Growing Pond of You

When Cirelle started coming over for Girl Fridays Halfland Help I thought it was fantastic to have a pair of talented hands taking care of some of the less-demanding production tasks. But that's not what has happened. What's getting more clear is that she is a superb creative partner.

Take today for example, I saw how expert Cirelle was with making faux plants look natural on my test tasks for her. I thought after we made the cottage window treatments together, I'd get her to plant the Time Frog's pond on the main set. I showed her the array of faux reeds, cattails, and other grasses I'd collected for the purpose. I showed her the Conscious Stones, the papier maché rocks, the photos of lily pads and prop lotus blooms I'd made last year. As she started placing the rocks and describing where she wanted to plant the foliage, I was impressed with her understanding of how nature works. She's actually excited to be helping me plant the set! [Thank you, God!]

Then the unexpected Cirelle bonus struck again. As the Time Frog's actual size stand-in looked on from his position in the pond, as Cirelle started arranging the reeds to be planted at the water's edge, we soon realized that the water needed to be worked out first so we'd know the waterline level and how to have the reeds growing in the water itself. My original idea of using several tubs of hair gel soon paled next to the spontaneous development of a perfect hand made Halfland pond that I'm terribly fond of.

After various creative idea tossing, we landed on the idea of three layers of fabrics; an algae-like green ultrasuede murky bottom attached at the depth of the hole, a softly crumpled middle layer of bright blue tulle [whose gentle contours looks exactly like water even in person] and topped with a shimmer of translucent pale green silk, wired at the edges, made as taut as possible, to become the ponds surface. Lotus leaves and flowers can float on top. (Above Cirelle and I test out various color combinations.)

This solution THRILLS me to the bone. I love the way it looks. And not only does it look amazing from above, but when the easily removable under layer is taken away (or even through a hole in the fabric!), the camera can shoot straight up from under the water, through the lotus tendrils, under their leaves floating on the water's surface, to the brighter world above. I screamed a little when we saw that.

In the last few minutes of our time together today, Cirelle and I scrambled to get her started with a sculpt of her original Halfland character (It will appear in a cameo in Halfland series and then possibly become the FIRST Halfland spin-off series of it's own, that she will make for and by herself! I love the idea of people making their OWN Halfland films! YAY!) She wanted something creative to work on for herself at home. She's so incredibly intelligent that she absorbed my triple-speed tutorial on stop mo puppet sculpting, as our hands flew, twisting a wire base. Her delicate character sketch is in the background.