I am finally turning to my Silent Night, Deadly Night (1984) diorama, and the first piece was to get some good scans of the tape I have so that I can scale it up for the window and get some decent-resolution prints.
I got the spines of the tape scanned in as well. I love the spine designs—there’s not too much media these days that has a spine!
Finally, I got a decent scan of the top of the box. Given that it was a bit uneven, it didn’t come out perfect. It’s also where we get the commercial-use warning, which is kind of an odd location.
I also scanned the back of the tape, though I’m not going to print that out since it will never be in view. Although if I decide I like the print enough to and scrap the whole idea of a three-dimensional chimney, I may rethink that. Here it is just in case:
This morning I asked Michael Branson Smith to take a look and see if he could cleanly replace all the text on the tape about Nightmare on Elm Street, Halloween, and Friday the 13th with the clean, concise prose from the movie poster, namely:
MBS is the bomb.com. I think it’s much cleaner this way, and while I’m taking artistic liberty with the original VHS design, I do think it’ll work better for the diorama.
Now that that’s done, I wanted to get a sense in Preview of how the tape will scale. Currently it’s 10.3 cm wide (4 inches) and 18.92 cm high (7.5 inches). If I multiply that by 6 or 7, I get roughly a 60–70 cm (2–2.5 feet) wide tape by 115–125 cm tall (4–4.5 feet).
I did the same math with the spines and got the figures I needed quicker than just about anything else I’ve done thus far. Loving that we don’t have to worry about perspective on this one.
I played with the numbers based on some wood I had hanging around the office, and I think the final measurements will be the following:
- Front and back cover: 68.32 cm wide (scaled from 10.3) × 125.5 cm high (scaled from 18.92)
- Sides: 17.47 cm deep (scaled from 2.68) × 125.5 cm high (scaled from 18.92)
- Top: 68.32 cm wide × 17.47 cm deep
The sides are 125.5 cm because I have a 251 cm piece of OSB board that I can just cut in half to make the side panels. I’m using a scale factor of 7.2 for the height, but tacking on a little more for the spine width since the wood is a bit wider than 17 cm —I’m doing this purely so I don’t have to make another cut. Cleaner is better.
Tomorrow I head to Obi (the Italian Home Depot) to pick up a large 130 cm × 70 cm OSB board for the front of the tape (and maybe a second for the back?). I also need fake snow, fake brick wallpaper (if I can find it), icicles, and some screws and a few brackets. It’s Bob the Builder time.
Although honestly, I’m still not convinced I need to do anything more than just get the tape scanned images printed out, throw a few brackets on it, screw it all together, and bam—done. Easiest diorama ever. Maybe some black wrap for the background? Not sure, but given it’s the holidays, I’m convinced less is more.
