We had an inspirational design, a sketch and then glued and taped together another analogue blocking.
-
- Inspirational
-
- rough sketch
-
- Blocking
Tag Archives: Inspirational Artwork
Yesilcam – building Kara´s street
Now that everything is “done” (which of course still is not…), we finally get around to putting together more pictures from the set-building process.
Our most complex set – both in building and shooting – is the set of Yesilcam Street, Kara´s street. This street is based on a real location – except for the parts that are made up. Sinem, Kara´s alter ego, lived here in her youth and this is where Kara´s journey in Istanbul starts.
I will present the pictures in a loose chronological order – starting with one from one of our research trips to Istanbul, when I met Ayse Teyze, who was still alive and running her tiny kiosk on Yesilcam.
Sinem and her mother in Yesilcam
Mini-Istanbul – a metropolis in one room
The set building process:
First, there was an inspirational. Then (and those photos I spare you) I started to do a small plastillin blocking and drew rough groundplans of the buildings visible in the inspirational.
Then Eugen Kelle started blocking in 3-D until we had a set big enough for the camera move and sent out floor plans – basically the measurements of the set itself and the different heights of ground.
Pablo in Ruit built a wooden construction which was covered in styrofoam by Jörg. While Pablo started working on construction of the houses which include the practicals, Jörg started to saw back, middle – and later foreground houses from styrofoam – and would continue to do so for several days, as there were many!
In the meantime the detailed “light-street-foreground” houses got into shape mainly on Nina´s and Susanna´s desks. More streets, groundplans, foreground houses, facade smoothing and filling, adjustment of all houses, fixing them to the set and finally the paint work – everybody working hard.
You guys in Ruit did an amazing job!
-
- The inspirational
-
- Wooden construction
-
- The “light street” in the middle of nowhere
-
- underneath the facade
-
- the city growing…
-
- Pablo working on the practicals
-
- Where are we??
-
- city growing…
-
- and growing…
-
- still growing
-
- finally: dawn by Susanna
-
- And more colours.
The curtain rises for the set builders
It´s about time we introduced our set building team and their work. At Steegmüller-Skulpturen in Ruit, close to Stuttgart, the fabulous four Susanna Jerger (Head of Set Building), Jörg Steegmüller, Pablo Pinkus and Nina Milarch work hard to give our puppets a stage. And with a stage they started.
We know, of course, about the existence and possibilities of a digital layout – and a DLO sometimes indeed does come in handy to plan a set. Still we deliberately decided against it and went for an analogue approach. From other productions we remembered how the rendered plans from the DLO sometimes also posed a limitation towards the artistic approach. You are tempted to rely more on the numbers from the rendered files than on the artist´s eye.
Sorry, long story to explain the first pics: From the inspirational drawing via a little cardboard set we blocked a 1:1 cardboard set – in which we manually blocked our camera move, too. From this blocking we took final measurements and handed them to the Team in Ruit.
-
- Marionette stage, inspirational artwork
-
- paper model, 1:4, kitchen table
-
- Jörg Steegmüller and Nina Milarch mounting the floor boards
-
- Colour samples for the floor by Susanna Jerger
-
- The completed floor
Mr Fleas
We have another character. Mr Fleas. That’s him in an inspirational drawing, singing a duet with the Emerald Fish.
-
- Inspirational artwork by Anne Hofmann
