Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1546033
To the line producer's delight, we saw the potential to house multiple sets—the office, examination room, breakfast room, entrance, hallways and staircase—in a single location: a crumbling mansion in Yonkers. We added modern elements, such as glass-brick infill, to provide a light-filled backdrop for the doctor's initial examination of Frankenstein. The set decoration team crafted bespoke modernist lighting and ran hundreds of feet of cloth wiring along the walls, ceilings and floors to convey Euphronious's constant need to harness electricity for her experiments. The crew built modern tiled fireplaces over the existing ornate ones, tiled floors and infill archways within the existing large openings. A long, minimalist, black-lacquered wall housing hundreds of books, collectables and artwork subdivided a much larger space in the existing layout to create the breakfast room—all working in contrast to the slightly rundown fabric of the existing building. The crew built the lab on stage at Steiner. Every detail—lighting, door handles, screens, metal stairs, ladders, window shapes, furniture, joinery, tiled surfaces and touches of timber—was designed to serve dual purposes of innovation and reinvigoration. Creating layered yet simple modernist elements was a joy, with close collaboration from Assistant Art Director Blythe Quinlan, Concept Artist Alexios Chrysikos and Scenic Artist Chris Kay, who crafted polished plaster and metal details, and painstakingly experimented with mixing the perfect modern reds. He graciously allowed me to draw and scratch years of theorems, diagrams and musings on the set walls and surfaces daily after the team left. The Art Department studied quantum physics and medical science from that era and worked with an astrophysicist to incorporate authentic elements into the sets. We designed and crafted 1930s scientific props, medical devices and set pieces— A B C D