Finding the Time and the Space part 3 of 3

Okey dokey, so let's talk about the set design. Hopefully this will wrap up the series of reflections in a quicker manner than the last few posts, but lets see where it takes us. After talking about all the character and costume stuff, it really segued into this when things were moving. It was hard to really think about what to do with specific things like the apartments and lab until they were locked down and we saw what we were working with. James' apartment was the first location we had. Oh boy, that place. The sheer strategy it took to maneuver in that crammed room was like a training exercise for the rest of production.

Don't go so far away.

Yeah, it was tight in there. All of the equipment not being used was stuffed in the bathroom when not in use. Crew was outside roaming around or hiding in the room somewhere. It's both nice having a small space to work with but also can become quite claustrophobic with so many in there like a clown car. We knew we needed an apartment to go nuts with, and Mrs. Z got one for us! Once we first set foot in there, we snapped pictures and went to Goodwill for stuff we could furnish the place with.

Helping get an idea of what's there to work with.

Things like the American flag on the wall were quirky things we liked to add that would show the weirdness of the dude. Other random pieces are scattered around that are less noticeable. Messiness was one idea that took hold on both of James personal spaces. He's not a neat guy. He's got experiments lying around on the stove, he's got blueprints sitting around and notes wherever it'll remind him of what he needs to achieve. There's less care towards living comfortably for him. From there, Daniel, Tristen, Ethan and I made several trips back and forth adding stuff around to make it fit the world we were creating. Thing was, something seemed to be missing on the walls to bring it all in tighter.

The office.

We were trying to figure out what we needed later that night, and Mr. Z sold us on the idea of doing some Nagel inspired art and hanging it in James' apartment. It made sense to us for James to have some things like this in his apartment given what his character is. He's kinda trashy under it all. Daniel and I ended up pulling an all-nighter getting those two pieces done. Fun stuff when finally finished it, too. That's another whole story. But this was the night before day one of filming and gee were we wiped before it even began.

Part of James' apartment.

From there into the first day, we added stuff last minute to the room and all of the pictures on the wall fell down and needed to be put back up and oh gosh. There was this one clock on the wall, too... This one clock that would not stay up for that whole week. I don't like that clock. Not one bit.

I still want more TV's.

That very clock I was rearranging before the first take of the intense yelling and subsequent slap scene between James and Caroline. Quickly I dashed into the closet before they started rolling. It was really scary in there listening to all the yelling. It was dark, too. And smelly. But after the scene was over, Bryan, still in character, was opening drawers angrily in rage and he opened the door to the closet I was stashed away in. Of course, I happened to be leaning against the door so I started falling out like a dead body towards him. It scared the coked-out James Pratt out of Bryan's body!

Coming up with that NATRAM seal.

When that week was over Daniel, Bryan, Tristen and I disassembled the whole place like we were never there. Next location was pretty cool. The Foothills center served as the spot for the NATRAM building and worked out great. We didn't really do much there but add in the logo up on the wall. Daniel did the final version of that in GIMP and printed it out on regular printer paper and taped it up all meticulously.

Press conference.

Where the press conference scene was filmed, that was the very same location that auditions were held. It was a bit of a deja vu moment. Not much there to really do, but Mrs. Z cut up the fabric for the navy blue sheet behind James and the green screen stands were used to stand them up and the podium was borrowed from our old high school. Whatever goes.

James Pratt's filibuster.

Options were weighed trying to film at a real modern art exhibit, or even just do it guerrilla style in there but neither really proved viable so we ended up settling on the Z's garage. The garage housed an art exhibit with a bunch of random stuff I've done just hanging on the wall. That was pretty funny for me to see. One of the pieces on the wall was done the night before filming specifically for this scene. I made it really out there and nutty looking but stuck in some hints to another film by Daniel.

"This piece makes me feel like jelly."

The garage proved very versatile as we immediately used it the next night for the dance club scene and changed it into a smokey bar in the same night . Ultimately with the number of extras that are there, there's not a whole lot of room to see much of what's there but I stuck some records hanging on the wall and I helped Daniel with hanging those blue sheets from the ceiling. Disco ball and blue flashing lights for the time machine were strapped in several places effectively giving it a closed off feel when the lights went down. All those extras in the garage, though. That was another crazy night. But it actually worked out really well, which I'm glad for.

80s dance party in the garage!!

Down the line came a real stressful week were there were no locations for two pretty big sets. The lab and Felix's apartment. A church was needed, too. We really wanted a big and labbier looking place to work with but nothing was falling into place. A room in our old high school could have been good but it wasn't in the cards. Wish we could have worked with something bigger like that but you've gotta get creative about what you can do when it comes down to this. Crunch or be crunched, we settled on using a room in Daniel's house that we were given the permission to go to town on.

What we imagined, not what what was feasible.

After making it completely sparse, Ethan, Tristen and I scrambled to get the bedroom looking like a lab. We literally stumbled out of the house and into my car (which only seats two- WHERE DID ETHAN FIT?) and hit Tristen's house, my house, and Goodwill for whatever parts we had around that would work for a lab. I went into my dad's shed and picked out some pesticide thing, boxes to pad out the place, extension cords, folders, balloon pumps other random crap, we used a big wooden table slab-thing from Tristen.  A real mad dash, plus there was even a huge rainstorm on the way.

It's all smart science stuff, clearly.

We repurposed several pieces used before and they left me alone to do stuff to the space. It was coming together, actually. Everyone had their doubts it would work, but it wasn't too bad. Daniel filled the big blackboard full of mumbo-jumbo and I found a bunch of formulas and put them all over the place. I filled some of the test tubes with different colors to reflect some of the moods coming out of the different scenes as well. Daniel tinkered with the experiments lying around and broke apart an old radio. All worked out okay. Then it had to be broken down again.

James' lab

Immediately, the next set was still needed for the next day. Mrs. Z was trying to get some other options for the next apartment along with a church but nothing was clicking and time was once again out. The church clicked, though. Mr. Raiton was really great, he let us use his apartment in that moment and it was another thing that we made work out for us. There wasn't a whole lot of original props used for Felix's apartment, we were reusing some smaller stuff but there was the necessary trips to Goodwill for further pieces of furnishing.

Felix is a neater guy than James and his home would act accordingly. A dumb thing I did was stick a sheet over the TV to try and cover that. Looked awful. That was thrown off and the TV just wasn't seen in any shots. One thing we got early on we knew would be for Felix's apartment was this little gold plated Last Supper piece because of his being Catholic. Daniel printed out a bunch of pictures of Sarah as Mara and placed them all over the place. Those random framed pictures are floating around who knows where now. Fun fact... both James and Felix have pears in their apartments. FIND THE PEARS.

The rough idea for Felix's apartment

That week had consisted of time machine stuff in the desert, lab stuff, church stuff, apartment stuff and it was a crazy week. Very exhausting, there's no getting around the fact that some of us were cracking at this point. However, by making it to the end of the week- there was a renewal of spirits and a feeling of beating the odds that it worked out and we made it through that big pickle. I also feel like everybody just genuinely likes each other and wanted to find the way to make it through successfully. So we did.

Felix's apartment in progress

Filming kept progressing when I was gone for a week- I know Daniel wasn't happy the scheduled wrap date got postponed for another week but I was happy to be able to be there along with everybody for the last couple of nights on this thing that was my life for those past few months.

BACK TO FORMULA?

This post turned out to be less process-orientated, which makes sense to me now given the topic being a different beast than the others. Hey! It wasn't quick at all, either. Heck, it was probably longer than the other one's. More about the craziness of getting things together. Hope you enjoyed reading it, though. Feeling like this might be the wrap up. I mean, sure... there's more. A lot more I could talk about, yeah. But this is a good place to put the cork on this bottle and nicely keep it in the cellar. For now. Is it ever truly over?? That's the beauty of it.

It goes on.

You can watch Timespace here. If you've read all of this crazy-talk, you might see some more stuff you didn't before or hopefully will soak in different things. https://vimeo.com/ondemand/timespace

"Why do we do what we do?" YA GOT ME.

GOODT!

Finding the Time and the Space: part 2 of TBD

Last time on this blog: I only talked about the time machine... but what other masterful machinations are in store for you, the ravishing reader, this time? Well, this time I'll talk about figuring out the characters visually. That's a pretty important thing, I think.

You look quite tense.

From early on in our discussions, Daniel and I knew there needed to be something distinctive about the characters rather than just arbitrarily outfitting. Figuring out what that was for each of them would eventually reveal itself organically as we delved further into them, but starting out- you just go for what jumps to mind after hearing the basic type of character they are and what would happen in the script. For the main character James Pratt, that's how I recall the process going along.

This guy's got swerve.

All of those above sketches were some of the first of James. Before it was even set firmly in the mid 80s at that point, I believe. He didn't even have a name yet! Yeesh. He had the scar, the rolled up-down to business sleeves, a plain ol watch. The hints are there but this could still be any random fellow with his fists clenched. This's just what I got from what I was told about who this guy was immediately.

Caroline does her stuff.

Caroline was one of the other's that was thought about early on. One funny thing was that the whole reason her name was Caroline to begin with was because the song "Sweet Caroline" by Neil Diamond was to be integrally played at the ending and provide quite a darkly tongue-in cheek note to leave us on. I'm not sure if any other thing I could say would give a better indication of how different this was.

Felix. Like it says.

Upon reading the first draft of the script, things started to feel a bit more lively for me as I started to get to know these guys better. One of the main reasons behind the 80s setting was to be able to do crazy things with the characters and have fun with it. We wanted a "heightened-80s" look going on, meaning to take distinctively 80s things that we enjoyed to help give it that placement present with the characters and also have the flexibility and room to craft our own world using those guiding principles. Achieving that would require lots of research, yeah. But immediately, I knew I wanted Caroline to have crazy frizzy hair.

1st meeting. This was cut.

I found myself digging through numerous clippings of clothing catalogues from the late 70s to mid 80s as well as looking through family photos of the period to have some concrete reference. Random movies from the period helped out a bit as well, but I prefer doing the rapid fire approach in calibrating the brain. I filled pages with my own notes and drawings of possible outfits for what extras might wear. I'm not sure if focusing on extras that early on was pertinent, but what the hey.

Reid Ackerman interview.

One idea I toyed around earlier on with was James sporting brighter colors against all the bad stuff he does, sort of a statement like he doesn't care- "Yeah, look at me!" Bright colors would permeate throughout much of the wardrobe in the film in the end, in an appropriate way that hopefully tapped that "heightened-80s" idea but didn't go completely overboard with zaniness.

Mara freak out.

But after the cast members were finally chosen is when things started to naturally fill in more concretely. It's very strange to think about, because there was a moment just before where we were wondering how things could work and how these characters would even work. Having the real life people behind them there now really brought these written ideas and whatever else tighter into reality, furthering along that molding process to more definitive levels. Around then is when it finally felt right to do the style guide for the main four cast members. That, and this stuff needed to get done next.

They are smart. Look at their labcoats.

I read through the script again to come up with statements about how these characters feel and what they would accordingly find themselves in. Among other things, I called James cocksure. I called Caroline snappy and inquisitive. Mara, yearning and flashy. Felix, habitual and stiff. Helped to move on to finding references of clothing that would reflect these things. What type of stuff would they wear when they're casually hanging around? At work? Sleeping? Accessories? Whatever? Taped a buncha crazy boards I was given full of all the stuff I found, all of it was driven by those helpful guidelines.

It's that guy.

James' ruthless actions would be reflected by his down and dirty look with the suspenders and pants pulled up along with the sleeves. The watch ring that James wears on his right ring finger was a touch I really liked for him as it was something both peculiar and imposing. I found that in an old jewelry box of my mom's, and it was something she wore in the 80s and let us use. Caroline tries to find acceptance after heavy stuff with her family growing up, dressing professionally for this fancy organization but also trying to get that security she needs with James so accordingly dresses pretty nice when around him. She also would have a special hourglass necklace as something unique to her. Earlier on, I didn't see James with glasses but it helped in making the actors look older than they actually were and the big thick-rimmed 80s glasses became too cool a thing pass up. Big funny glasses for everybody! Except Mara. Makeup instead!

James looks mad.

Mara's wild wear was inspired by Madonna. She dresses with all this shiny excess and it's because she desires to have back what she got a taste of for one perfect moment. She was probably the most fun character to work on in these stages and her bits are my personal favorites in the film. She actually didn't even become a thing until much later on, it was just the other three.

Mara looks crazy.

Felix is comparatively more rigid when looking at him against the other three characters. He dresses pretty safely and by the books. He's creative with science, not clothing! Felix even mostly keeps his sleeves rolled down as a visual hint differing him from James personality-wise (I wish he ended up only having the sleeves up for the scene where James gets him drunk, as a nudge that he's cutting loose for once and he ends up getting screwed for it- but he ended up with the sleeves up more often).

Felix looks scared.

After this is when the trips to Goodwill for boatloads of clothing started. I remember the trip where major damage was done- Mrs. Z, Mrs. Bagnall, Daniel, and Tristen were there and everybody was finding whatever they could that looked 80s. That's the thing, you find these ideas you really like but you need to actually find something close enough to it without compromising.  One fancy outfit we found had its old tag on still where we saw it was originally on sale for over $1000, that was pretty funny so we ended up using this one "expensive" costume for what James wears in the big final 15 minutes.

You can kinda see some of the style guide boards in the back.

After arranging around some of the wardrobe on the floor in different combinations for different characters, we had a base in front of us! Wahoo! From there, it was Mrs. Z putting her all into the costume department. Having her working directly with the clothes was great because she strived for ensuring authenticity and had a good system. Being there for costume tests was neat to see because it provided one of the first real indicators for me that this was becoming real finally after months of just seeing things in my head.

Speaking of seeing things in my head.

Before every shoot, the actors needed to be given the hair and makeup treatments by Mrs. Z and Kylee Jaeger which would take an hour or two every day. Jessica Mirl also did cool stuff with the scar on James' face, having to often work on it between shots because it would be at a different level of healing in the next thing being shot. Every day, Mrs. Z would have the outfits for each scene picked out and labeled.  Accessories would have to kept track of. Then the actors round out the whole picture by putting themselves into the characters, making them feel real. Lots of gears spinning around in the machine at the same time to make it function, I'd say!

Where should I put my scar?

Now, I hope that gives some sense into the way this went along. I probably won't have another venue to talk about these things, so I really need to get this stuff out of my head. Healthiest darned thing I can try. I know I'm real tired right now. It's not because of writing and thinking about all this stuff again actually, I'm just really tired. Well, that's it for now. I will probably have one more big Timespace post... probably. Probably on set design.

Ay!

Watch Timespace here.

Finding the Time and the Space: part 1 of TBD

Like I said a little while back, I wanted to talk about my work on Timespace in better detail. Maybe it will help recounting the experience while it's fresh in my brain. Maybe some of this might be interesting to see the movie from a different side. Maybe, maybe? Well enough maybes, let's get down to the info that's juicy and nice.

In the middle of January was about when I first started doing things for the film, locked in the Dan-Cave with Daniel. After a ride in the back of a limo planted ideas in his head with ideas as stretchy as that stretch limo. He had a rough idea of where he wanted to go with things already then. Even still, it unraveled much differently than what it grew into. Daniel had a white board filled with how the rules of time travel worked and what happened in each timeline as a result of the time travel. It was thorough. You can't do time travel without setting your rules first! Get rid of as many holes as you can right away!

One of the early time machine designs that ended up being
further explored to refine the design.

I was sitting there working on time machine designs. He showed me one of those funny conspiracy shows he got this concept of the "Nazi bells" from. The legends told of Nazi's using time travel using bell-shaped things filled with mercury counter-rotating super fast to transport something to another time! Some crazy Nazi scientist escaped and something similar to that winded up crashing around Pennsylvania in the 60s. It's funky stuff but it was a totally neato basis to power our version of time travel!

Getting there.

Those things would be on the sides, attached to an enclosed and refined base to ensure the mercury would flow around in the vicinity of the time machine chamber. The base was going to have fancy fans and grates underneath to air out those Nazi bells and also maintain direction and stability when traveling. That was the idea. Yeah. One thing that was trying to be avoided early on was making the time machine look like a giant dick. That was a challenge given the fact that there was no avoiding the big bells needing to be attached.

Time Machine Model Sheet

Some motifs would stay, like the overall color scheme. The red lights on top ended up both being in front to give the whole thing more of a giant toy robot feel. The machine itself was to be pretty practical since it was made in a government laboratory. Things shouldn't end up looking too sterile, though. I wanted to inject the sense of peculiarity I like to add to most things I do. Time machine, that's absurd- and it needs to have a level of acknowledgement to that. It ended up kind of looking vaguely enough like a giant toy robot you're stepping into. Also, yeah- it's shaped like a coffin. Yes.

The TO-DO list.

There also needed to be some firmer cohesion between the shape of the base, and the connectivity of the bells to the chamber. That's where the shape started to become more like a rocketship and less of a box. The two silver coils attached the bells to the chamber now, taking that mercury flowing directly into the chamber. They also look like big robot arms. Now it was a Robot-Rocketship! Good!

BLAST OFF.

Mercury flowing directly inside, though? What? The walls were intended to be "lead-lined" but there's only so much you can suspend your disbelief when you're working with some pieces of wood in reality months later. No wonder time travel's bad for the health. There are vents on the sides, though! The interior's floor also had a mirror, which was to lend to the idea of time travel creating a mirror reality. The actual time travel was to be activated with two handlebar switches being pulled on the sides after all was ready to go.

Wowee.

Constructing the time machine came months later after all of the thoughts had gotten to these points and it was finalized. The actual prop wasn't assembled until early June, done so quite professionally by Dave Mirl. With his expertise in crafting things like this, he slightly modified the design to make more sense when building. All that was left for us to do with this big hunk of wood constructed was make it look like the design. All that was left, ha! The time machine wasn't ready to film until about the night before it finally went in front of the camera in mid-July.

Even after that first day it was reinforced further that same night to be safer in the future. It was continually worked on for that near month and a half in between, with just about all of the major cast and crew pitching in to help whenever they were around. Around the side of the Ziegler household, where the time machine was. That was real swell, though. Everybody was really great in helping get this thing in working order and their efforts should not be unnoticed. Timespace! Teamwork!

Mid spray painting, woo.

Copious amounts of spray paint was inhaled, and so many trips to the hardware store that all the employees kept wondering "how's the spaceship coming along?" every time upon entering. Work was done then on the insides to try and get away with the insulating idea in some way. We found a shiny bed sheet that fit snugly and flush to all the corners, one of the best finds for this thing. Covered everything inside that needed covering!

Done spray painting, woo.

After the whole wooden time machine was painted, the rest of the matters involved detailing to the best of our abilities with time ticking. The rest was small, except for those darn bells. We had no clue what to use for them. We started to go into panic mode after several last minute trips to hardware stores proved fruitless, it ended up being a trip to the dollar store that was our near-priceless (for once) gift from the heavens. Daniel and I both spotted some small plastic trash cans and laundry bins and we both had the same idea going on right there. High fives for synergy! The bins were stacked on top of each other and we knew we had our base for the bells right there, it was the best thing ever.

Ding dong, the bells are ringing.

Of course, now they needed to become bells. So tape fastened the pieces in place and the whole two things were done with paper mache. I did have some much appreciated help in making those from Mrs. Z, Mr. Z, and Katelyn! 80s jamming got us through, I recall. All along the way, Arizona was being bombarded by dust storm after dust storm for this whole month, as well as rains, winds, lightning, thunder, meatballs, the works. If there was ever an eventuality such as this, the whole thing needed to be completely covered in a tarp and securely fastened down.

Batten down the hatches.

Mr. Z installed the working red overhead lights - running down the side to a fancy flip switch, then things were in pretty good order! We had wanted there to be fog effects when powering up the time machine but that didn't pan out, I guess. Another thing I wanted to point out is the fact that every day this prop was needed for filming, it required to be towed in the back of two separate trucks and both heavy pieces were lifted from there into the desert and back.

The whole process of designing a prop as huge and heavy as this hunk o junk was a very adaptive one. Naturally so, I suppose. A very sweaty and slow job till the end, but there was undoubtedly fun to be had along the way despite some of us wanting to burn the machine like the protestors wanted in the film. I think given the materials we had, the intent managed to shine through in what winded up on screen where it counted.

That's it...

After this long-winding post on the time machine, where could I possibly go from here?? Well... I'll talk about the characters next, I guess.



It's gonna eat me.

You can watch Timespace here, if any of these revelations have piqued your interest.

Pondering The Infinite Wonders

One thing I like to do to whenever I have some time to spare is a fun personal project called Infinite Wonders. It's a superhero book that has rummaged around in Tristen Bagnall's head and my head for the past year or two. We enjoy working on the book whenever we can. Our plotting parties are legendary. I keep saying whenever because we always go back to it whenever we're done with other things because we enjoy adding more to this little world. It's the type of superhero comic we'd enjoy to see more of these days, so it feels liberating in many ways for the both of us. Currently working through the 2nd issue, which is a big bomber. Funny how the 1st issue was just normal sized and the 2nd one is bigger!

8x10 on bristol board. Pencil, ink, watercolors

Above's a small piece I did on the side to break things up a bit. Also helping me to start getting the feel for one character that is getting introduced soon in coming pages for me. That's one mistake I made working on the first issue. I don't think I allowed myself to get comfortable and it's something that is very apparent for me in my own critiquing. So I've been trying to remedy that hopefully by stretching and prepping more with exercises like this. Just do whatever, it's good for the head! Wanted to do something quieter but also inject some humor in there to throw that off balance.

Let's do some airobics. Yes, air.

What I meant about getting comfortable is that I'd like to be sure, especially for characters that are pretty important. Back to the beginning of the road for this one, she started out looking less streamlined. Just standard fare with the jacket on top. Lightweight boots going above the knees and gloves going up past the elbows. Something that felt light would be good since she can control gravity, breeze around and whatnot. That's partly why I think a regular ol jacket was bothering me.

Now let's just dance in the sky while we're at it.

I started trying to find ways to get the lightweight flows going on in the back by making it integrated into the costume more. Boots and gloves also became less sterile. Feels more fun that way, bringing that up-down levels motif more into play. That you can drop up or down or do whatever when she's around. One point it started becoming kinda 80s with the poofy shoulderpads. Big goggles were still fitting, I thought. Displays the wide-eyed youthfulness (both have big goggles for that reason). Also good for flying around in the air!

Almost there. Now do a long jump.

Slighter changes started to signal to myself that it was getting there, and after a few more tests I was happier with the design. Got a few more Infinite Wonders things I can show soon. I think my next post might be about Timespace, though. YOU CAN WATCH IT HERE, BY THE WAY!