Sophia Production Design WIP

Settle in friends, this one's a doozy. In production design, the last thing that I worked on was making things for the film that I was the production designer for, Sophia. The production design for this film was pretty elaborate as half of it took place in a fantasy world with a monster. I had to create a modern art/optical illusion art exhibit for the beginning of the film. First, I started working on the big installation that Sophia travels through that takes her to the fantasy world. It needed to be portable so that we could take it from one location to another easily. It was modeled after the Pathless Woods exhibit by Anne Patterson that was featured at the Ringling Museum. Essentially, it is an exhibit of ribbons hanging down that you can walk through. So in order to tackle this, I started with the frame of a pop-up tent.

I needed to put some kind of grid at the top of the frame, but it needed something to lay over that would also be collapsible. I made a web out of parachute cord that stretched across the frame.

Then we got a roll of plastic garden fencing, which I put over the top of the web (which you can see in the gif at the top). From there, I started putting the ribbons on in a grid pattern and alternating three colors. I used a gold/yellow color, purple, and teal. It was pretty easy to just double knot them onto the fence grid, it was just a lot of time tying them all on :P

It was at this point that I ran out of ribbon and we needed to order more. So that was fun. But I finished it up and here it is out in the wilderness (jk it's a park).

And here it is in a warehouse- so portable!

In the museum, I also had to create the art exhibit that they were looking at, so I painted (with some help) 12 optical illusion-ish paintings.

Then, for the fantasy world I needed to make a bunch of spiky flowers that I painted purple and yellow. They are foam spheres on a wooden dowel and then a bunch of tiny wooden sticks stabbed into the sphere.

Then I spray painted.

My friend Jo also made a ton of giant foil flowers.

We also had to hang a bunch of the ribbons out in the forest from the trees.

For the fantasy world, I also had to make a ribbon monster costume, which was a pretty big challenge... and I made it in a week (procrastination, yay!). So it could have been better for sure, but basically it's a morph suit with a hat that has a ton of ribbons attached to it. This made it easier to get on and off.  You can see it on the far right below.

And that's it for all the production design I worked on for the films this semester!