SETBUILD '09

The setbuild is finally over – and the first year as well!
Our production week went really well and we managed to do everything in time even though we had to cut our production time by 20% because our Robin could only be in Rochester on Thursday. Beacause we new this and worked like crazy in advance we got it all done by Thursday.
We all enjoyed the production week and did really well!

Here are some pics from the production week. A big thanks to Batman and Robin for dressing up in tights for us. You did a great job guys!

Pre production week:

Testing the Batboots

Day1:

Ida taking a break

Admiring the backdrop

Henry & the set after day one

Day2:


Serious business

Day3:

behind the backdrop

guarding the light

Day4 – the Final Day:

Niko works on the final touches for the lighting

Robin gets some make up on…

The outfits

…and Batman as well


Getting ready for shooting

Batman, Robin & the puppet masters

The team

Back to the Batcave!

Hi, again.
So, our first Production Day is now over. It´s been a long but a really good day for us!
Hey, Our backdrop is nearly done!! Cool!!!!
Two girls from the Theatre group came to help us and did a brilliant job painting our canvas. Also Henry helped us enormously. Thank you girls and thank you Henry so much!

We also managed to begin building our stage. We set 10 tables in a combination we needed and bound them together, leaving space and a hole for the window. We put all the planks on the tables and tried to figure the best way to place them. Tomorrow we´ll take out the camera and begin to set the planks into exactly right places considering the view from the camera.
Tomorrow we´ll also try to finish off the stage and bring out the lights. Since as we were told, setting the lights ready might take a moment…
Anyway, so far we´re making a progress. Cool.
We took lots of pictures, some of them might be here tomorrow.
That´s it, bye for now.

-Petra

Hi!
We are just hours away from the beginning of our Production week! So close… During these past few days we´ve tried to prepare and make ready as much as possible to decrease the upcoming stress. We are about to have a tight schedule because as our Robin isn´t available of Friday, we have to shoot our final image on Thursday.
Our only option is to work hard and be clever and rapid and actually manage to have a ready complete set by Thursday. Phew.

So this is where we´re at:

The technicians downstairs were kind to make us the window frame. We picked it up last Friday and it is now painted.
As we have mentioned before, we made a choice to sew many of the pieces of clothing by ourselves, as we couldn´t find them from anywhere. All the pieces of clothing Eeva talked about in her last post are now done/nearly done. With the great help of a sewing machine (thank you!) we spent yesterday and some of Today by sewing and creating some wonderful pieces of special design outfits that (hopefully) will look just great on our models! Now we are missing only both Robin´s and Batman´s gloves. We also need to make some finish touches and (hopefully only) some small changes, depending on how everything looks on the actual set.

Niko found us new boxers for Robin, that hopefully will look better than the ones we had found before. Eeva found the fabric for Robin´s shoes (from a fabric store in London) and did a great job creating them by her own. Also we actually DID manage to find a pair of decent-looking green leather gloves (thank God) from e-bay. For 7,99£. Pretty reasonable price, don´t you think? Anyway, after realizing how tight our timetable for next week will be, we got scared that the gloves wouldn´t arrive on time. So we e-mailed the seller and she made a promise to us that she´d post the gloves first thing tomorrow morning. So IF Royal Mail doesn´t screw this up, the gloves-problem seems to be solved, finally (we´ve been looking after those gloves from every possible store here you could think of…and from London as well…) Yey Hurrey!

The biggest issue now seems to be the backdrop. We began to paint it 1,5 weeks ago and it doesn´t look good… But we will make it look amazing in the end! …or at least we´ll give it a shot! (fingers crossed)
The backdrop is now taken down and kept in studio 3. And is about to be builded up again first thing tomorrow morning.

Today we had a group meeting where we discussed about the timetable for next week. We got ourselves again a bit more organized and ready to go.

There´s still a long way, but no time. We´ll see how it goes… Thumbs up for us guys!

-Petra

After hard seeking, our heroes’ outfits are looking quite okay. We have searched the right coloured tights from Chatham and Helsinki, and been in every High Street’s clothing shop in Rochester and Chatham. Now we are nearly there, but we still need to find leather gloves and felt cloth for making the shoes for Robin. From Batman’s outfit we’re missing the mask and we probably need cloth for the gloves (if there is not enough fabric to use from the leggings).

We have got already:

Batman:

Cloth for the cape (can be used for the mask also) from Siru’ s Images of Seduction project, £ 10
Long sleeve T-shirt from a charity shop on Chatham High Street, £ 2, 50
Wet look leggings (for knickers and shoes) Matalan £ 6
Tights from Seppala (A high street store in Finland) 10 €

Robin:

Mask £ 0,48 and Cape from Just Fabrics, £ 9,48
T- shirt Niko’ s £ 0,00!
Belt Eeva’ s £ 0, 00!
Knickers, (women’s bikini bottom) Dorothy Perkins, £ 0, 85, these are maybe too small, need to see if we find better ones
Tights, five pack, Wilkinson £ 1, 49
Next we need to sew the capes, shorts and shoes for Batman. We’ll borrow a sewing machine from a girl who is studying fashion at UCA, so that won’t be complicated. I have also done patterns for Robin’s shoes, but first we need to find the fabric.

Eeva

We’re back from the holidays and working hard with our set. We’ve batshopping and found many props for the set. Robins outfit is almost done, we still in need to make him his shoes and find a pair of gloves (we might have found a pair) and panties. Our Robin confirmed that he can be on the shoot, which is great news! Batman’s outfit is also being put together, we brought tights for him all the way from Finland.

Last week we had our last building workshop with Henry before the production begins. We split our team in two, half of us painted the planks and the other half built the backdrop and started painting it. It’s massive! (So big that we had to take everything down to be able to move it to Studio 3, where we’ll continue painting it on our production week).
//Ida

The massive backdrop



The beautiful plank paint






Niko is well protected!

Superman: *snigger*

Batman: “Did you see that…”
Superman: “That bloke was wearing his underwear UNDER his clothes!”

Finally, some pictures from our second mock-up:

This is how far we’ve come with the project:
- We have a Batman!
- And a Robin! (but we need a stand in if our Wonderboy can’t come)
- We re-did the mock up and now we should have all the measurements for the stage, the window and the gigantic back drop
- The technichan’s downstairs are kind enough to build us the bloody window
- The theatre people make us a batmask
- We have fabrics for our heroes cloaks
Now we’re all off for a well deserved batbreak. See you!

Meeting 5.4.2009
After the progress tutorials last week we have figured out the exact measurements of our set. Eeva used the scientific measurement of Robin´s foot. From here calculations we could gather that since we had twelve long planks as our wall the length of our stage would be 12×24,5 cm i.e. 249cm. Though this was now solved and we were sitting in the fashionable Wayne manor enjoying our teas we knew there were other problems to tackle. So it was “back to the bat cave” for us. The costumes needed thinking about. We have been looking for tights in all the fashionable shops well known to fashionable ladies and crime fighters, but finding the right colour and right prise is not as easy as one might think. During this meeting we started checking that the materials for the capes would be purchased. Petra and Eeva were nominated to go and buy the fabrics we had earlier discovered in a sewing shop in Pentagon. Even though one might think the costumes are quite simple, there are some details in them that still require our attention. Finding the right gloves for the boy wonder, making batman´s mask and getting the colours right are all equally important parts of making our scene work. Another matter that came up during the meeting was solving the size of the window frame in our picture. We had solved all the other measurements but that was still giving us all a big headache. We spent quite a big part of our meeting trying to draw the window onto paper and looking at the picture solve the size of it. Finally we decided that it would be best to make the 3D model and measure the window from that. As the preproduction presentations are coming up this week we also started making our Bat Point presentation. We thought back on ideas we had in the beginning and were all quite unanimous about the fact that we decided very early that we wanted to make an older film that had not been done before. We chose Batman and particularly this scene because it is a classic moment in the movie and it is funny and though it looks simple has its little tricks. At the end of our meeting everybody was given some task to complete before the preproduction presentation. Eeva was to prepare the cutting list, Ida to print the high-def version of our chosen frame, Petra to take measurements of Batman´s head for the mask and I was to get a QuickTime file of the scene. As there was no time to waste and we had finished our tea we scattered into the night with our capes fluttering behind us.

/Niko