Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1504681
8 4 P E R S P E C T I V E | J U L Y / A U G U S T 2 0 2 3 team of draughtsmen on site drawing in parallel as the town was built. At any given time, they were normally about a week ahead of construction. While the town was built through the summer in temperatures often hitting 45 degrees celsius, the greens team fought to keep the existing foliage and landscaping alive while bringing in a range of new trees and shrubs. In total, twenty new trees were planted, some reaching up to forty feet. With that work underway, the focus shifted to Nevermore. Another extensive environment that needed creating from the ground up. I'd already designed Wednesday's dorm while prepping in London. It was the cornerstone of the show and had to epitomize the underlying themes in one environment. It was a space of two diametrically opposed characters, who are thrown together as social outcasts in a school for outcasts. To highlight this, they were put at the top of the school in the old attic space where the character of Enid already lives in colorful isolation. When Wednesday joins her, she claims her half of the space and drains it of color. This idea I took one stage further and stripped half of the central stained-glass window down to black-and-white, giving a strong graphic symbol to the center of the space. Originally, I had planned for it to be real stained glass and the colors to drain away by magic, but it was decided it needed to be more down to earth so it was changed, with Enid applying the color herself, and Wednesday stripping off her side with a knife. Headed up by Art Director Carmen Ratoi, the set was built seven feet off the ground, and then entirely surrounded by a huge photo backing with a secondary blue screen that could be pulled around it. Decorating the two sides of the room was a fascinating exercise. While Enid's was relatively straightforward, just fill it with as much color as possible, Wednesday's was somewhat trickier. She is allergic to color and her character is extremely precise and calculating, leaving a very narrow palette to work with, meaning I had to say a lot with very little. While everything appears to be black- and-white, the design team always started with something that wasn't. All the individual pieces of furniture or fabric were specifically chosen from all over the world, then carefully stripped back and stained or dyed in layers until we achieved just the right level of translucency so that you could still feel the texture, color or pattern of the original piece underneath, while giving the monochrome feel we were looking for. Even the timbers of the roof structure were carefully chosen and stained to remove the warmth of the wood but keeping the character. With all the pieces combined, we wanted A. DORM ROOM—ENID'S SIDE. ILLUSTRATION OVER 3D MODEL BY KAN MUFTIC AND ROXANA ALEXANDRU. B. DORM ROOM, WEDNESDAY'S SIDE. BUILT ON STAGE 8A BUFTEA STUDIOS. SET PHOTO. B A