The Broken Sword
This was a 15 minute 16 mm short student film shot at the North Carolina School of the Arts. My position was Production Designer; I designed and the built with a core group of 2 a ceremonial mountain top structure and a japanese shrine room. Steven Rambusek served as Art Director and Construction Coordinator and Mary Colston served as set dresser.
The mountain was bulked out using all the scrap lumber accumulated from the last set strike. It was built very sculpturally using the white model as a guide. (shown above). Fabric was loosely stapled to the framing and then aluminum foil was hot-glued to the fabric. This was topped off with some scenic painting to give the stone fihish.
The mountain set ready to go. I also built LED tracking markers (not shown) to set up on C-Stands to assist in the sky replacement of all of these shots. We'd have very little to lock down to on the background since it was our goal to black it out. A green screen was opted out because we had no way of getting a full transfer other than a compressed video DV file- not allowing for proper keying. A luminance matte was the better option in this case.
The platform was raised from the ground via a recycled and modified bleecher. The metal was then paneled with 1/2 plywood. I then color-coded with paint the complex stone pattern (seen above) to allow more than one person to work at a time. Each brick was sculpted on the spot with concrete using a system of laminate baracade walls. Once one set of bricks was done, the baracade was removed and the next would flush up.
	The Japanese shrine room was built to be seen from basically this one angle. Limited budget didn't allow for all the wall space I wanted- so to cheat it, I strategely placed the foreground columns to block the lack of extra walls. (the scale model above shows how this planne out) The screens are actually newsprint glued onto luon strips. The shadow effect is real bamboo set on C-Stands just beyond the set.
Some drafts...