The shrine interior is pretty much done. When Ben and Erik saw it they laughed. I'm not sure what that means. I've written a lot about how making these objects is like performing and I finally have an example. When Martin Landau described his Academy-Award winning performance as Bela Lugosi in Ed Wood, he said that he tried to play the accent as if he were a Hungarian trying not to speak with an accent. This is pretty similar to what you have to do with props. If you age things and distress them like you're trying to show off the wear and tear, they look obvious and contrived. Instead, you have to really try to make the thing look good and straight and nice--in spite of itself. The "ex nihilo" letters, for example, are all crooked. But if you tried to intentionally make them crooked, they would look like the "Toys R Us" logo with the backward R. They wouldn't be believable. So I had to make the letters as straight as possible without using a ruler. As they started to droop (I didn't engineer them very well) I taped them to hold them in place. They continued to droop in places and that's what you see. "I'd like to thank the Academy..."
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