John and Christine Pick Colors!

Saturday Build: Dying Fabric for the Trees!

Mixing dye

Stirring eight 33 foot long pieces of muslin in big tubs for almost two hours.

Wringing them out and hanging them to dry on the pipe while wearing high fashion trash bags.

All eight strip hanging to dry.
After this we raised the pipe- sending the fabric up past the curtain line. The fabric dripped onto the drop cloth making it rain dye for several hours. At first it sounded just like actual rain.

High Fashion protective garb.

Saturday Build: stumps, mylars, and houses

act two!

I should probably have posted these!

Three Houses

Act Two is very much like Act One- however the woods get deeper, and more menacing, and our charecters get into much more trouble. In other ways much is still the same. We begin with three houses (although they have more stuff) and then see the woods which changes according to the time of day.

The Woods Late Afternoon

In order to make them feel a little deeper the second act will feature hanging vines and be slightly darker. Having met with John, Peter, Eli, and Josh earlier today this seems possible. As does the shadow puppetry.

The Woods, Midnight with fallen giant.

Those aren't dark purple hills behind the trees- that's the fallen giant and tower at the end of the show. We're going to need a puppeteer!

studio update august 23

Alrighty. Just looked through all my notes from my last meeting with Peter and Pam. School starts in just over a week and I'm back in the saddle. I better be I meet tomorrow with Eli and Josh and will hopefully get to chat with John Trout.

When I wrote about my last meeting I mentioned how great it was to brainstorm as a group. Peter has a good sense of this world coming together in the set and he had some great ideas about how to deal with all the animals in the play (Milky White, a horse, birds, and a hen). If you've been following the tumbler of inspiration you'll see a bunch of origami animals- Peter had this great idea about transforming the flatness of the set into origami creatures.
Probably nothing but the birds will actually be true origami but I think that constructing the cow horse and hen could be really fun for a group of students (set design or maybe even my sculpture class now that I've seen my class list!)

Also. I made a fancy list to talk to John about.

old growth forest in british columbia

While Mr Tillman and I were on the Sunshine Coast of British Columbia we had the chance to stop by a park that featured some old growth forest. Absolutely amazing AND shockingly like my drawings for the set.

It's hard to see in this image but you have to look up to see the tops of the trees. From here they're just big verticals.

Nurse log (in the forest- not the sculpture garden!)
Most trees had this beautiful green moss covering many of their branches. This is the feel that I want for ACT Two.
See all that growth around the base of the tree? That's what I'm thinking about for the foam bases of the trees.

Mark Dion and Roxy Paine

Just got back from a much needed vacation in the Pacific Northwest. My enthusiasm for all places (anyone who's heard me talk about both Baltimore and Iowa can attest to that one) is strong for Washington and British Columbia. I have all kinds of stories to tell (ask me about the alpaca farm!) but I didn't expect my vacation to also be re-energizing for my work on the set.

While in Seattle I had the chance to go to the Olympic Sculpture Park. Most sculpture gardens leave me feeling a little underwhelmed (the BMA for sure) Seattle's new (or new ish I guess) park does it right showcasing all kinds of work from Richard Serra, to Alexander Calder (one of Garry Cerrone's favorites) to living artists working today like Teresita Fernandez and Mark Dion as well as a half dozen temporary ones by local artists up for just the summer.

I was so excited about the Mark Dion piece.

Neukom Vivarium is a custom built greenhouse built to display a nurse log from a forest in the Pacific Northwest. A nurse log is a fallen tree that hosts new life on the forest floor as it decomposes. The old tree lives on as a rich habitat for ferns, new trees, fungi, and a whole host of little critters.

Mark Dion uses the constructs of a natural history museum and naturalists as his visual vocabulary. The Vivarium includes custom made critter tiles, displays of books, tools, glass jars filled with samples, and a docent wearing outdoor gear to answer your art and science questions.

The greenhouse itself is shielded with transparent green panels to mimic the shade of the forest. These shadows this cast on the floor were extra beautiful.

The Vivarium has a second room filled with drawers and cabinets filled with books and drawings that you can sift through. I was particularly into this drawing of a cross section of a log.

Here's a short little video of Mark Dion speaking about the piece on site.

This Roxy Paine tree is right next to the Vivarium.

This piece by Mungo Thompson was great surprise. Thompson is a sound artist from LA and his piece b/w is playing outside the pavilion and in the parking garage. It features recordings of birds slowed down so they sound like humpback whales and the sound of whales sped up so they sound like birds. Super smart. I was also a fan of the streamlined dual turntable display.

meeting with Peter and Pam

This is kind of a no brainer but when you're working with other people it's so helpful to talk about the things you're doing. Peter, Pam, and I had an awesome meeting about color, materials, 18th century Germany, and origami animals.

I'm thinking very differently about the houses and animals in the play now.

Peter keeps a scene by scene tally of "crazy shit" in his binder of things that have to happen in the play like "birds fly down and pluck out the stepsisters eyes". His list and my purple post-its on my script had a lot of overlap and we've already got ideas on how to solve things.

act one (second post)

Rapunzel's Tower

I'm hoping this one is possible. Since the back half of the woods is essentially shapes on the scrim then we should be able to project shadows onto them. I'd like to make Rapunzel's tower (AND the witch climbing it) out of shadow puppets for that first short scene. I'm going to have to talk to John about whether or not this even possible.

The Woods at Midnight

Midnight it when things get darkest in the first act- not to mention that that's the way nighttime actually functions. So for each midnight in the play the set will be much darker with the lights a deep purple and the trees back lit so they look closer to black.

act one (first post)

Three Houses.

The woods are either dark or dimly lit behind a scrim. The houses are very simple- just fabric stretched over wood, you should be able to see the wooden supports through the fabric like these two paintings by German Painter Sigmar Polke. The houses will also be on casters so they can roll in and out.

Afternoon Woods.

You can see all that pink book page "leaves" on the floor of the woods. I'm thinking 8 trees, one stump, and another surface of various plants.

Early Evening Woods

Things get darker and more blue. See how the trees have moved around? There's a scrim behind the 8 trees that has other trees on it- either painted or perhaps just paper and light.

Grandmothers House

The woods are dimly lit and the light is on the house (could easily be Jack's). I love the idea of the bed being green in some way- it would be opposite of Little Red.

studio and sketchbook

Can of markers. Yes, I organize my studio just like my classroom.
Stack of books. I'm borrowing the bottom two from John Trout and the red one is my copy of the script.
Sketchbook to do lists.

trees

Here's the first of my preparatory drawings for the set. These are actually the most recent but I wanted to post them earlier rather than later.

I need to decide what kinds of shape the trees should be and how many branches they have. The trees will be a dark purple and they'll be sitting on this pink foam surface on casters. I'd like the woods to feel really large- much larger than the actors on the stage- my instinct is to have the trees be like the ones on the top row- tall with most of the branches implied to be offstage- it's a little simpler and cleaner and implies that the trees are much bigger than they are.

Here's a drawing to give you a more clear understanding of how the trees would function. I think in person they'll be much cooler- think of this drawing like furniture instructions from IKEA.

The trees will sit on pink foam which sits on plywood which has casters attached to the bottom. This way the trees can be moved between scenes and imply that the woods are changing and getting deeper or simply different.

All kinds of floura (and fauna?) will be below the base of the trees stuck into the pink foam. I'm thinking teal glitter ferns and plants made from paper covered in glitter, red mushrooms, and silver flowers made from glitter pom-pons and sparkly mylar foil table toppers. I'd even like one that's only the smaller plant life. This will be a lot but they should be easy to make- I'm toying with the idea of having a big afterschool workshop or X block flower and fern making glitter party so students we could get a lot done and expand the amount of kids who are working on the set (and for John- it could promote the crew-especially if we invite MS kids).

The sparkly parts on the forest floor will twinkle slightly all throughout the musical, constantly reminding you of the wood's presence even when the action is upstage or in the houses. The glitter also references the unnatural, or magical and unexpected parts of the woods. Plus Little Red gets to pick some of them early on in the first act, since they just stick in to the foam this should be relatively easy.

I'm like the bases being rectangular as a reference to Roxy Paine but they could easily be a more free form and organic shape.

it's a small world

I should probably share Mary Blair's 3-D extravaganza- the It's a Small World Ride. Originally constructed for the 1964 World's Fair then moved to Disney Theme Parks. Unfortunately it's been updated but most of her work is still in tact.
I'm planning lots of flatness used to create deep space- the two dimensional made three dimensional- image made into object.
For those brave souls willing to spend 9 minutes watching it, a youtube user has uploaded the full Its a Small World ride onto youtube. Watch it with the sound off if you find that part offensive and look at the awesome Mary Blair Set! And her use of glitter. She's responsible for all the awesomeness except the scary animatronic singing children and the never ending song.

forest floor inspiration

Ann Hamilton's beautiful installation corpus at Mass MoCA in which sheets of paper rain/flutter/drift down onto the ground throughout the exhibition. I'd love to cover parts of the forest floor with book pages like leaves. Too many might be too noisy. I'm also interested in wheat pasting some right to the stage if we cover the floor.

Dip-dye outtakes from this months Martha Stewart Living. You can see all this when you read their Craft Dept. blog daily like I do. For a little accent- I want some of the pages dyed magenta.

This image is from a fantastic coffee shop in Europe- the whole place involves upcycled books in light fixtures, and in this case the wall.

Mary Blair Meets Roxy Paine

After writing it down yesterday I was talking to an old grad school friend on the phone and I described the set again as Mary Blair meets Roxy Paine. I think it's best in this case just to post images.

Mary Blair- Love the color, mood, whimsy, and the way that the shapes can be both inviting and menacing. I'm borrowing the color palette from the first and third image.

Roxy Paine- Love the hovering foliage- I'm thinking of putting each tree on similar platforms with my own foliage and then putting the platforms on casters so they can move around. His trees are also pretty remarkable- they're menacing yet beautiful and polished.