Stretchy Sky

It was a smaller step today, but intriguing. I took a scrim of white nylon and stretched it over a piece of plywood. Then I had fun finger-painting a cloudscape with dilute blue acrylics and daubing on titanium white to make fluffy cloud shapes on the bottom half. When dry, this backdrop remained stretchable and offered a lot of effect possibilities.

Here's a little diagram of what I came up with that I'll be testing on my practice area before building full size. Soft lighting thrown on the back most layer, as long as the transparent sky was also front lit, might look interesting. I'll have to try things out.

It occurred to me that I could place a plain cyclorama of gradient blue at the back of my testing set, stretch this new sky scrim onto a wire/or thin pipe structure affixed to the set floor via tiedowns, as a setting for Halfland environment behind the landscapes.

On the full-sized set (and boy, do I mean full-sized, this thing is HUGELY huge!), if this idea works well, I'd create the curved pipes out of gently bent electrical conduit or something equally sturdy and easy to get.

I plan to also experiment with adding a layer of projected sky into this set-up to see if it adds a luminance and a sky-like dimension on camera, in camera, as it were.

The Hills Are Alive:
Tomorrow, I'll show how my wild plan for the distant contours of Halfland hills will look on this schematic. (It involves using the enlarged Xerox nude of me-self that was laying around.) I swear, I have everything around here! Name something, anything used for arts or crafts (I love this game) that you can think of and I'll see if it's in here. If you do manage to "stump the shop" I will admit it publicly and never play the game again... online.