The Making of The Shining Diorama

I had the concept for featuring the “Come and Play with Us” scene from The Shining in the Bav-O-Rama before it was even built out. Originally I wanted to include Danny on the “big wheel” (it’s not actually a big wheel) as well as rig a camera so that folks could have their picture taken with the Grady sisters, something that made absolutely no sense. As it happens, part of learning how to create a decent diorama is figuring out what to abandon and/or leave out. For this scene that meant cutting out Danny all together and just having his POV assumed. The other piece was to eliminate any photo/video technology, but more on that later.

MBS gave me the inspiration for trying to dial-in a sense of perspective for this diorama, something the Creepshow installation lacked a bit of. He also floated the idea of having the Grady sisters projected on plexiglass, but that meant more serious overhead, i.e. buying a projector that can deal with the intense light the space gets throughout the day, I wasn’t convinced a more affordable projector would be bright enough.

I wanted to do this one on a stricter budget, so I ultimately kyboshed the projector and focused on the lofi fundamentals, and I’m glad I did.* These sketches came before Miles and I dismantled the Creepshow diorama in mid-January with the expectation The Shining diorama would be up within a few weeks at most (wishful thinking). I thought we needed to take apart the the previous diorama to begin calculating angles and measurements for the hallway perspective, but if I knew how long it would take I would have let “Something to Tide You Over” run longer.

Early on I bought a Big Wheel from the US along with a cheap carpet with the classic pattern everyone connects with The Shining, but as I started studying this particular scene I realized neither of these elements would work. There was not enough room in the diorama for the Big Wheel (not to mention Danny rides a Hedstrom Trail Cycle) and this carpet pattern was not in the hallway scene when the sisters ask Danny to come and play with them forever and ever. So if either were to be included it would be deviating from the film. That was something I toyed with for effect, but opted to remain true to the original. What’s more, it made accounting for perspective with that rug pattern much, much easier.

After dismantling the Creepshow diorama I hung the geometrically patterned carpet as a not-so-subtle “coming soon” sign. But what I was hoping would hang for a few short weeks became months.

When trying to start The Shining diorama I got hung up on a number of things, in particular what would be the correct angles for the ceiling and floor to capture the illusion of space. On top of that my dad got sick and passed away, so the end of January and all of February was lost.

In March Tommaso and I created a scaled version of the hallway, and when I turned it on its side it was pretty damn accurate, but the project still lingered because I was not entirely confident. On top of that my day job was taking over my time, not to mention a malfunctioning Cheyenne video game that will not be spoken of lest I lose my mind.

As I wrote about already, it was not until mid-May when bavastudio hosted two theatre production students from Canada, Wren and Kamille, that real progress was made.

Wren and Kamille built out the ceiling of the diorama using foamcore and that was just the spark I needed to get back in the game and knock the diorama out. They figured out the ceiling works best at an angle of 20° incline, and having a specific angle made everything easier (an important lesson).

Using foamcore to cobble together the hallway floor

Soon after Wren and Kamille left, I had renewed inspiration and confidence to try creating the floor of the hallway. The floor was at a roughly 18 degree angle, and given it was going to be painted blue and gray, I used a red Sharpee to designate the locations of the panels I cut out, but admittedly I should’ve used pencil.

With both the ceiling and floor installed and the side-walls angled accordingly you get a pretty good sense of  how the hallway perspective might actually work, and that was a very exciting moment. I started to glimpse the project as a achievable reality.

Putting the hallway at 1:4 scale inside the actual hallway was probably not as impressive as I thought it waswhen I took the picture, but it does highlight that Tommaso and I winged it pretty well that first time.

To get the floor to sit at an 18° angle (a bit less than the ceiling) we used stacks of VHS tapes, one of which is [Stephen] King on Screen—a VHS phantom thread.

I took a photo of the hallway with the iconic carpet for fun, but I had already decided it was not going to be on the floor. That said, I have alternative plans for that rug pattern that I’m still working on.

Once the floor and ceiling were installed, the next piece I turned to was the baseboard. For the floor trim I used the 18° angle to make the strips out of foamcore, and that worked fairly well. Also, turns out that glueing two pieces of foamcore cut at different heights provides a more convincing base board effect, although not as ornate as the original. I painted the baseboard with the peach-ish color left over from the Elevator Action stencil job from a couple of years ago. That color worked out really well in the end. In the image below you can also see the masking tape in preparation for painting the floor to resemble the blue and gray carpet.

One of the crazy things about this diorama is the Grady sisters print-out was done on my cheap Epson 220 printer using a screenshot I took from a Youtube video clip. I could have (and probably should have) gotten a higher quality image to work from, but I wanted to get this thing done, and trying to to figure out how to rip a 4K disc would have killed my TCB vibe. Pro tip: I used the Rasterbator site to break the image up into 8 different 8″ x 11″ pages for printing.

As demonstrated in the image below, once the 8 separate sheets were printed you could cut and glue them together on a 5 mm foamcore board. The Rasterbator site leaves a couple of centimaters of white at the bottom and the right side to makes attaching the sheets easier.

One assembled, the effect is pretty good from a certain distance. I could’ve gotten more hifi, as I already said, but perfection is the enemy of good enough and done.

Tommaso helped me position the Grady sisters in the hallway to get a sense of where they should be placed to make the overall effect work. We finally ended on about 57.5 cm from the back of the hallway as the ideal spot. We then cut the Grady sisters out of the foamcore to get the desired effect.

Tommaso also helped me carve out the frame for the H.W, Bartlett painting that hangs in the hallway. This came in handy to further lock-in where to place the twins for a sense of their height and, again, to capture the ideal sense of depth in the hallway.

Would I paint the foamcore floor with water-based paint again? Not sure, it definitely warped the floor, but interestingly enough that helped with the effect. That said, I think I would probably do spray paint to see the difference, I just think water-based acrylic paint provides a bit more texture and is not as smooth. If given the choice and I had the time I would just source the blue and gray carpets and cut them in. It would not have been hard at all.

One of the hacks Antonella and I figured out to make the sisters stand-up straight without a perceivable trace was to use two long screws (6-8″) encased in hose-like tubing. The tubing worked well to support long, lightweight aluminum piping that held up the Grady sisters quite inconspicuously.

These two pipes were placed over the screws with the see-through tubing, and they fit quite snuggly.

Once the two aluminum pipes were inserted over the screws they ran through holes in the foamcore floor. After that, makeshift duct tape holders on the back of the cut-out held the sisters up cleanly with no trace of the support system—allowing them to freely haunt the hallway.

I was really happy with how well the screw/tubing hack worked to keep the Grady sisters standing on their own four feet.

Initially I was using the cord hiding strips along the ceiling line of the diorama to ensure the incline of the ceiling is consistent given its removed constantly while working. But once it was added and the work continued I realized how well the strips could double as the top part of the hallway’s crown molding.

I struggled a bit with the blue patch of carpet because the crappy Italian DIY home repair box store Obi would only mix satinato (or semi-gloss) blue, which didn’t work given how reflective it was. So I needed to go to a good paint store, in this case Frisanco, to get a matte dark blue mix that actually worked. The issue this created was I must have put on four coats of blue to hide the satinato that started to warp the foamcore considerably.

With the gray and blue carpet painted, it was now time to think through how to build out the columns on either side of the diorama. They’ll be placed (roughly) where the white trapezoids are on each side wall.

I also started figuring out the back wall using a piece of 5mm foamcore and by lightly tracing the window.

For the back wall, I was surprised how easy it was to find a good sample of the wallpaper pattern and just tile that in Gimp to create the desired effect for the back wall. I tried printing the the wall paper pattern for the back wall using the Rasterbator site again, but this pattern was much trickier to glue together.

Rather than trying to glue things I decided to simply tape together the various sheets of paper with masking tape. Despite the tape lines, this helped me get a sense of how big the window and trim should be.

It was at the point I got the floor painted, wallpaper on the back wall, and the baseboard working that I got a glimpse of what could be. And from here on out it just keeps getting better and better.

Tommy used some of his new Oahu alcohol markers to color a brown, wood-like frame on the W.H. Bartlett painting.

The columns behind the Grady sisters further dialed-in the sense of depth and perspective. And seeing the first of two columns in place was yet another satisfying moment.

At this point I also started working on another element that was crucial for a sense of depth, the hanging ceiling light. Placed just a few centimeters in front of the sisters, it provides a crucial elements that really makes the window come out in three dimensions. In the movie the light has a brass fixture with an articulated glass shade. I didn’t want to buy a full blown fixture given scale issues, so I found a cheap $2 white plastic fixture and spray painted it metallic gold.

Turns out the actual fixture was not working with the glass shade I bought, so I needed to swap. But the gold painted canopy that comes out of the ceiling worked well.

Probably the trickiest part of the whole diorama was getting the baseboard and crown moulding around the columns right. I don’t think I did a great job, but I did enough with the foamcore pieces to fool the casual observer.

Preparing the side walls with the wallpaper was something I was putting off because I was afraid my Gimp skills were not up to the task. But in the end the perspective and measure tools in Gimp take most of the pain out of the process. Here’s the trapezoid representation of the side walls with all the measurements (which are more or less the same for both walls).

Possibly the most important piece of the entire diorama was the wallpaper on the side walls. I was hesitant to jump into this, but I finally mustered up the will and used the wall angles and respective measurements to get a test print for the left wall (left and right are always relative to the back of the diorama, never looking in from the window). My test was pretty decent, and seeing the paper on the sidewall was yet another moment (there were a lot of moments).

You also get a good shot of the light fixture in this shot. I bought a glass frosted shade for $14 online and spent about as much on the power cable, light socket, and 60W lightbulb. There’s also a little gold chain along the insulated wire for effect. Once the wallpaper test made sense, it was time to commit and print both walls.

The local printer could only print 90 cm x 70 cm, and given the side-walls are 120 cm x 167 cm (at its widest and tallest) we had to break the print up across two sheets. The print included overlapping pieces that could then be cut and used to paper the columns. The columns come at about 90 cm from the street window, so the measurements were just about perfect. If I’d known better,  I might have placed the columns at 85 cm from the window to hide any possible wallpaper seams behind the columns.

The more forgiving, repositionable mounting glue was crucial for getting the wallpaper right. It allows you to gently nudge the paper to make sure you can salvage any mistakes—and there are always mistakes.

Above you can see the wallpaper for one of the side-walls mounted on a piece of 3 mm foamcore. After that it’s just a matter of cutting it out and applying it to the wall.

With the wallpaper applied to both walls, it was time to paper and install the columns.

Taping the wallpaper to the backside of the column and then pulling it around the visible side was crucial to making it seamless. I learned this after the second try 🙁

Above is a good look at taping one part of the wallpaper to the inside of the column. The second part gets taped down after the paper is affixed to the outside of the column with glue.

The crown molding was a combination of the cord covering strip on top and 5mm foamcore cut to perspective underneath. As mentioned before, the cord covering strip was initially used to preserve the angle of the ceiling, turns out it doubles beautifully as the upper part of the trim, despite its size remains consistent throughout.

It’s really pretty awesome how much everything came together once the wallpaper and columns were finished.

Now it was time to finish off the back wall window. The gray construction paper serves as the base of the window on the back wall. I used the window cut out to make sure you can’t see any of the gray, essentially hiding the wallpaper and offering a neutral color so no undue attention is drawn to the window.

Another cool hack was getting some light gray construction paper and laying that down as the base of the window. Once positioned correctly, I cut four elongated pieces of 3 mm foamcore and attached them directly to the foamcore with super glue (Super Attak in Italy), which means cutting away the construction paper and wall paper and gluing directly to foamcore. There was no need to super glue the construction paper to the wallpaper, I simply used regular strength glue. I did, however, use super glue on the strips of foamcore board because they will be the basis of  a loose frame that secures the plexiglass.

You can’t see it here, but the plexiglass is now underneath the window frame. After gluing the frame to the foamcore strips and you have a solid window with plexiglass doubling as a glass window.

The cool thing here is that the window will now reflect light from the fixture in the hallway, which adds a nice effect.

One of the last pieces was dressing the window with curtains and a curtain rod. I had a cheap small curtain rod hanging around I could cut down and Antonella picked up some fabric at the local market and made custom curtains, and they look amazing.

While the above picture is not great, it does give you a sense of the back wall installed and the curtains in action.

Here is a rare look behind the scenes at the back wall of the diorama, as you can see it is presently held together with duct tape, a Dewalt screw gun box, and a dream.

If you get too close you can see the cracks in the system, like the low-res print of the Grady sisters, but sometimes lofi can be just as good.

The final product is quite a thrill. It’s really cool to have something in your head become a reality like this, even if it’s a copy of an amalgam of other peoples’ visions—thank you Stephen King, Stanley Kubrick, and untold folks on the set of the 1980 film!

There are still a couple of things I need to do, like finish the fire extinguisher alcove and create the hallway in the rear that disappears into the left side of the scene, but for now I will just enjoy good enough.

Update: Taylor Jadin let me know it is hard to get a sense of the size of this diorama, so I found an image someone took of it the other day to give a better sense of the scale of the diorama in relationship to the sidewalk. The size of the window is about 167 cm (or ~5 feet high) by about 100 cm wide (or ~3 feet). It’s fairly big as dioramas go.

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*That said, I do want to re-visit a video projector enriched diorama for the space in the winter. I think the less intense light and a scene that can encompass video seamlessly would be a lot of fun.