Moving Heaven and Earth

Today I painted a gradient blue backdrop that curves the full back and top of the test set. Then I took the very cool stretchy sky scrim made yesterday and attached it a few inches in front of the back most layer. The sky illusion is fantastic!

Maybe I'm the only one this happens to, but whenever I drive along a highway where there are mountains in the distance, I always "see" them transform into the contours and curves of a female's body. It never fails that they look like gigantic god-sized women reclining in a sinuous repose. I can't help but imagine them as colossal living beings sleeping or resting across the Earth.

Based on this concept, in Halfland, way off in the distance, in the far back landscape, I plan for the hills to be made from subtle photographic material transferred onto 3D papier mache topography. Made a little mock up of that today with two different paper images I already had around just to see if the illusion would work. I looked at the set up through a keyhole made with my hand and I was startled that it looked exactly as I imagined, very much like it does in my real life visions.

I added these, um, flats to the diagram above to illustrate the idea. My challenge now will be to work out how to create this kind of a backdrop solution on the humongous Halfland set. At first, I thought of a jumbo scrim stretched onto tall curved aluminum conduit on wheeled stands. But tonight I'm wondering if I should go ahead and rig the set to pivot on a turntable instead.