was a different story! It was rather tricky painting something circular on a horizontal plane. We used sponges to stop the dripping. The inking on them was also very difficult! We all had different ways of doing it. I felt this wasn't going to look very good so I messaged James asking which of the inking he preferred. After telling my team which technique he preferred and how to achieve it, Joe and Flo went about it wrong. This resulted in me having to go over their work and wasting time on them!

The Easy Part

more columns!

it's never-ending!

Mmmm, not sure thats right Flo..

WRONG

Right

That's better!

The time came to see if our saving grace worked.... After PVAing the hell out of the floor, Laura had us pick up all the sheets of ply and shake them vigorously. If everything was done well, the plaster would stick on. That's the theory anyways.... Most of it fell off! By this point we got more floor space so we just laid the whole floor our and plastered the rest of it while doing the patches.

Nice Patchy Floor

Trying to blend in those patches!

Once the floor was all patched up, we moved on to the MASSIVE flats! We started off with texturing all 4 sections roughly. Then I cut out various different shapes out of ply according to the model. When plastered over, this added more dimension and depth in different areas.

Theres the Pangea effect

The flats all painted nice and purty!

Got my inking technique down to a science!

By this point we were on a mad dash to finish! We had to come in on a saturday! A SATURDAY! James even came over to the workshop often to help us as our numbers kept going down. The only things left to do were the hardest parts... POLY CARVING! We did the steel deck carving first.... so quickly that we didn't take any pictures! We were pretty rushed by this point so pictures are scarce.We were given the flats for the steel deck "wall." I then got thin pieces of ply and screwed them onto the wall to create a lip. I then glued layers of polystyrene where the rock work was going to be heavy, the two ends. We then carved it out into rock shapes, scrimmed and plastered over! Same thing was done for the front of the stage rock work, but there was a bit of confusion. We were given more sheets, so we assumed that was for the front...Nope that was for the sides of the steel deck. Apparently when they cut out the side of the ramp, they did two sides... but one of those sides was supposed to be flipped up to create the front wall. We weren't told this until we started screwing in the flats we thought were for the front. 

There were also the dreaded BIRDIE BOXES! This was where I found out SMs don't quite have the same mindset as designers. As George, the lighting designer, wanted there to be birdie lights on the front of the stage, we had to disguise them as boulders along the front of the stage. The SMs were in charge of making these little boxes for the birdie lights to rest on and we were to carve around them. The first mistake the SMs made was making the boxes twice as big as they were supposed to be! After George came in to cut them down, they were still massive! We were on our last 3 days in the workshop and had to do all the polycarving by then. We didn't have enough time to carve enough to disguise these boxes. Lucky Laura stepped in and told us to email James with CC to Sean and Lucy to discuss these boxes. In the end, they were cut, for good reason. It would have thrown the balance of the design off and they would have cut into the ramp quite a bit.

Laura coming to save us!

See, no birdie boxes needed!

I ended up carving most of this heh

To save on time, we scrimmed the Polystyrene and added plaster at the same time! This was HELL!! Even with the added idenden to the plaster, it was a bitch to get the plaster on the wet scrim! Some parts even started to fall out so we added a lot of nails so the scrim wouldn't fall off as we added the plaster. In the end though, the front rock work was very strong and study.

After this it was get in! And the fun of paint calls. That was just pure chaos, so I had no time to take any pictures, but you could definitely see the set coming together in the space. Quite different from seeing in the workshop under harsh lighting.