The story of the green shrine

Erik made the green shrine structure out of old wood I found on trash day, old wood from Gene's house and wood he had at home. The structure is based on the white shrine in the earlier post. He did a beautiful job with it. I learned a lot by aging it. Originally the screen was installed on the front of the door and I tried aging and painting everything at one time. I sanded here and there, wiped on white paint as a stain and painted on the rusting solution. It looked terrible. I realized that you can't just generically age something, what you do has to make sense. Duh. After some trial and error here's what I learned.

1. These things look better if you start with a dark undercoat because it simulates dirt collecting in the cracks. The dark undercoat seeps into the seams. Using several different undercoat colors also helps to create variation in the look of the paint.

2. I had to deinstall all the metal elements, esp. the screen, and rust them separately before installing them again. You would think that rusting them while installed would look good, as if the rust was dripping into the paint or something. Maybe I was too sloppy, but it didn't look good. It looked OK to rust the nails in place, however.

3. You can't just sand randomly or else the result looks faux finished. In my second attempt I sanded in two places--the wood at the latch opening and at the bottom, two places where it makes sense. That came out good I thought.

4. The dripping rust looked good. That comes from using an overabundance of rusting solution on the nails.

5. I probably made this thing too detailed, especially considering how far away we're going to shoot it.

Making the shrine was really educational. It helped me to realize that these props are performers, just like the actors. You even have to think like an actor to make one of these things. Ben was saying that in film acting you have to consciously try to withhold emotions. The same thing is true with the shrine. One of the reasons the first attempt looked so bad is that the shrine looked as if it were saying "look! I'm old!" The more I covered things up, the more I tried to withhold the appearance of age, the better it looked. Sounds so much like Heidegger's idea that entities withhold themselves. I should look that up. You can see the green shrine in the desert pre-vis.