Lesson: Set Creation Part Two

It became increasingly harder to make the set look like a bedroom as there are a lot of props needed to create something that believable. I felt as if we were just looking for things to add to the room to fill the space that things just started to get a little ridiculous in terms of the messages on the walls and the dirt and stains that was splashed around the area. This being said, as time progressed so did our idea and after a discussion with Joeley we decided that the space would be best suited to look like a squatters area.

This meant that we it wouldn't look so sparse and that we had a little more creative outlet in terms of this new set design idea. Sadly our Art Director wasn't around to concur the idea so as Director I creatively decided to go ahead. As per an idea from martin we took random but matching strips of wallpaper and pasted them on to the wall to make it look old and peeled, as if the majority came off a long time ago and parts refused to let go. I felt this helped give the space the forgotten look that surrounded the squatters corner.

A key aspect if the piece is to have a heart being pulled out of a chest. Jacob wanted to use a pigs heart.... which would have been sufficient but I still thought it would be nice to play around with how one might go about achieving this without the use of an actual organ. I then started hunting around for material and decided to go with yellow foam.

I then began trying to make it heart shaped before I got Jacob to paint it heart coloured. It was suggested that the edges shouldn't be smooth and and to give it a rougher and more worn look which I did my just pinching off the edges as opposed to just cutting it with scissors.

I added tubes which Tom painted white to pass for Arteries and Veins and with that we had our make shift heart.

Whilst the boys were painting I started to experiment with what effect the foam would have when reacting with fake blood which I made using Strawberry sauce, Red food colouring and water. I had to use acrylic paint to thicken the mixture as there was no Coco Powder or Cornflour on hand (As known per a recipe I have used in the past) This gave the mixture a more "raised" and less smooth look but I felt that this wouldn't cause a major problem when it came to production. What I did find was that what I expected to happen with the sponge did not. I expected the sponge to absorb the mixture quite heavily and thus with a slight squeeze of the fist allow blood to come pumping out of its pores. What did happen was this: Firstly the heart was completely taken to the fake blood mixture, which meant that any painting we did to it prior would not be noticed (On the other hand the sponge was yellow so I suppose it was best we got rid of that straight away) Secondly the sponge seemed to be a little too good at absorbing as it took a lot of squeezing to actually get any of the fake blood mixture out of it.

Though I only tested the effects on a small duplicate of the real fake heart so results on a larger scale might be different. Also this made me realise that we would need a lot of fake blood mixture, but this wouldn't be to difficult as we need the mixture to be quite runny for obvious absorption reasons.


This session was useful for experimentation and I also felt that I learnt something from watching the other two groups work. From the mirror group they just had a lovely set that you could see a lot of effort and planning went into.

As for the torture group the way they created the finger chopping really made me start thinking and understanding how the budget creative thinking really worked. How you can find anything from something.