It's been Wall-to-Wall Halfland

How to begin to unpack what's been happening in Halfland... Hmmm....
A Beautiful Mind
One of the major milestones for the project was my wallpaper-pasting down every single remaining reference image collected over the last 15 years for Halfland onto over-sized posterboard, by category. I had completed doing this a couple years ago for the main characters and some of the tree and cottage materials but this was finishing all the rest over several days. I had everything pasted and ready for Intern Sophie last Monday. After feeding her an after school snack, she helped me attach all the sheets onto an entire wall of the shop, floor to ceiling, wall to wall+.

These images are incredibly valuable to me. I believe in collecting reference images for projects like a whale eats, by allowing the food to come to me as I travel through the ocean of life. All I do is filter it as it comes across my mouth, as it were. I am ruthless about it. I will cut images out of rare, irreplaceable books, buy a whole magazine just for a single image, and print out copious web finds without attribution. All of it is up for easy viewing and inspiration now. So helpful.

Sky Pie
After much much thought, I believe, I have truly and finally worked out the sky I'd like to create for Halfland. The plan is as easy and inexpensive as I could make it and even though it's hand-made, it gives the coveted "infinity illusion" I'm hoping for.

In order to determine the actual size of scrim I will need to buy, I got the bright idea to use a 10' x 20' plastic drop cloth to measure the space. I thought I might use these as the final sky itself for a minute, so I tested what sort of medium might work to paint it as a sky cyclorama. Polymer mixed with transparent dye worked ok. But really got me was how white, opaque clouds looked on their own sky layer, one can be seen above right, through tree branches. (click always to enlarge any image).

It wasn't until a nap this afternoon that I hit upon my sky recipe. Seen below...



The woven nylon stretch fabric I used in my test scrim photographs with a moire pattern that isn't visible to the eye. Buying the non-woven theatrical scrim should handle that. This clip doesn't show how well the infinity effect works as a result, but if you can see past the moire, into how the three layers of cloud shapes interact, you might get a sense of it...


Here's my awkward scale elevation of the sky system in the workshop space here with the set. It should look something like this when the cardboard trees are built to cover the support column, as shown on the left. The system will have to be installed in different spots as scene shooting moves to alternate sides of the 360 degree set.

Felted Vool
Art Bonus: I made little blessing booties out of a second-hand raspberry wool sweater that had been washed in hot water in order to weave its fibers into wool felt. Or how my great Polish Ballet master pronounces it; "VOOL!". I added hand-felted rosebuds to the toe for Ella Rose and tucked a little blessing on a strip of paper inside. I love Verking vis Vool and sneak projects with it whenever I can. I even introduced needle felting to Intern Sophie last week. She went totally ape for it and was excited by the idea of using this technique to craft the tiny fuzzy woolen socks for her cat puppet in her film in development; "Socks: The Movie!"

Thank you for reading. I can get back to finishing out the set now... Wishing you well!