Big Love: model attempt #1

My first attempt at creating a model for the Big Love set was...well, let's just call it a learning experience.

I started out with a photograph of my white model...

I really wanted to play with "levels." There's just so much physical action in this play that I wanted to give the actors some space to really roll around in. I liked the idea of the entrance to the house being up above- characters who are living or staying in the house can poke their heads out the window and yell down below. And the characters who come from the direction of the ocean have their own space to play with- the platforms to the right seem like a perfect space for the girls, and later the guys, to throw themselves to the ground over and over again. I even picture Bella dropping her tomatoes off the top ledge- just setting her table down right outside the door to the house and giving those poor tomatoes a long, long way to splat.

Then I found an image online of cliffs dropping off into the ocean....


And well, I just sort of hacked the two things together. My white model was great, but the photo of it wasn't the best- I'm not quite sure why...just the angle or the point of view just wasn't really working. Also, I wasn't great at using Photoshop just yet, so the back wall of KLT ended up looking a little funky...I just wasn't able to give it the perspective that it needed. I did, however, manage to suceed in making "Little Kresge" look absolutely enormous.

I also needed to make it look as if the house were present on stage. So, I found a picture of a house.


And I needed to make it look like it was remotely possible to get from the house to the stairs, so I stuck some stairs in there too. Altogether, it was a very hasty cut-and-paste job. The final product wasn't bad or wrong, but didn't really look the way I wanted it to. I was *trying* to make the set look realistic, but wasn't quite succeeding.

One great success was finding the perfect "futuristic" bathtub:


And here it is, attempt number 1:


Like I said, not the worst, but I was determined to do better. I really loved this play and had a lot of great ideas about it, so I decided to keep working on it and use it as the set to present at the end of the semester.