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Here's some of the
work for Rocket of London. They were looking for someone to
help with building a 1940's style concentration camp. The
job expanded to a 6-foot P.O.W. camp guard tower.......
Check out the film website on http://www.starcrest.de
jump
to guard tower
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Monastery
door...the real
thing
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The
storyboard called for a close-up of a Gothic style church
door. After scouring the area near my home I found a good
example - this is it from a distance. The stonework was very
weathered from moss, lichen and traffic polution, and the
door was chipped, scratched and dented all over. It had also
been touched up with modern varnishes, and the huge
ornamented hinges had grown by nearly 25% due to dozens of
paint layers - but I couldn't show this - it had to be
contemporary with 1940.
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Models of
real objects are much more difficult to make, because they
have real surfaces and finishes. The material for the stone
was polystyrene, and the door is made of balsa, stained with
oils. The hinges were cast from a plastic master with
Milliput.
The styrene
was cut unto blocks, roughned up then glued together to give
convincing fissures. The shapes for the blocks were worked
out on computer from measurements of key points (every 5cm!)
to get the curves spot-on. The prop has no back - nobody
would see it!
The door
was made from individual strips of balsa, agained roughened
and distressed, then glued together. The stains naturally
gathered in the bruised fibres and accentuate the look.
The
polystyrene was blue to start with. It was surfaced by
coating with PVA glue, then covering with sand sieved to
0.2mm to get the scale right. It was than undercoated with a
stone-coloured acrylic blend, then weathered with mossy
greens, greys and browns in paints and chalks, by brushing,
spraying and pouring, as required.
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Guard Tower
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The job started with a schematic, which was then scaled
so that I got the right number of slats at the right height,
the right strut length and thickness.... you get the idea. I
made this chart to keep me on track
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Since Rocket were in London and I was in Edinburgh, I
sent them down lots of wood samples so that they could test
them under studio lighting conditions. Here are the samples
photographed against my manky old back door gate as a
guide.
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I cut the samples in half and kept one set, so that I
would know which one they picked. I made a recipe mix chart
so that I could replicate the finish, of course.
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Final selection....
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Here's the hut pictured against a meter rule for scale -
I found an old post that was the same height as the scale
legs were going to be, to give some sense of scale. Note the
colour reference chart taped to the side.
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Here's the thing on-set....
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Mark does a bit of head scratching.....
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Viewed from another hut.......
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The search-light for the hut, beside a torch. The torch
was certainly simpler, but showed the bulb and therefore
ruined the scale, so the searchlite was made with 4
rice-grain xenon bulbs with a double layered frosted
acryllic diffuser lens.
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