Creepshow Diorama: Lights, Camera, Sand!

As the window area of the bav-o-rama is being finished, I’m trying to get the final pieces of the diorama figured out. If all goes according to plan, the inaugural Creepshow (1982) installation should be ready to go by mid-July. Very exciting! Here’s a look at what the space will look like, it’s pretty cool.

Alberto has once again worked his magic: the two side walls for the background are hinged to the wall and on wheels so it will be dead simple to adjust the angle they meet the back wall as needed.

All three are made of pressboard, and I have to figure out the best way to apply the comic strip background to these walls without creating a long term mess. Maybe I apply the background scenery to lauan first, so that it remains rigid while at the same time is easily attached and removed from the pressboard walls—any advice there is greatly appreciated, dear reader.

All three walls are 120 cm wide by 167 cm high, although the two side walls can change angles effectively changing the back wall width as needed.

Earlier this week I had a conversation with Michael Branson Smith (MBS) to get some advice on the looping video of Becky Vickers drowning, as well as the best way to handle the background. At first I was imagining breaking up the beach scene into three parts, ocean and shoreline creeping in on Harry Vickers’ head as the centerpiece, and the two bookends of that triptych creating a sense of space and dimension by adding in sand dunes you might find in the Hamptons or Montauk. That said, if the license plate on the Jeep driven by Richard Vickers is any indicator, the scene is set in New Jersey which has a very similar shoreline to those I grew up with on Long Island.

Creepshow Jeep with Jersey Plates

Anyway, MBS suggested we take scenes from the original graphic novel that accompanied the release of the film in 1982 in order to make a custom series of panels to give the viewer some context—just the first of MBS’s many brilliant ideas. So he and his wunderkind illustrator daughter are working up some possibilities, and I’m very excited about that, you can get a rough idea of what they’re thinking here:

Something to Tide You Over Design background design concept

I have a meeting with that elite NYC design team tomorrow, so there’s definitely more to come on the background front–so good!

Another thing we got to discussing is how to contour the sand so it doesn’t look flat and relatively fake. MBS suggested chicken wire and paper mache to create an uneven surface that I can then glue the sand too, while at the same time affixing the head. He also suggested having the diorama floor of sand slope down a bit to reinforce a sense of scale and the normal incline of any beach at the shoreline. This seemed like an excellent idea, and after some youtube scouring I have a few ideas. I also realized it’s going to be important to mark-up the sand with various debris like dried seaweed, wood pieces, etc. to make it look somewhat convincing. Also, once again, I’m wide open to the experience and knowledge of anyone reading this given it’s all quite new to me. I’ve not done paper mache since third grade art class when we were tasked with wrapping and then painting a wine bottle to look like an bottom-heavy humanoid—a memorable project for sure.

Moving on, we got to talking about what might prove to be the most challenging piece of the diorama, a real-time switching of the video input from the looping video of Becky drowning to a live feed from a camera trained on anyone who stops and looks at the exhibit for more than a 5-10 seconds. MBS suggested that a proximity sensor attached to an Arduino might do the trick, so I’ve been looking for resources on this and have found at least a similar project someone has articulated using PIR motion detectors to switch  between different videos. I don’t want to switch between videos as much as switch between video inputs, but it might be the same thing. This is yet another area I could use some help with if anyone has some expertise in this area, or even knows someone who knows someone else I can reach out to 🙂 Getting this bit to work would be pretty rad, but we will see—world enough and time and all that.

Finally, another topic we touched upon was lighting, and the idea of two stand-up LED strips hidden on either side of the window. They should provide more than enough light and be easy to manage, while remaining outside the viewer’s field of vision—unlike my original idea for hanging lights. Then MBS floated the idea of the strips subtly changing color depending on the time of day so that the diorama reflects the actual time of day, so a brighter, sun-baked yellow during the day, much like the beach.At night the diorama has a bluish tinge, and I wonder if we can even have a redish/orange glow at sunrise and sunset. Luckily LED strips are pretty easy to find, but programming them to change color with the time of day might be another project for the Arduino, our Twang experiment many years ago might offer some insight there.

Anyway, that’s an update as to how the diorama is moving from a bizarre idea to an honest to god reality! There’s nothing better than watching a plan come together.