27 September 2019 A Monday-ish Friday

[KathyB]

It seems as if it's the third Monday this week, at least. I am planning an extremely exciting weekend of laundry and dishes, so I definitely want it to be here as soon as possible. Actually, I have some work to do as well, so maybe tomorrow will feel like the fourth Monday of the week.

Happy whatever-day-it-is!

[scenicdesign71]

After a long, slow week, my Friday was satifyingly Fridayish.  It was one of those nice days at work where I had a single project to work on all day at the shop, and while it wasn't an especially challenging one, it was just complex enough to keep me happily occupied through the day.  I didn't finish it, but the scene it'll be used for doesn't shoot until next Thursday anyway, so I was really just doing it to get a head start before bigger set pieces start arriving next week.  And as a bonus, since it'll take another hour or two to finish this project, I have a pretty good idea what I'll be starting with on Monday morning.

In case I've piqued anyone's curiosity (...anyone? ...no?), the project was to construct three illustration-board sleeves to slide over existing street signs which might possibly turn out to be faintly visible in the distant background at a given outdoor filming location (somewhere in Brooklyn, I think?); carefully cover them in glossy green self-adhesive vinyl; "weed" (remove the negative-space refuse from) and transfer six sets of glossy white cut-vinyl lettering onto lightly-tacky "release" film; and then apply said lettering to both sides of the green sleeves.  (And when all this is done, I'll probably age them down a bit so that they don't look brand-spanking-new).  This will allow the set dressers to change the signs on location so that they have different street names (and font, formatting, color etc.) as appropriate to the city where the scene in question is set (in this case Boston).  And to do so quickly and easily, just before each shot is filmed, so that our fake signs don't confuse random passersby all day.

That's one of the things about filming on location -- i.e., managing the place's continued use by "civilians" who are just trying to get on with their day -- which you might not think would trickle down to set dressers and scenic artists, but it does.

Earlier this week, for instance, I was in an enormous hotel dining room making small, shallow illustration-board boxes, covered in contact paper which we had pre-painted to match the existing wall color, in order to cover four bright-red fire-alarm boxes that might have ended up in-frame drawing unwanted attention.  (While these wall-color box-covers are not, themselves, 100% invisible, for background purposes the color does camouflage them into barely-perceptible "eye-wash," a whole lot less conspicuous than fire-truck red, and unlikely to be noticed even if they do end up being technically visible onscreen).

But in the real world, fire alarms are there (and highly conspicuous) for an important reason; heaven forbid a fire should occur during filming, and precious seconds be wasted in confusion trying to locate an alarm that's been hidden.  So if we're prepping a location days (or even just hours) before filming, we're careful to tape our little camouflage-boxes onto the wall somewhere near the alarm, but not covering it (yet): that can wait to be done by a member of the filming crew immediately before the shot, and removed immediately afterward.

I'm a geek, what can I say.  Six seasons in, among tasks ranging all the way from house-painting to portrait-painting (and, on several occasions, food-painting for the props department, to make cast-latex bacon strips or salmon steaks look like the real thing), I've also made dozens of these covers for street signs, alarm boxes, exit signs, AC thermostats, light switches and wall outlets (which, even in deep background, mustn't be seen to have American-style switches or outlets if the scene is supposed to be taking place in Jakarta or Zurich or wherever, as scenes on this show often are).  But I still find this stuff kinda cool.