I’ve been making some progress collecting the various elements needed for the Creepshow (1982) episode “Something to Tide You Over” diorama. This will be the first diorama in the bavastudio space, and I’m pretty excited. I guess the first thing to note is that the window proscenium is being built out presently, and it’s coming along nicely:
It’ll be hemmed in by an angled perimeter of three walls (eventually with paneling finish) to enclose the window diorama cleanly. I like this design because there’s both enough storage and enough space to work within. The last two pieces will be adding the third wall with a door for easy access.
After that, we’ll need to figure out whether to design the background panels with something like 1/2? to 3/4? plywood that provides thicker, more stable material (but also heavier and harder to work with) versus a cardboard-like material so the panels are easier to handle. I guess the question will be whether or not we’ll eventually be hanging things off the background walls for various effects—something I imagine happening very easily in the near future. Perhaps we can move between both materials depending on the scene’s specific needs. We’ll see, all the same we will have to figure out a way to secure them cleanly.
In terms of the outside enclosure, the cocktail-style video game Rally-X will fit nicely up against the angled wall, giving ample space for stools for game players to sit and enjoy the play—always a challenge with cocktail machines. Beyond that, we are rethinking where the coach and chairs for the living room area go based on space, but I’m thinking the diorama will be finished well before the rest of the space (perhaps in just a few short weeks), which means I had to start collecting items for our first scene.
To give some context, the scene will be taken from the third episode of Creepshow (1982), namely “Something to Tide You Over.” In this scene Harry Wentworth (Ted Danson) is buried up to his neck in the sand on the shoreline by Richard Vickers (Leslie Nielsen) to torture him for having an affair with his wife Becky Vickers. As part of this elaborate and twisted revenge love triangle, Richard has placed a black and white television in front of Harry so that he is forced to watch his lover drown live, while at the same time preparing to meet a similar fate as the tide comes in. It’s a psychotic scenario straight from the mind of the master of horror himself, Stephen King, and adapted to screen brilliantly by the great George Romero.
My idea is to capture the scene from behind, where you see the back of Harry’s head, but can watch the wife drowning on the TV in some kind of loop. What’s more that image will switch to a camera above the TV that captures anyone who comes by the diorama on the street and stops to look. The switching between inputs for the TV is something I’m working on now, but it would be amazing if it were automatic versus manual. So, to build this out there were a few things I needed, noting I already have the black and white TV and camera. In fact, I did get the Sony ZV-E10 to push a live image to the 52 year old Motorola TV just yesterday, which was a blast!
Apart from that, I went shopping yesterday and got the other pieces I’ll need for the diorama, which are listed below, alongside the price.
- A table top, low-quality aluminum camera tripod for the live camera: $30
- Blue Metal Beach Pail (scaled at 2? to make the 9? TV seem bigger): $10
- Mannequin head with real human hair that will need to be styled: $30
- Life-size blue crab to reinforce accurate scale of mannequin head: $11
- RF convertor for RCA signal for the old 1972 Motorola black and white TV: $10
- 10 foot Micro HDMi cable to get live video out of Sony ZV-E10 camera: $11
- A multi-HDMI Selector to seamlessly choose between live camera footage and looping video of Becky drowning: $12
- 50-100 pounds of beach sand for the base of the diorama: $10
So, as of now I spent a grand total of $124.00 on this specific diorama. I’m hoping to keep the costs for each new diorama relatively low given I want this to be fast, cheap, and out of control rather than an obsessive struggle with verisimilitude. What’s more, I’ve been accumulating a lot of stuff over the years, and that should finally pay some dividends with this kind of project.
A couple of other pieces to figure out are how to get the footage of Becky Vickers drowning cleanly into a watchable, believable sequence with a GIF or short, looping movie. I know we worked with the video pi looper for OER19, and I can play with that and see if it still works. But I also have an extra mac mini hanging around that I can just run HDMI out and convert for the Motorola TV. On the mini we can use either a GIF in a browser window or looping video in something like quicktime without much overhead. So that piece is absolutely doable, I just have to study the various moments of Becky drowning and get some advice from the GIF/video king Michael Branson Smith on the best way to capture and edit them. I must say, the window diorama is really pulling the bavastudio together.
Update: I forgot to include a sketch I made of the diorama while traveling to Berlin a few weeks back. It think it captures the essence pretty well…
The other piece that still needs to be worked on that I left out in this post is how to design the background panels. I was thinking making them comic book panels that show the rising tide and ocean on the center panels, and the other two highlight the dunes and perhaps also extend the vanishing point of the ocean. Not sure there, but I like the idea of making them comic book panels that do not push towards versimilitude given the whole conceit of Creepshow is that it is a horror comic in the tradition of Tales from the Crypt.