Designing for films (1949)

that when they were broken on people's heads they would not do any harm. Unluckily in the rush of sending these bottles down to the location the original was sent too, and a hefty farm wife laid out some unlucky extra with it! When trees are required on a big scale, either on exteriors where they do not already exist or in the studio, they have to be built: plans and elevations have to be drawn of them in exactly the same way as for any other kind of building; but in the plan you visualize imaginary sections through the tree at every 2 ft, drawing them one on top of the other, and you supply an elevation marked off at every 2 ft to read with it. Naturally one can only build the main branches of a tree, because after you get down to a 6 in diameter the job gets very unwieldy. All the smaller branches can be cut from real trees and added later. In building a tree the 2 ft sections that you indicate on your plan are referred to as the 'formers' and these are cut out of 11 in X 1 in boards and held in place by lengths of 3 in x 2 in tubular scaffolding. Over these formers are then laid 1 in plasterers' laths, with a ^ in gap between them. Upon this base are tacked sheets of bark cast in the plaster shop, naturally starting with the coarser bark at the bottom and getting finer higher up the trunk. Piano wire, which is invisible to the camera and can take tremendous weights, can be used sometimes for bracing branches together, one helping to support the other. The final branches are cut from real trees, the best tree being the evergreen oak, which stands up to rough usage in a studio very well. In planning rocks and rock formations it is quite useless to draw a plan; the best that can be done to achieve good results is to build a little model out of coke, coal or pebbles, and after having marked the practicable areas, that is, where the action takes place, have these areas built of tubular scaffolding and timber. The rest is built of mesh wire on a framework of tubular scaffolding, after which you have to leave it to the ingenuity of the plaster department. Rocks and stone strata are very difficult to imitate and I have known only two men in this country who could do them well. One was an erratic but marvellously energetic artist. You could show him a model of a rock formation and once he had got the idea he would get two or three men in the plaster shop to make up odd-shaped 'boulders' of mesh wire covered with plastered scrim, and from the carpenters he would get frameworks of odd shapes and sizes from 1 ft to 4 ft square; these would probably be just covered with scrim and dipped in plaster; then from the incinerators he would have brought all the slag and cinders that could be found; and he would start work. With the help of labourers and plasterers he would punch mesh wire into the shape of mounds and keep it supported with lengths of timber. Over this he would lay yards of scrim dipped in plaster and on to this he would throw his big blocks, which would throw the smaller pieces so that they fell around these bigger ones, and then, on the top of all, he would scatter shovelfuls of slag and cinders, also mixed with plaster. Sometimes he even mixed buckets of plaster to a creamy thickness and standing on a ladder would cast this over the whole. After the addition of a few ragged bushes or one or two gaunt pines the results were, however, always marvellously realistic. The building of ships for a film studio is almost a specialized job. During twenty-two years as an art director I have built the decks, hulls, and rigging of some twenty-eight ships, ranging from Spanish galleys of 1680 to frigates of 1830 and modern submarines. I have already explained on page 14 how I built one ship in order to get real skies as a background to it and on pages 44 and 45 are illustrations of the construction; in the same film we had to show the deck of a small sloop in a storm at night. This was shot at night and the deck was built on a wooden rocker like a giant half-barrel. 80