Stop-motion, stop-animation, classic
special effects, puppets, masks, costumes, props, models, sets, matts, production
illustrations, production design...
This
contraption, as we called it "the
quasi-LIGO" (after the LIGO installation,
made for scientific experiment that
suppose to measure gravitational waves)
is a brainchild of both my good friend
Vladislav
Knezevic
(who felt he needed LIGO-like device
for scientific looking encounters-of-extradimensional-kind
in his short experimental film "B-sides"
), and of course - me, who designed
and eventually assembled the thing,
in the closing weeks of 2017 for filming
session just a week prior to Christmas.
I usually don't get more than a week
or two for designing and building
anything like it, but I had time for
this one!
I made this doodle on the left in
the mid-summer, after Vladislav gave
me first pointers. At first, I thought
this "box" above is going
to be all there is to it. However,
I've realized soon enough that this
design wouldn't fit Vladislav's specifications,
for a simple reason that it should've
been lower and wider, to fit the screen
better. So, I've started to develop
the sketches below.
At this point I've already assembled
some pieces (see below), just as
a mock-up but nevertheless, so I've
tried to incorporate those in the
design of the "box" (
exactly what Vladislav had in mind
at first ).
But
the parts I had and hoped to use
were all too small. I started
to realize I'll have to redesign
the "box" with a bigger
frame, if I want to use all this
parts that had already fit together
so compelling. And instead of
making the box bigger, I tried
something else: why not using
existing designs, but hey! - let's
make a frame around the box! Or,
better yet: let's keep both boxes
and put them together in a frame!Huh?
ABOVE:
The real deal -L I G O examples
from around the web. Needles to
say - very expensive stuff
I've turned back to references:
let's check it out with the real
LIGO itself. The thing was, all
I had so far were two sketches
and some sub-assemblies, that
should somehow fit together as
a whole... Now, as much as I too,
by that point, got hooked on mesmerising
qualities of the real LIGO key
elements, the make-believe scientific
installation for the film in question
isn't going to be about gravity
at all, so I couldn't really simply
copy the real thing. Lasers were
a must, so were some transparent
geometry: cylinders, hemispheres,
and some other forms, whichever
looked interesting, as well as
some mirrors, lights and so on.
So I made tests. Here they are:
We
couldn't get the real silicate discs
that are used in real LIGO, so we
had to go with what we had. Not much
else worked, but these above. Plexiglass
discs, glass pieces, mirrors - laser
passes through all this without a
trace. Completely invisible. We needed
smoke,at least a little bit, so that
the laser beam would show. With that
in mind, I continued to conceptualize
and expand the frame around boxes...
Above
left, top: "box" configurations;
Middle: some assembly ideas; Bottom:
combining boxes? Above right:
early frame concept
So
the frame got bigger, much bigger.
The question was: could I make it
within the budget? The idea was to
recycle some elements already in my
workshop storage, use the common metal
shelf parts for the outer frame, as
only vertical struts should be visible.
Voila!
The
basic idea has been born. But, will
it resemble LIGO enough, or even at
all?
