General Dressing
Girders – bridge and decking legs
AS mentioned the majority of the set was made up from steel decking, the parts of this which were on show, ront and legs needed to be cladded. Our solution to this was to make up pretend girders. These were to be made from three strips of plywood which when viewed from the front would look like an RSJ or I-beam.
Crosssection of girder dressing
We also looked into how we might weather these, on the poor side the y needed to look rusty and worn, and on the UGC side they could be cleaner, The follwoing video at arounf 1:40 shows some weathering of metal techniques
We only had access to sponges and brushes and used gery paint for the undrcoat, and then black, orange/red and green for the wathering effects. We’d sponge on the paint and in some placs rub it with a paper towel, in this way we would build up layers. Using research material we’d look where the build up of grime would occur, for RSJ’s these appears to be mostlty in the corners. this weathering technique was used throughout the set, mostly on tyhe poorside and you can see it around the stairs and on the decking on some of the later photographs.
This we thought looked quite effective and given that it was the first time most of us had done weathering it came out quite well I thought. This could’ve been made easier if we’d had access to air paint sprayer, using an airbrush would have enabled us to get a more realistic feel to all the weathering, in some places both on the girders and the rest of the set, we applied too much paint and it gave some sections an almost pantomime feel unfortunately.
These girders were then cut to length and attached using bolts. Here we ran out of time as it would’ve looked good if we could have atached further dressing to look like bolt heads along the length of these girders.
Palettes
The poorside of the set needed to look run down and for this we though cladding with broken up wood from pallets would be an effective and cheap way of doing this. The pallets were broken up into their lengths and these were then used to dress the set and used as actual building material for some of the flats used throughout the production. Where these bits of wood we’re tight up against each other I thought it would be effective to paint the joins with black paint. this gave each piece some separation from it’s neighbours and allowed the audience to see the effect easier.
Plastic Vacuum formed brickwork
We used Vaccum Formed sheeting for dressing on some of the flats most noticably on amenity #9
The shhets were cut to size and then screwed into position. They were then given a base coat of cream, and then the groiuting painted black. They were then weathered with black and green paint which was allowed to drip down in some places.
This sheeting was bought from a to z of scenery.
Palstic corrugated
for other sections of the set plastic currugated sheets were used
This was undercoated in grey and then red paint applied to give it a rusty feel. This again was cut to size and either screwed or bolted to the set, depending on its location.
UGC Side
We wanted a clean almost sanitary look for the internal of the UGC ofices. This would be particularly evident on the very large flat on stage right
The thoguh would be for us to have a tiled type look to this. Im previous years for brickwork people have cut shapes out of hardbaord and then stuck these to the flats, a very laborious task. I suggested we bought white fronted hardboard and used the laser cutter to engrave file shapes onto that. When we came to do this however the engraving took a long time over 2hrs per sheet. So we ended up using the laser cutter on a cut setting but made the head move faster than it should for the cut. This had the effect of engraving. These panels were then attached to the large flat.
This turned out to be very effective.
The rest of the dressing on this side was made up from girders and stairs all painted grey with silver paint detail
Matt Cooper 