Extended Practice- Study Task 2 - Portfolio Building- YCN- Frontier- Research&Building the Set

Portfolio Building- YCN

- Frontier- Research & Building the Set

As the new idea was to have a rock climber on a cliff for the poster/ advertisement, the first thing I did as the set designer was to research how other people created the look. I wanted to experiment and see how a rock effect was achieved so this tended to lead me to train dioramas as they are very small but very detailed, so it was good to see their methods. Like dusting the rock after to create tones, as well as detail. This is something I will be trying to do, as well as looking at rock formations and what textures and shapes are created.

After looking at these rocks, I then found I was drawn more to canyon rock as the red colour really comes out and looks much more appealing than grey rock as that is much more common in the UK so wouldn't be as attractive, whereas the canyon rock makes us think of a more large adventure that would be in other destinations.

With these images, I was able to use them during construction to get the shapes and effects that natural rock creates. This is why I spent time getting these images together to all show how the rock could be shaped and how the colours of the rock could come out.

This is the beginning of the rock formation, i have chosen Polystyrene sheets as they are thick to carve into, as well as the character doesn't need to magnetise into it so I am able to make it more structurally sound. I glued different sheets together to get a large size so the puppet didn't need to be so small, as well as being able to get different structures on the same sheet for different shots.

I then began cutting down the pieces so they looked more natural and less like polystyrene. I found because of how flat the sheet was, a large bread knife did a really nice job of getting different cuts and rough effects from the sections. Below is a video of this process, showing how it is done and how much time it took to do the whole thing. This was also a very long process because glue soaks into the polystyrene, so drying was a nightmare as it took days.