Into the Trees

The most ambitious make yet

Today I built a forest in my office.

The day began with collecting sticks. I found this fellow, which felt like a good/bad omen.

He took his price though! In blood! But I made it out with plenty of gnarly sticks.

Now, the making haze descended, and I didn’t document the process of building two ramps, using some hardboard and blocks of wood as a base. I had a bit of a vision in mind for how I wanted to make a set on a slope, using sticks as trees. So I just got on with it.

The ramp was loosely painted to knock back the recognisable colour of hardboard, and I drilled holes for the sticks. They were held in place with hot glue. I haven’t figured out what I’ll actually do with this set now that I’ve finished shooting on it… for now at least… That’s a problem for later me.

The next stage was to build up the forest floor, using basically everything that I’ve got.

There are a lot of individual pieces of scenery, all joined together with loads of rocks and sticks. This took a surprisingly long time to get happy with.

Somewhere around this point I realised the sky backdrop was not big enough, and had to work out how to squeeze another section in there. It was far from a perfect join, but I managed to slide it in there and get it reasonably flat to the wall and the original sky.

I then tried out some lighting on some figures, just to get a sense of what was what:

I knew that I wanted smoke, so I took this opportunity to make a splitter for my smoke machine. It worked briefly, but for reasons unknown became a single route for smoke. Disappointing, but work will continue on this. I’ve found cardboard tubes are the best carriers for smoke - I got some hosing, which you can see underneath the smoke machine. It works ok, but quickly heats up, and messes with the smoke. The cardboard tubes deliver it in a cooled state, which is extra “ribbony” - a technical term I just invented.

The idea here is that I can supply smoke to both the foreground and background at the same time, rather than having to flood one area and then do the next as quickly as possible before it all dissipates.

This is the last phone camera pic, just to check I was happy in broad terms before breaking out the big camera and setting up the tripod properly.

I also shot a little video of this set up for social media, since I was liking how this looked.

How did the big camera photos turn out? Stay tuned!

Thanks for reading!
Jon