Film set/Art Installation build [updated 8.26.15]

[mcooley]

I too like the change in size of the squares. The courtroom aesthetic can be rather straight forward and boring, so, subverting that even if only a little works. Plus, you mentioned earlier this is a "non-narrative" piece so any place you can explore and/or exploit the visual language of the set I am all for. Hope to see the final project posted here and maybe a reference to the film itself, curious who the artist is? I take it this is not a Matthew Barney trilogy?

Thanks

 

[ear3]

Thanks, I feel better.

Not Matthew Barney, but he was certainly an early influence on at least one of the artists.  Artists are Justin Lowe and Jonah Freeman: http://www.marlboroughchelsea.com/chelsea/artists/jonah-freeman-and-justin-lowe

I too like the change in size of the squares. The courtroom aesthetic can be rather straight forward and boring, so, subverting that even if only a little works. Plus, you mentioned earlier this is a "non-narrative" piece so any place you can explore and/or exploit the visual language of the set I am all for. Hope to see the final project posted here and maybe a reference to the film itself, curious who the artist is? I take it this is not a Matthew Barney trilogy?

Thanks

 

[ear3]

Brief post before heading off to the site.

Almost but not quite finished up the bench yesterday.  Part of the day was eaten up, first, with coordinating another lumber run from Boards and Beams (unfortunately I had to stay on site and continue building), and then, dealing with a roof leak.  There was a violent thunderstorm yesterday, strong enough that it tripped the emergency alerts on everyone's phones simultaneously, and then a leak in the roof appeared, of course right over where I had positioned the right witness stand, and of course, right after I had sanded it:

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Thank god I went with the decision not to anchor anything to the platform, so I was able to move it out of the way until the leak subsided.  It's just water, but filtered through the roof it left some nice stains when it dried, requiring another pass with the HSK sanding block (I mention this b/c I just got the mini systainer set in the mail the other day from [member=5]Bob Marino[/member] -- thanks Bob!).  A weather check shows we're safe until at least Tuesday, so my anxiety level went down a notch.

And then fitting the remaining moulding took some time.  My Kapex is about 50-60 feet from the bench -- I thought about moving it, but I'm actually concerned about safety due to the projectile offcuts made by the Tenyru miter pro blade.  Where it is now, I can aim them at the wall, but over by the bench I would have to keep a look out on both the left and right for passers-by, and so it's not worth it.  I also now understand why people get dedicated CT minis for some tools -- it's getting to be a hassle dragging the CT26 from the work table over to the courtroom, then switching over to the Kapex, and then perhaps the router table.

But after all that I did finish off the fronts:

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Then went to work on the interior panels.  I found that the TSC is actually a better tool for straight line scribing the large plywood than the router.  I just cut them a little proud, then penciled the excess:

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Threw on the rail to trim the edge:

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And ended up with a perfectly flush panel:

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Once the tops are on, I may not even need to trim out the backside with 1x oak frames, as I've been doing with the sides, except maybe for the back edge in order to hide the plywood edge.

Got some great help from one of the interns on sanding the wall panels (thanks Tyler!), which I will start dressing with moulding today once I finish up the bench.  I told him to do as much as he could take, and he ended up sanding 4 straight hours with the ETS 150.  Since I needed the vac, I just had him use the dust bag attachment:

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Before you say anything, we did leave him with some masks, but he chose to fly without protection.  Another set of lungs destroyed for the sake of art.  I remember the first project I did with one of the artists back in 2004, before I knew what the heck I was doing, I must have bored several hundred or so anchor holes into this concrete wall in a cramped underground tunnel with a hammer drill.  I'm sure that has taken several years off my life expectancy.

Off to work.

 

[nickao]

"projectile offcuts made by the Tenyru miter pro blade"

In my experience that's the saw, not the blade.

I am not sure why, but the Kapex always seemed to kick the little offcuts more than any other saw. I simply stop the saw in the down position which helps tremendously, the kapex is still a kicker though.

Your project look fantastic.

 

[nclemmons]

The finished bench looks great, Edward. 

 

[ear3]

Interesting.  It really did seem, though, as if the Tenyru added more velocity to thos projectiles.

"projectile offcuts made by the Tenyru miter pro blade"

In my experience that's the saw, not the blade.

I am not sure why, but the Kapex always seemed to kick the little offcuts more than any other saw. I simply stop the saw in the down position which helps tremendously, the kapex is still a kicker though.

Your project look fantastic.

 

[ear3]

Yesterday was quite a day.  Pulled a 16 hr shift, staying from 8am till midnight trying to put the finishing touches on the bench.  You know when you're working on something, and you tell yourself, "if I can just get this part sanded/cut/etc., everything else will move quickly from there."  It's seemed like that for a couple of days, with every task I've identified as the turning point leading to more work.  In the end, carpentry just takes a long darn time, especially if you're producing finish work that is going to be oiled or stained.

On top of that I got a deeply embedded oak splinter in my finger when I was rushing late last night.  I may have to go to the medical clinic at some point today to get it out -- neither me nor my wife had the stomach last night for digging into my flesh with tweezers.  Splinters are no joke.

So what I thought was going to be a morning's worth of work, putting the remaining trim on the bench and sanding it, took me until about 8pm.  I busted out the RO90 to speed up the work though, a tool which I only recently brought to the jobsite, since I was leaning on the other sanders:

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Once finished, I could move on to fabricating the tops.  After ripping a wider board down to 8 1/4, and profiling one of the edge's with the OF1400, I mitered each end, taking care that the profiled edge remained on what would become the inside corner.  The reason for this is that the router is not able to get the inner edge once it hits the corner, whereas it can easily form an edge on the outside once the boards are already joined:

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I then cut the boards to size -- I was so tired that I forgot there wouldn't be symmetry on the boards, so I initially cut the size for the front board on what was actually the side one.  Fortunately, since the witness stands are mirror images, and I built them the exact same size, I was able to simply flip the board over to the other side:

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Next put some dominoes in the joint.  Initially I did all wide mortises, but found it worked best on the fitting to make one of them narrow

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Lastly, I got to deploy the clam clamps which I had ordered specifically for this build.  I don't do much door casing, so never had a good excuse to get them, but I jumped at the opportunity as soon as I knew I was going to be building this.  Keep in mind that I had never actually tested them before doing this glue up -- I just didn't have the time.  So I was blown away when they performed exactly as advertised:

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Because the boards were so large, it helped to add the quick clamp on the inner edge, and on the top for the actual judge's bench, to add a long Bessey clamp to keep the miter tight all the way down the joinnt.:

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This morning I'll attach all the tops and then move on to the walls of the courtroom.

 

[bdiemer]

If the film is half as entertaining as your post, it will be a blockbuster. Thanks for sharing!!

                                                                                                                Barry

 

[tiralie]

I thought about moving it, but I'm actually concerned about safety due to the projectile offcuts made by the Tenyru miter pro blade. 

Get or buy (Betterly) a zero clearance insert at the very least and make an auxiliary fence when you have time. Those pieces can really hurt you and/or your assistants and screw up you schedule.

 

[ear3]

It's been a rough few days.  Friday was a 16 hr day and Saturday turned into an 18 hr one, though yesterday I got a little reprieve and only worked 13 hrs, and got to go home "early" and simulate a birthday dinner for my wife.  The only reason I haven't been put on notice is that she actually went to high school with one of the artists, and is the reason why I know him in the first place, and so I have the "but you're the one who introduced me to him" trump card.

We got some welcome news yesterday, however, when a decision was made to push the shoot one day, and so we now have today and tomorrow to finish everything up.  We may lose a few people from the film crew, since it's hard to get everyone together in early August, but from what I can tell all the essential personnel are all still on board.

So back to the build.  I had glued up the tops for the judge's bench on Friday night, and so Saturday finished the edge profiling and attached them permanently.  I'm still having problems with the DC on the 1400 when using the edge guide + dust catcher on this long pedestal moulding bit, but I ultimately didn't go with the suggestion made by [member=1619]SRSemenza[/member] to just use the normal dust shroud that attaches to the base, since I would have had to remove and reseat the bit, and I didn't want to spend time resetting the height to achieve the profile I had already executed on the edges of the dividing wall tops:

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Even with all the flush trimming of the paneling, there were still some high spots on the MDF boxes that produced a gap in a few places between the top and the structure, so I ran the RO150 with some 40 grit cristal to get a completely coplaner surface:

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I ran into a problem when I went to attach the top on the actual judge's bench.  One of the sides was not at a perfect 90, and so I wasn't getting the even 3/4" overhang I had factored into the sizing:

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It wasn't the Kapex blade setting, since all the other miters were perfectly square.  Rather, I think it was due to the one drawback of the UG cart and extensions, which is the relatively little support you get on wide boards, something [member=42806]Wood Hog[/member] might run into soon on his new cart.  I had used the Kapex clamp to hold the boards flat on the cut, but I guess one of the 8 1/4" boards had been slightly skewed, and so it threw off the miter by a degree.  It wasn't a huge amount -- the difference in width between the front of the top and the back along it's 4+ feet of length was about 3/4".  So I decided to improvise and use pipe clamps to slightly narrow the structure of the bench at the back by about 1/2" and split the difference on the remaining 1/4" less overhang at the back between the two sides:

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I was a bit worried about stressing the miters joints on the top, which were less than 24 hrs from glue up, so I used a few screws to secure it to the structure (and filled the holes) in addition to adhesive and pneumatic nails, and left the pipe clamp on overnight.  BTW the shot shows the red carpet they rolled into the courtroom on Saturday morning, which was the start of the room really getting tied together.

I spent the rest of the day Saturday cutting the trim for the wall paneling in the courtroom, which measures 40x26.  It was for this task in particular that I picked up the Kapex and UG cart prior to the job, since I could quickly batch out perfectly sized elements for the moulding squares using the stops:

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When I thought I was only doing the paneling behind the judges bench, I was going to use something a bit more substantial than astragal moulding, but ended up just going with it to keep costs reasonable.  Even so, we bought out Boards and Beams of all its red oak astragal, so I got a few pieces in white oak -- I'll make a few moulding squares completely out of the white oak and position them such where there won't be too much of an aesthetic mismatch:

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Starting on Saturday we were flooded with a bunch of extra labor, which was both a blessing and a curse.  You don't really know at first what people's experience and competence level is, even after you ask them what they've done in the past, and so you sort of have to spend time testing people out and seeing what their skill sets are.  It was rough going at first.  To be honest, it's a bit unfair to hand someone the RO150 and give them a crash course in finish sanding, but I really had no choice at that point, since there was no way I was going to finish on my own, and the assistant I had been using was requisitioned for materials sourcing all weekend.  It was kind of a site to behold.  One guy I used was doing pretty well when I was looking over his shoulder -- I made him just sand the work table for a couple of minutes in Rotex mode to get a feel for how to balance the thing --  but after leaving for a while to attend to something else I came back to find him digging the edge of the pad down the full length of the board.  So at the point I  handed him for the ETS 150, and did the first two passes at 100 and 120 myself using the RO150, and handed him the boards to finish up using the ETS at 150 grit.  He was great in other ways, though, since he did a marathon 4 hours of sanding all the wall panels of the courtroom.

I'll continue in the next post 

 

[ear3]

Sunday came and it was all hands on deck.  I finally managed to identify a couple of really skilled workers.  One of them works otherwise as the house installer for a gallery, and the other said he had apprenticed at a wood shop back in Korea.  This guy was great, since without prompting he volunteered to clean up and organize my work space -- which I hadn't done in over a week -- and helped save a couple of bucks by rescuing some good offcuts.

So I was able to simply spec out the wall paneling job and let them go at it running the baseboard and the battens:

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I then found some other guys to begin applying the Osmo polyx oil.  During lunch I had them sit down and watch the New Brit Workshop videos of [member=11196]Peter Parfitt[/member] to get a crash course in finishing with the Osmo.  They did a test run with the dividing walls, and then moved on to the wall paneling:

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With the finish applied the courtroom is starting to look really sweet, and the judge's bench in particular.

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Late in the day the sunlight came through the one window we hadn't blacked out yet for the shoot and made the bench paneling glow:

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I have a new appreciation for project managers and general contractors after this job, and the way in which they are able to coordinate everything and constantly put out fires while still getting their own work done.  At one point yesterday, I measured and cut a piece moulding, then as I was walking back to tack it in I was stopped by several different questions from several different people, which made me lose track of what I was doing, and so I walked over to the same place to measure again, then walked back over to the saw and measure the board I was STILL holding in my hand, and only then did I realize I had already cut it.

So everything was going great yesterday until I noticed this:

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F@$%.  AAAAAGGGGGGGGHHHHHH!!!!!

I almost had a breakdown.  Here's what happened.  I had promised myself Friday evening that I would not leave until I had finished gluing up the tops.  It was 11pm and as I was sizing up the boards for the large top (the one in the picture) I realized I had made a mistake and profiled one edge of a board that would be two short to get two pieces out of.  I had been conscientious about building the structure shy of 4 ft in terms of its dimensions, so I could get a single vertical grained panel out of one piece of 4x8 ply.  But after adding in all the thicknesses of the ply and the trim, as well as the 3/4" overhang, each of the three pieces had to be cut at 49-50 inches, which meant I could only get one from an 8 ft board.  This would be incredibly wasteful as a 4 ft offcut was no longer useful for me for what I had left to do.  I saw, however, that my assistant had gotten one 9 ft 1x12 plank from Boards and Beams, and so i decided that I would repurpose the 1x12 I had already profiled as one of the boards I would be ripping battens from, and use the 9 footer to make the two sides of the tops.  My workspace is pretty dark at night (the nearest overhead fluorescent is maybe 30 ft away) -- I was working off one worklight, and I hadn't yet gotten the Milwaukee portable LED I purchased Saturday and rigged up on one of the pipes:

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And I had already been working for 15 hours, and was of the mindset that stuff just had to get done.  I think I remember noting the next day (Saturday) that I might have some issues with the grain matching once the finish was applied, but it was one of those thoughts that disappeared almost as soon as it came amidst the turmoil of other things in my head on this project.

So what are you going to do?  When I pointed it out to the art director he said I shouldn't worry about it, and there's going to be stuff on top of the bench covering it anyway, and since the top is almost 5 ft. off the ground with the platform, it will be too high for many people's eyes.  Once the finish had settled a bit, the mismatch was slightly less glaring -- but only slightly, and only if you look at it from a certain angle:

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Fine.  But I feel sick looking at it, wishing to god I had just stopped for a second on Friday night and thought harder about what I was doing.  I look at the front and I can see all the care and time spent matching the grain, and then i look at the top and it's just amateur hour.  In terms of my portfolio, I would never dare now to include a picture of the top of the bench in examples of my work.  It just sucks.

So the best I can do is try to learn from this, and maybe serve as a warning to others.

In the meantime the rest of the room is coming together:

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Since there's going to be artwork on the upper half of the walls, I restricted the moulding squares to the bottom.  I'm going to finish piecing in the base cap today, and then work with the other carpenter to get in the crown.  And try to avoid looking at the top of the bench.

 

[Clweed]

Everything is looking good !!

I know what you are going through being tired and trying to focus. As a Hobby woodworker when I get tired and make a mistake or lose focus like that, I drop everything and quit for the night or day. I know if I continue the mistakes will also.

Deadlines are killers!!

At one point yesterday, I measured and cut a piece moulding, then as I was walking back to tack it in I was stopped by several different questions from several different people, which made me lose track of what I was doing, and so I walked over to the same place to measure again, then walked back over to the saw and measure the board I was STILL holding in my hand, and only then did I realize I had already cut it.

 

[teocaf]

I know that the Foggers appreciate it and you've been getting some helpful feedback to your posts.  With this job being so deadline sensitive and with the various curves that you keep getting thrown, not to mention the oppressive heat, I don't know how you make the time to blog while keeping your wits about you.  You're a better man than I am.  I guess I'm just getting old--I know in your place I would have to be compensated a great deal to document the details in real time for some forum looky-loos (no offense, guys--lots of great people on here).  I would prefer to work as fresh as possible every day.  Not trying to tell you what to do; I mean this post in the nicest possible way.  Well, keep on trucking dude--looks like there's great work emerging out of that once-empty space--it must be very satisfying!

 

[Stone Message]

Sunday came and it was all hands on deck....

I then found some other guys to begin applying the Osmo polyx oil.  During lunch I had them sit down and watch the New Brit Workshop videos of [member=11196]Peter Parfitt[/member] to get a crash course in finishing with the Osmo.  They did a test run with the dividing walls, and then moved on to the wall paneling:....

Hi Edward

I am so glad that the "crash course" helped and thank you for mentioning it. I visited a professional woodworker today who has a rather nice contract for one of our universities to create traditional oak panelled work, a new library and some other stuff. Osmo has been specified by the architect and so I was helping my friend prepare.

I hope that you are pleased with the results and thanks again.

Peter

 

[nclemmons]

Hey Edward

How did the project wrap up?  it's been nearly two weeks since your last update.  Hope you were able to hit the tight timeline and get some rest!

neil

 

[ear3]

[member=167]neilc[/member] -- Project is ongoing, filming completed but reinstall over at gallery now in progress.  Writing up an update as we speak.  Thanks for inquiring.

Hey Edward

How did the project wrap up?  it's been nearly two weeks since your last update.  Hope you were able to hit the tight timeline and get some rest!

neil

 

[ear3]

It's been a bit since the last update -- I kind of ran out of gas, as the last few days before the start of filming was just an insane rush to get things completed.  I'm used to a final 48hr dash on these sorts of projects, but this was beyond anything I'd ever experienced.  My workspace became a complete disaster, but there was really nothing to be done about it:

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To make matters worse (or better, depending upon your perspective), since the art installation portion of the show is being funded by Red Bull Studios (the creative arm of the drink company), they gave us a never-ending stock of the drink.  So imagine a warehouse full of dozens of ppl jacked up on that stuff:

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I tried to avoid it, as the short term boost is canceled by the subsequent crash, but I sometimes succumbed to temptation.

We got a bit of a reprieve when they postponed filming by one day to Wednesday. It wasn't just the courtroom that needed finishing, but basically everything else, so I didn't feel so guilty.  In any case, for the last few shows, I've usually been done with my stuff early, such that I've been able to help out in other areas, so I feel like I' built up some credit in the bank.

On Monday and Tuesday then it was just about getting all the trim finished.  I ended up having to delegate a lot of the panel trimming to others, reserving the trickier elements for myself, like the mitered step down behind the bench platform:

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Of course I would have liked to modify the moulding square to follow the miter pattern on the baseboard, but there was simply no time.

Decided to just use door casing to trim out the nook where the judge's bench sits, and made a modified plinth block to tie it together:

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Small problem was created on fitting the casing around the doors -- I had gotten some wrong measurements from an assistant I sent to spec the casing at Home Depot, and so had left too small a space for the casing/plinth block when I first put in the baseboard.  No matter, problem solved with the multimaster:

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Tuesday came and all that was left was the crown moulding -- 120 feet worth of it with 4 inside corners and 2 outside.  My bacon was saved by the other carpenter, Tim, who had done the setup on the other scenes, and who, despite having completed his work, decided to stay on a few extra days to help me finish up the courtroom.  Since I normally work alone, operating alongside someone so skilled was a real treat for me.  And given the circumstances -- time + materials constraints, first time working together, etc. -- it turned out to be an amazing partnership, with each of us deferring to the other when appropriate, and not getting mad or stressed when the other demanded extra time to get things just right.

For the inside corners, I decided to put to use the Collins Coping Foot I had picked up specifically for the job.  Not that it's the smartest thing to test out a new technique/accessory less than 24 hrs before deadline, but I was desperate for any edge I could get:

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It ended up working beautifully, and certainly much quicker than my normal hand cope method.  Once I got the hang of it, I didn;t even have to use the RO90 + interface pad to smooth out the underside:

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The outside corners, which were Tim's forte, came out great as well:

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So by 9pm Tuesday night we were done with all the trim and then the art department set about dressing the set for next day's filming.

 

[nclemmons]

Looks great - nice finishing touches.

Amazing for what was about a month's work of days - but many more hours!

 

[ear3]

The concept behind the film is that it is the space of a fictional city called San San, which is sort of like a parallel world that would have resulted if the early psychedlic era dreamers of the late 50s and early 60s had gotten control of the planet, with all the earnest craziness and ugliness associated with that era.  The courtroom then is a strange sort of lynchpin in this world, as a symbol/site of authority for a movement that rejected it in its traditional forms.  So the dressing of the room had to communicate both the authenticity of legal authority AND a sense of what happens when that authority gets twisted/dilapidated by those not used to wielding it.  Or at least that's how I read it.  In addition, once it gets over to the gallery, the room will also serve as a presentation space for the "commodifiable" art created by the artists, and also as a kind of congregation point for the audience, since the bar is going to be right outside the space.

Once everything was dressed and cleaned up, I was pretty happy with how it turned out:

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Filming went smoothly as far as I can tell.  They set up a track in the middle of the room and panned the camera across the bench:

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As soon as filming was done on Thursday, the relocation crew came in to strike the set and move it over to the gallery.  I had a moment where I felt like Richard Pryor in Brewster's Millions -- the premise of the movie being he's given a month to spend 30 million dollars by a previously unknown wealthy great uncle, and if he does so successfully he get's 100 million, or something like that.  Near the end of the movie, they finally finish decorating this million dollar apartment they've been working on all month, only to empty the thing completely because the money has run out:



So I packed up my tools, thinking I was going to get to enjoy the rest of my summer:

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Despite the initial clutter, it took very little time to get things back into order because of the shop renovation I did earlier in the summer that made my storage Festool specific:

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But as soon as I put my tools away, I got a call with a request that I help modify the courtroom for the new art gallery space.  So it was back in the truck and over to Red Bull Studios, about which more soon:

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[Cheese]

Nice stuff Edward...interesting that the learning curve for the Collins foot wasn't very steep. [big grin]

Are you going to share some photos of the reinstall segment?

[member=37411]Edward A Reno III[/member]