It’s been over a month since the Halloween diorama went live, and I’m ready to take it down this week as preparations for a Christmas diorama begin in earnest. That makes this the shortest-lived of the three dioramas thus far. I’m getting into this whole diorama thing, and having a few under my belt has helped confidence levels, not to mention a better understanding of what is and isn’t doable. Beyond the possible, being able to predict what will or won’t take a ton of time/labor is really important. It’s all about learning to tame the diorama dragon!
I already wrote about the idea behind this diorama before it was actually built out, and reflecting on that post I do think the scene worked pretty well, even if less iconic then The Shining moment featuring the Grady sisters in the hallway. I mentioned one of the things I really wanted to capture was this sense of fall that this moment in the film creates, and while I’m not sure we totally achieved that I love the fact that we went for it. This diorama was the first wherein we painted the backgrounds and modeled the tree from scratch. That meant a significant amount of work that made our two week deadline feel super tight, but I’m glad we did because it stretched us quite a bit—despite the fact Tommy learned what a pain in the ass I’m to work with, poor kid. Did I lose it a couple of times? Yeah. Was it in service to ART and not filthy lucre? FUCK YEAH! Being his own burgeoning species of artist, I think he’s beginning to understand the great weight we carry around in our hearts and minds.
Tommy and Anto starting to paint the centerpiece background
Anyway, painting the backgrounds and sculpting trees takes times, but luckily we had Antonella’s calming competence take over the tree making and branch sculpting; Tommy led on drawing and painting the centerpiece; and Riki painted the sky, side panels, and more. It required a lot of hands to make this come together as quickly as it did, but it did come together and in the end I loved that we opted to paint the backgrounds and sculpt the tree.
Centerpiece of the diorama that makes up the scene behind Michael Myers
The tree branches were sculpted by braiding then wire and covering them with clay and then painting them dark brown
The tree trunk has a foam core skeleton that we covered with two or three layers of masking tape, and then painted
The textuality of paint is powerful, and the colors made the window come alive in ways I hadn’t expected. It was also nice to push into new mediums: the creation of the tree out of foam core and masking tape was cool. And while we stopped short of the toxic foam for bark texture, I still thing it looks pretty good. We used a small, cheap video projector to blow-up the scene to help map out the perspective for the background paintings.
Mapping out the hedge scene on the wall so Tommy could get some scale and perspective for the background painting
The diorama sidewalk bleeding into the hedge scene from the movie.
Tommy starting to sketch the background center piece
The actual sidewalk, grass, and hedge were the first pieces we built out, and those came together relatively quick. At the box store for home improvements here in Trento, namely Obi, I was able to pick up some cheap fake grass and hedge leaves, as well as some OSB board. Rather then building the base of this one in foam core like we did with The Shining hallway, I opted to actually build the base out of wood given I wanted it to be more solid.* We did, however, use foam core to create the template for both the trapezoidal diorama area as well as the perspectival sidewalk within it. Those templates were then used to cut those pieces out of OSB board with a circular saw—power tools have arrived into the diorama making 🙂
Foam core template for the diorama area that would be cut out of OSB board
Sidewalk template cut out of foam core before being cut out of OSB board
The diorama base was then raised at an angle to help with the perspective.
Once the base was created we cut out the sidewalk and screwed that on top of the existing template. One of the coolest touches was etching out the sidewalk cement lines with a tool akin to a Dremel. It helped both with the verisimilitude and the reinforcing of perspective.
OSB sidewalk with lines etches in, also spray painted for a gray like cement effect
In the image above you can also see a long trench cut out towards the back-left. That’s for the track Michael Myers moves along as he appears and disappears from behind the hedge. Beyond the painting, that was the real ‘innovation’ of this diorama. I bought an electrical curtain rod that had a remote control and I flipped-it over and used as small a piece of track as possible. To my great surprise it worked pretty well—and the remote must be using a radio frequency because I could mount it outside the window and the track would still respond to the command to open or close the curtains.
So with the base built out and the background panels painted, the last bit was to get the tree to stand in the hole and attach the autumnal leaves to the wire-branches Antonella had braided. We tried live branches from a Japanese Maple in the yard, but the leaves died so quick that we had to find fake leaves to attach—which luckily was easy enough thanks to the evil empire that is Amazon.
The sculpted tree with changing leaves as well as the on-the-fly wired spot light
You can also get a sense from the above image of the blue, cloud filled skies that made up the ceiling. Riki really made short work of the side panels and the ceiling, and for that we were fortunate he can paint so well, so quickly because for a little bit I thought we were going to have to fake the side panels with something else—but that was unacceptable. In for a penny, in for a pound. The other thing you can see in the above image is the spot light that helped to highlight Michael Myers, who would’ve otherwise been lost in the shadows. I re-wired a small spotlight on the fly that had its own switch—I felt pretty awesome about. The one issue, as Tommy warned, was that a misplaced light source could throw off the effect of the assumed light in the painting. He’s probably right, but given the fact that a fair amount of the background was subsumed by the hedge and tree, I don’t think we’ll be getting too much hate mail on that point.
Michael Myers cut-outs—I think this might be from the Halloween reboot from 20017, but who is counting?
The final pieces were cutting out a silhouette of Michael Myers to attach to the track.
Michael Myers on the track to diorama awesomeness!
That worked out pretty cleanly, even if the figure is more akin to the more recent Michael Myers than the 1978 edition—we were on a timeline people!
A sense of the diorama’s perspective and colors, which I love.
You can get a sense of how colorful the whole thing was; the mixing fake and real leaves on the sidewalk and grass adds a nice effect. It really did “scream” fall, if you will.
A fuller look at the diorama from the street
There are a few other pieces I failed to discuss here, like the sidewalk’s elevated ledge, but I’ll add more detail to the descriptions of the images on Flickr given they ‘re all collected in an album. As it stands, I’m over a month late with this post and I need to get this out of draft and onto the blog so I can begin to document the next one—no rest for the diorama weary. Before we close, though, it makes sense to show you the moveable track in action. We were able to successfully securee the radio remote outside the office to allow people to move Myers back and forth from behind the hedge, which was a definite coup for this amateur. Finally, I love that Miles was able to join us on Halloween to help christen this first of its kind “interactive bav-O-Rama.”
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*The diorama space is pretty small and there are times I need to crawl in there and adjust lights or in this case the tree. A foam core base would make that impossible, so from here on out I think all the bases will be made with more solid materials.
