Images of Finished Set

26/5/11

Today was our last day on creating the set. We layed out all the props we had gathered for the room including a tea set and real food. I brought in a smoking pipe, a Czechoslovakia envelope I managed to find online with were placed on the coffee table along with other props including a decanter and German story book. I also brought in to uni a large house plant from home to fill the empty corner of the living room. I think the plant looked really good in the living room as it showed more evidence of people actually living there.
We were given a large selection of lights and cameras which we could adjust to our preference. We also had use of a smoke machine which gave a really interesting effect in Gregor's bedroom which helped relate our set to the Psychological horror genre.

Overall, I'm really pleased with the set we have created. It may have taken a while to create but we managed to achieve all we set out to do before the deadline. I found it quite hard to work in such a large group as so many people had different ideas, and not many confirmed their ideas with the rest of the group. This particularly showed when it came to making the contents of the sets as some constructions got in the way of others creating their individual pieces. The most annoying thing which affected the group was the lack of people turning up to help create the sets as it slowed the process down and also made the work load uneven between each member. However I think everyone manged to get along well and offered to help others when they needed it.
My favourite image of the set is the two armchairs in front of the fireplace, as due to the props and warm lighting it suggests that the room is being lived in and is a safe, family home to the characters. I also like the images taken of Gregor's room as this represented the genre of Psychological horror that we set out to achieve.

24/5/11

Today I helped to put together the pieces for the bed in the bedroom with some members of my group. We managed today to put all the furniture into the set. Although we still have props to be put in, i.e. table cloth, flowers, we all agreed that the set seemed quite bare as we had little furniture for the large sized rooms. This could be overcome if we had stayed with the original measurements of the rooms. However seeing the room almost complete felt a great achievement and pride inn the work we had done. For most of the day I created the window frame for the right side window in the living room. Me and Kat cut the pieces out of MDF and Jess helped me attach the finished frame to the window.

23/5/11

On Friday, the skirting board was put on the walls in the bedroom. Today I helped to place the skirting board in the living room with Sarah L and Laura. We had to file some of the ends in order for the skirting to fit in the corners. We started to nail the skirting boards to the wall but we could not carry on to the other side of the wall as the floor still needed to be painted first. I then painted the door frame in the bedroom to match the doorframe around the double doors using a watered down black paint. Once Ben arrived we cleared the living room floor of paint pots, tools and other mess ready for the floor to be painted. Me, Jess and Ben put masking tape along the bottom of the skirting boards which had already been attached.

19/5/11

As many of the group had finished working on their pieces of furniture we helped with the creation of the doors as this seemed to be a bit behind schedule. I helped to paint one of the doors whilst others were making and distressing others. After being asked for help, I worked with Karen to pin the frames of the windows to the wall. After we finished the window frames, I helped Emma to make the legs for the bed and painted the foot and headboard in a layer of wood stain. While pieces of the bed were drying I helped Jess and Ben paint the base coat on the bedroom floor, using rollers and brown paint in sections Ben had already marked out with masking tape. I also helped Emily glue the fireplace to the wall and painted the skirting boards with Sarah W. and Sarah L.

18/5/11

All day I helped create the skirting board. We measured the length of the skirting boards to fit around the edges of the room and helped Adam cut the boards with a Jigsaw. We also worked out how the skirting would meet at the corners so we removed 18mm from some pieces to overlap in the corners of the room. Before each piece was cut we labelled it with the same figure as the flat it would be attached to.

17/5/11

Today Jess and I created the frame for the bedroom window. We tried to make it similar to Karen’s design on the living room windows, however we found it difficult as the frame is at an angle and where the flats join up does not line up straight. We ended up screwing the frame to the surrounding flats as this seemed the easiest option. After helping file pieces of the fireplace, some of the group and I started to create the skirting boards. We used 18mm MDF, making the skirting 15cm x 8ft.

16/5/11

During the morning I spent my time working on the bedroom walls. Ben showed me how he used scraps of tissue mixed with paint and PVA to create the texture on the walls. We added the tissue to the wall were the wallpaper had been scraped off. I think it worked quite well to add expressionism to the room and is strong evidence of a non-human form living in the room. In the afternoon I helped to cut out shapes of MDF used for the door panelling. This took quite while to do as there were many pieces which needed to be cut all with different measurements.

13/5/11

I decided to cover the seats of my dining chairs as they were both ripped and had leather coverings which I found was uncommon in that era, and would not match the upholstery in the other pieces of furniture. I brought half a metre of dark red cotton fabric and used a staple gun to secure it in place. I first covered both the rips in the seats with duct tape so they would not be visible through the fabric. As the seats were already broken and very old I decided that taking the leather off first may cause the stuffing to escape and be quite difficult to remove. Overall I am very pleased with my dining chairs as I think the style and colours work well with the décor in the living room, although I believe the room would look more realistic with more dining chairs due to the size of the dining table. After I covered both my chairs, I then helped Eleanor to paint her dining table in similar colours to my dining chairs, adding wood grain texture and a gloss varnish.

12/5/11

After Eleanor had measured and cut out all the pieces she needed for the dining table, Sarah L and I helped to secure the pieces together. We first adjusted the legs of the table to co-operate with the height of the chairs. However we found the table was quite high in order for people to use the table while sitting on the chairs, which meant having to shorten the legs by cutting 5” of the ends. We also came up with the idea of building a frame underneath the table which we could attach the sides to. Using wood PVA and nails we attached the sides and the legs to the table top.

11/5/11

All day I helped Laura to create the armchair for Mrs Samsa. Following Laura’s designs we cut out the shapes needed from MDF and Plywood using the bandsaw in the workshop a drilled them together using a variety of different sized screws. After I helped to create the wooden base of the chair Laura then covered the seat in foam and covered the entire chair in a floral fabric.

10/5/11

Henry came in to show us how to apply the wallpaper in the living room. Most of the group helped to cover the room in the wallpaper John had brought. We found it quite hard to match the pattern on each strip as only a small area matched up which also meant we had a lot of excess wallpaper. Unfortunately we realised that we would not have enough rolls of paper to cover the room so Jess, Eleanor and I went to B&Q to get some more, while the rest of the group continued to wallpaper. When we had covered most of the walls we realised we only had a small section by the door to cover which seemed a waste to open a whole new roll of paper especially as we had so many spare scraps of paper left over. After a vote the majority of the group decided to cover the last section in left over excess wallpaper, which also helped to keep our budget lower.

9/05/11

Along with a few others in the group, I helped paint the first layer of paint in Gregor’s bedroom to the designs John had created. We used a mixture of different coloured paint in shades of brown, green, yellow and black. One of the paints we had planned to use was very thick and lumpy which gave a great texture on the wall when applied thickly. Whilst the paint was wet we added some sawdust which was the contents of the vacuum, which was thrown over the large lumps of paint. However some of the sawdust had to be removed as the wallpaper which was to go over the top would not stick to the wall well. After, the whole group helped to cover the living room walls in wallpaper paste to help the wallpaper adhere to the ply wood.

6/5/11

Today we completed attaching the flats together including the wall that went temporarily missing. This meant having all the walls to both rooms. To make the walls stronger, Emma, Sarah L and I added wooden braces around the back of the flats using screws and cutting away the excess with a hand saw. Myself and Jess also labelled the flats to help us place them in the correct order when re-constructing the set at Maidstone Studios.

4/5/11

Today we carried on placing the flats together and found that some of the headers and footers were the wrong size or the skin was nailed to the wrong side as well as the bedroom window being at the wrong angle. This meant we had to re make and adjust some of the flats which took extra unnecessary time. We also only had a small number of us in today which also slowed the process down.

3/5/11

Today we had Henry in again to help us. We have now completed making all the flats for our set. We started to attach the flats together by drilling screws through the sides. It took a few of us to do it as the flats are large, and needed to be flush with one another. Henry also showed us to create temporary stands for the walls to help them balance, which were placed at the side of the doorways.