Lands Edge

Kyelynn is helping me each week for two to three hours to construct the maximum landscape around the main cottage set. We use salvaged cardboard boxes attached to either the wall on the left or the wooden scaffolding built around it on the right. Pathways around the set are accessed by swinging them up like trap doors and keeping them out of the way with elastic loops onto simple screws.

This is the long view of Halfland when it was first revealed, taken from the bathroom doorway. The colored area indicates what I can get with a standard 50mm lens, a bit above the Answer Tree, and a bit of foreground in front of the white picket fence.

The full set will get built up with as little detail as possible, as most shots center on the Answer Tree, cottage, and bug party just off the path from the creek. Those areas are fully realized as if they actually exist. But the background will only need to suggest what's around them. Going rough.

The cardboard panels will be covered with random canvas drop cloths painted browns and greens, bulked up underneath with crumpled paper stuffed into old pillowcases. All paper grasses get glued into the cloths, limbs get added to the birch trees, and the fabric sky membrane gets attached tautly to the scaffold.

It's a FlyAway set. Trees come away as needed, the foreground deconstructs and moves out, the fence and creek move out, and each cottage wall comes off to enable the camera to come in closer.