Welcome to the dollhouse

(click to see enlargement)

Here's the story of the green printing room basement set.

This is really the first floor of Ben's house, but it looks like a basement. The space is actually quite small. If we aren't careful with framing, Ben looks like a giant in a dollhouse. The room was originally white but in July of last year, Krissy and I painted it an eggshell blue that I had custom mixed. I think the wall on the right is still that blue (hard to tell if it's the paint or the gel). The blue was too pretty so I had some green mixed and painted over that. Interestingly, this past week when we went to shoot, it still looked too clean. It's amazing how nice that space looked although it is trashy (and smells of cat droppings). We spray painted all over the wall then painted more green on top of that. Then Erik happened to have some green primer which was a close match to the original green, but not exact. So we used that too. Finally, the wall started to look sufficiently distressed.

We added old electric wire in the background as well as the flourescent light. Everything you see in the shot was added--the boxes, printing press, stuff on the wall. It was like compositing in Photoshop for real! By the way, that wall is old and if you touch it, the cement just crumbles. So we had to use that poster putty stuff to keep everything up. The masking tape actually has putty under it. It's just an illusion. Nowadays, everyone has an "HD is so hi res" story. Here is ours. When I checked the scene at full res you can see that the electric wires just stop on a nail over Ben's head. It looks totally fake. Please don't look hard.

Well, after all that, after a coat of blue paint, green paint, spray paint, more green paint, and green primer, Mona said it looks theatrical because it looks too organized and clean!