I had some simple requirements in mind for the theatre:
1) I wanted it to combine the look of an old fashioned puppet theatre with a real-life, plush, grandiose theatre setting. I decided to base the details on traditional theatres and opera houses, but to scale it down so it is recognisably a puppet theatre. I used photos of actual theatres and opera houses as a point of reference. This sort of thing:
2) I wanted the scale to work well in proportion to the puppet; for this, I aimed for the stage large enough to have a sense of grandeur and to give the puppet some room for manoeuvre and expression without being cramped, yet small enough to retain the sense of the puppet as a small scale character on a puppet stage, rather than as a person would be in scale to a real stage.
I also wanted the puppet to fill the screen sufficiently for extended shots of the puppet framed by the stage, rather than as intro and outro to tighter framing for the puppet’s performance. My rationale is that I can keep the detail and atmosphere of the setting, whilst being tight enough to show the details of the character and allow for some expressive body animation, cut with close ups of upper body and face during key moments.
To achieve this, I decided to make the stage to the same proportions as the screen for the animation - 16:9 - and for the puppet to be around 2/3 the height of the theatre. As the puppet is being built to a height of around 11” to 12” - corresponding with 1/6 scale if he were a human figure - I built the front of the stage 18” high, which met this requirements and was a convenient doubling up of the 16:9 proportions to 18” height x 32” width.
3) I wanted to make the prop durable enough to survive any knocks and the general rigours of the animation in one piece and to be reusable for future animation. This was quite a challenge, as I’m used to working with a mixture of materials in 3D to get a look that I like, but the result usually ends up being fine to display, but far too fragile last on an animation set. My initial plan with scrap wood and 3mm MDF board was initially too wobbly and breakable and had to be reinforced. See below for more specifics on materials.
I also decided that I wanted the backdrop and floor to be removable and replaceable, which allows for changes to the setting and the option of a green screen background for Ties and other projects.
4) Lastly, I had to make the stage area deep enough to allow the puppet room to move, but not so deep/far back that the edges of the backdrop showed in shot. This wasn’t problematic, as it turned out – allowing 9” gave plenty of room for the puppet, the curtains and the backdrop, and I could have gotten away with a deeper stage without the edges showing. Nonetheless, it was an important factor to bear in mind with the basic design.
There were other considerations which, in retrospect, I would have taken into account from the beginning but, as a first effort at prop design, I can happily take these as lessons learnt for future projects.
So – onto the process of the build itself…
Materials
For the physical structure of the stage, I wanted materials that balanced strength with lightness, workability with limited tools and kept the cost as low as possible. After a browse through my scrap materials and local DIY shop, I decided to use 3mm MDF for the front and rear of the stage and connect these at the corners with 9” sections of wood cut from leftovers from the Ikea table top I’d used for the set.
For the curtain material, background card and paper, gold braid and gold ‘rope’, I looked through local art, craft and fabric shops, browsed eBay and had a rustle through my wardrobe for potential sacrificial items. A combination of these provided some wine red faux velvet, gold braid, rope and tassels and some thin cream cotton material (I didn’t like that shirt much anyway).
The following picture shows the cut out MDF pieces for the front of the stage. I used a Stanley knife with a metal ruler to cut the MDF pieces. The middle piece is for three sections of bunched fabric and the top piece is for a covered and gold braided top front section. These are to be drilled and bolted to the main (bottom) piece. The bolts are spaced with nuts thread-locked into place on one side and tightened on the other side. The light weight of the thin MDF and of the faux velvet fabric, which is not only cheaper, but also lighter than the real thing, are helpful in that they’re not heavy enough to ‘droop’.
You can also see the red fabric and gold braid I bought before I started cutting and measuring.
The next picture shows the start of the application of the fabric and gold border to the top front piece. This was cut to size so I could fold it over the edges and glue it to the rear of the MDF piece, where any glue soaking through the fabric wouldn’t be visible. This also meant I didn’t need to be cautious about being stingy with the amount of glue I used and risk the fabric coming unstuck. I used Copydex glue, which is latex based, so is flexible when it dries and works well with wood and fabric. Prior to this, I had drilled the holes for the connecting bolts through this and the (middle) piece that it would be attached to behind it and secured the bolts, as they wouldn’t be accessible once the fabric was in place.
In the next pic, you can see the rear of the same piece with the bolts in place and the second piece for the bunched/draping fabric, with cut outs for the gaps between the three bunches so the board doesn’t show.
Getting the fabric to hang right on the second piece was down to guesswork and trial and error. I found that folding the fabric in a concertina pattern, experimenting with its placement on the MDF and pinning it when it looked right eventually yielded the look I was after.
Here it’s initially folded…
In the meantime, I’d also sprayed the main front piece white, with a view to painting it, as, at this stage, I intended to paint a textured pattern along the bottom piece of the stage that would be visible when it was finished.
I stippled paint onto it with some sponge to give a textured finish, before drilling for the attachment of the middle piece and trying a quick test fitting. At this point, the bunched drapery still needed some tweaking before it looked right…
I also started to work on the rest of the fabric. I planned to have a set of static front curtains, held back with braided gold rope, a further set of red curtains behind this, ‘inside’ the stage on a cord so they can open and close, and an inner set of semi-transparent, cream coloured curtains behind these that can also be opened and closed.
You can see the progress with the pieces and decorative gold braid in the next pics, along with the first test fitting of the front curtains. Notice also how the bunched drapes have a better look compared with the previous pic.
Having gotten the look of the front fabric pieces worked out, I cut out the rear piece as a ‘frame’ to the same dimensions as the front to allow the background to be backlit, along with four nine inch pieces to connect the front and rear pieces. I added further lengths of MDF to reinforce and retain the shape, which were pinned, glued and clamped into place while the glue dried.
The floor and backdrop were created separately and made to be replaceable, as mentioned in the objectives I’d set out at the beginning of the post. I was particularly pleased with how the flooring turned out. For this, I used some thin sections of pine tongue and groove cladding, which I halved lengthways and cut to look like floorboards. Like the MDF, these were thin and soft enough to work on with a stanley knife.
In the following pic, you can see the early part of this process.
…and here a bit further along, after some staining and distressing…
The final touch, after finishing the weathered look, was to add nails to each ‘floorboard’. For these, I drilled holes in the corner of each ‘floorboard’ and then shortened individual panel pins by snapping them with pliers to create the ‘nails’ that were just shorter than the thickness of the cladding (7mm). This was painstaking, not to mention painful by the end of it, but I think the look it achieved was worth the effort. Here’s a bunch of the miniature ‘nails’ – there were 68 in all…
I also created slots that a paper backdrop on an MDF frame could slide into and created a paper backdrop with varying layers of translucence to create an interesting backlit effect. For this, the sky was airbrushed blue for a smooth finish, as I wanted to avoid brushstrokes being accentuated by the backlight, having tried this at another time and not being happy with the look. I used a circular piece of paper as a mask while painting the sky to keep a central sun/moon circle of white.
I then created a stencil from black paper to spray the ground/landscape at the bottom of the background. As I didn’t want the ground to be backlit, I spray-mounted the piece of black paper that I’d cut away to make the stencil onto the back of the background paper, so it followed the line of the horizon and made the ground section opaque. The finishing touch was to cut a piece of thinner paper to the size of the background, with a circle cut out directly behind the sun/moon to allow the sun/moon to ‘shine’ by allowing more backlight through. The rest of the sky retained some translucence to give a gentler glow, with the opaque ground only lit from the front.
Here are the finished backdrop and floorboard sections removed from the completed stage…
…..the stage with the curtains partly open, showing the outer and inner sets of curtains, with the translucence of the inner curtains slightly visible, as well as the glow of the ‘sun’…
…and with the curtains open and the lighting dimmed to show the effect of the ambient light of the sky and the brighter circle of the sun:
There are a few other tweaks and additions that warrant a mention - e.g. I added a decorative bottom border to the stage front, the inner curtains have aluminium wire running along a seam at the bottom to give control when animating them frame by frame, the stage has holes to secure it to the set with screws or bolts, etc - but I hope that gives a fair idea of the build process and the way I approached it.
Next, I’ll be working on finishing the puppet, lighting and on a test run of the workflow for the green screen shooting and compositing.
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