Furniture...

Well now for some furniture.

We have, so far, made only the Table and two chairs, and the rocking chair. The Cauldron, Oven and Caspar's bed are still to come.

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Furniture : Table and Two Chairs

These were made out of balsa wood by Barry. Barry built a wooden frame, and then cut irregular boards for the top of the table. He attached the boards to the frame with glue. He then cut four legs and stuck them to the frame with tiny dressmaker's pins and glue.

I really liked the overall design (especially the irregular lengths of the table-top boards) but there were a couple of things I wasn't terribly happy with... The table-top boards don't overhang the frame enough (the corners of the frame actually meet the edge of the boards on top)... This is something I could do nothing about, so I decided just to move on to something that could be altered.

Barry had made the frame and legs very bulky, which was the style he was going for... rustic and bulky... But for the aesthetic of the film, I preferred "rickety" to be the order of the day... So I hacked away at the chunky legs and frame, and cut strips from the edges of the table-top boards, to give it a more rickety look... I did the same with the chairs...

I think that through collaboration we have reached a suitable conclusion... I really like Barry's wierd shaped chair backs, as well as the fact that he made the seats irregular heights!



...and some detail of the table-tops and their "micro-detailing"... This just involved cutting away the sharp edges along the boards in irregular strips, to give the impression it had been cut at a miniature scale using miniature tools... Check out the irregular widths Barry gave to the wooden boards : Nice touch!...





...and some detail of the chair backs, featuring Barry's cool irregular design and also to highlight why I love using balsa wood for minatures; The grain is ideal for representing small scales, as you can see in the rough area on the face of the chair back...



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Furniture : Fidget's Rocking Chair

Super-proud of this one. I sculpted this out of some very fine pieces of balsa wood. This was my first time using balsa in years, and I am really over-the-moon at the results! That stuff is amazing to work with.

First off I saw Barry making his chair backs, with that really cool design, so I decided to mirror that in the rocking chair as can be seen in the photo. It will help tie the cottage interior together if there is a slight similarity in the design.

I took a long time over the micro-detailing on this chair. Carefully cutting away irregular strips to give that miniature hand-crafted look to the pieces of wood.

Once I was happy with the shape of the partsI used glue and tiny dressmaker's pins (as nails) to hold the pieces together. Then I stood it up on it's rockers to see how it worked out... and it fell over backwards!

The centre of gravity was too far back due to the extreme leaning angle of the chair-back. So what I did was to make a strut for between the front two legs to pull the balance forward (it will be easier to animate with a more centered balance). I used SuperSculpey firm which I textured after baking in the same way as I did with Fidget's wand... The weight helped enormously and the centre of gravity problem was no more.



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As you can see I used the same colour of wood stain on all these furniture pieces. I am considering to add a coat of Matt clear varnish over this to bring down the specularity... I am not sure this will work, so I will need to test it out to make sure.

Phew... This log is tiring to write! Glad I got up early this morning! Perhaps it is time for a cuppa.

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-Paul J. McConnochie
Producer / Director / Animator
Vortex42
www.vortex42.co.uk