10 new sets for 1 episode of AWKWAFINA IS NORA FROM QUEENS

Episode 6 of Awkwafina is Nora from Queens season 3 directed by Laura Murphy and written by Teresa Hsiao was quite the foray into possible alternate realities sort of like Nora is George Bailey in “It’s a Wonderful Life.”

While Episode 6 provided lots of fun sequences seeing each character in different “what if’s” it also meant A LOT of new sets for one episode. Like a lot, a lot for any TV show and especially a tiny low budget comedy like Nora from Queens.

Thanks to a SUPER set dec team: assistant set decorator Ashley Bradshaw, set dec buyer for the episode Casey Adams, and our trusty PA Kiran, we somehow put together 10 new sets in 1 week.

1. Lawyer Nora

2. Hot Tub Magnate Wally

3. Edmund’s Hi-Rise Kitchen that Grandma now lives in

4. Instagram Lin Family Home Kitchen

5. Instagram Lin Family Home Dining Room and Living Room

6. Instagram Lin Family Home Nora’s Bedroom

7. Nursing Home Grandma

8. Sad Bachelor Wally

9. Brenda’s Home

10. Fancy Living Room

LAWYER NORA

In the fantasy sequence where Nora does go to Kumon (lol) she becomes a high-powered lawyer with a Chinese middle aged lady’s boss girl haircut.

artwork by wonderful artist Crys Yin

we had a totally empty white room in which to fill with our best take on a high-powered millennial girl boss office.

what you can’t tell about the vertical blinds we put up for this wall of windows is that they have a really cool texture on them. We felt that vertical blinds quickly communicated the idea “office.”

lonely lawyer Nora drinking champagne alone with the back of faux high-powered photos and photos of cars like Mandy which she was desperately hoping for in the normal timeline of episode 306.

HOW THOSE PHOTOSHOPPED PHOTOS SAUSAGE IS MADE

If you are ever wondering how those faux photos are done, it is a whole process.

In our case, we came up with a list of high-powered problematic people for Nora to have photos with and then found their photos on a stock image site we had access to through production.

Then we float this idea with the director and writer (Laura and Teresa) and they tell us what they think in terms of the kind of people girlboss Nora would be proud to showcase photos of. They told us our first pull was too many political figures (I think we pulled Henry Kissinger as one of them) and to do more tech and rock stars.

We also had to look for photos that would be easy to photoshop Nora into to make it easier for our graphics people to do quickly. For instance that photo with Mark Zuckerberg is fairly easy to put another body into with a lot of space between the two people and black background.

Finally we settled on Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Drake, and a red carpet photo of the real Nora and Michelle Yeoh.

Then we printed out the stock photos we were going to use so that when they did a special photoshoot of Nora in the hair, makeup, and costume of Lawyer Nora (two days before we filmed the Lawyer Nora scenes) she would know how to pose to match the photos it would be photoshopped into.

Once those photos of Nora in hair, makeup, and costume are taken, our graphics team let by Dan-ah Kim have to frantically photoshop and print these photos so that we can put them into frames and have them on set to film these scenes.

Way more work than you were expecting right?

In this shot you can see the Elon Musk one.

MONOPOLY WALLY

Nora discovers that Wally has become a high-powered douchebag earning a fortune as a hot tub water bed magnate in this alternate reality.

For this set we also had an empty room with just a brick wall to work with.

In one iteration of the script Nora asks why Wally looks like the Monopoly man (I think they had to change the dialogue for copyright clearance reasons) but when we were prepping for the set we pulled reference images of the actual monopoly man (hahahha) and I think we matched the codes.

you can see where the business cards and holders are placed on the desk even though in the shot they are covered by one of the many young women fawning over this Hot Tub Water Bed Big Boss Wally.

my favorite detail: the business cards graphic artist Dan-ah Kim made for Wally!

EDMUND’S HI-RISE KITCHEN

In this sequence Grandma is living with Edmund in his fancy hi-rise kitchen where he lives as a successful actor.

Since the only other time we saw Edmund’s space this season is his trailer in ep 303 “Love and Order” we thought we would match the colors of his kitchen to the colors we used for that set, and even had some of the same art from that set in this set.

Since Edmund’s kitchen is sort of Grandma’s space too now that she lives with him, I thought she might also have a Chinese grocery store calendar here thanks to Dan-ah for making us another one.

we discussed with director Laura Murphy what would be on Edmund’s fridge and we decided he’s so full of himself it would be his headshot and a magnet that is another photo of himself and that’s it. 😂 (yes I’m old, this is my go-to laughing emoji)

This was a totally empty blank kitchen usually used for commercials so we had to totally fill it also.

Sad fact: one afternoon I went out and bought everything you see here and that night my production car was broken into and someone stole almost everything we bought. So I had to buy everything again a few days later. 😭

INSTAGRAM INFLUENCER LIN FAMILY HOME DINING ROOM AND LIVING ROOM

After Nora goes through that sequence of events above, she is presented with a whole other set of realities to contrast with that starting with her being married with a son and working as an instagram influencer.

Transforming the Lin Family Home was a real challenge. We had, and I’m not joking, 2-days to find, buy and rent all the furniture and decoration (Ashley the wonder woman Assistant Set Decorator MADE IT HAPPEN!) and 1.5 days to put it together in the set to change the rooms legibly enough that you would recognize the space but understand Nora had changed and had a different life

We were trying to make her new life bland, suburban, and “nice” in that boring IG way that people like sanitizing and remodeling their homes nowadays.

You can’t really see in this photo but the living room has different seating, drapes, and a whole kids toys section. Also Nora’s costume in this scene cracks me up so much—costume designer Michelle Li did such a great job.

How this same shot looked just last episode.

INSTAGRAM INFLUENCER LIN FAMILY HOME KITCHEN

How we changed the kitchen (if we had the resources to change the wallpaper we would have but sadly this isn’t that show).

How the kitchen normally looks.

before the light was installed, but still you get the idea of how sterile and different the kitchen has become.

the scenics even put a contact paper to change the kitchen counters to look like a marble countertop.

Those two cookbooks are my personal ones I brought from home the morning of filming and someone stole them. rude!

INSTAGRAM INFLUENCER NORA BEDROOM

her sanitized bedroom now a master bedroom for her miserable marriage.

how her bedroom normally looks

how this part of the room usually looks.

how it usually looks

During this quick storming out of Arthur you get a glimpse of this corner of the room

what this part of this room usually looks like

WORKING REALLY FAST

Like I said earlier, we only had 1.5 days to take down and properly store all the original decoration and dress-in the new look (only to have to re-dress it for future filming!) Which is possible but still a feat.

Since we had a great set dressing crew we were lucky everyone knew how to work quickly together.

when you are set dressing so fast you have no time to get a ladder

we stored all of the old Nora bedroom stuff in Grandma’s room and this is what that looked like 😱

Laura the Production Designer and me during our manic extreme set selection session where we had to decide everything for transforming the Lin Family Home in 1 hour so Ashley would have time to act on those decisions and put the rentals through and make the purchases.

WALLY’S BACHELOR PAD

the alternate reality where poor Wally never meets Brenda and lives on his own in a sad bachelor pad .

GRANDMA’S NURSING HOME

This was an empty room, and Casey did a great job bringing this idea to life.

Not only is this old TV with an episode of “Love and Order” playing a funny detail, this shot give you a glimpse at the many great small details Casey put into the set in this part of the room.

HOTEL/FANCY LIVING ROOM

You will see more of this room in the finale as this is where the episode ends “to be continued…” but we had to have this set ready by this episode.

I’ll talk more about this set in the next post but just know this was a build on a stage which is usually the type of set that is the most work for the art department.

when Nora meets Awkwafina….what?! stay tuned!

BRENDA’S HOME

exterior of Brenda’s Home which we tried to match the porch to with plants and a boho vibe with her eclectic colorful wardrobe.

When we first started Season 3 of Awkwafina is Nora from Queens, Production Designer Laura Miller and I discussed how Brenda’s home was the set she was most excited about for the season.

Brenda has been a character since Season 1 and she always has a clear artsy boho quirky style in her wardrobe and this would be our chance to flesh out her character with her home interior and exterior.

One of the first sets we started working on was Brenda’s gathering reference images and style inspiration based on our understanding of the character and matching the vibe of her wardrobe for the last three seasons.

snapshot from a pinterest board we started for her set from early early prep for the show.

reference images I had taped to my office wall including ideas for the design of the coffee table we had custom made as a stunt breakaway so that Wally could safely fall onto it and break it.

said breakaway coffee table, plus the hint (like the slightest hint) of the vases filled with roses.

Sadly we really didn’t see much on screen for this set, so here are some before and after shots of the sets we created for Brenda’s Home:

BEFORE

AFTER

BEFORE

AFTER

BEFORE

AFTER (imagine the vases underneath the sign filled with roses)

a hilarious shot of B.D. Wong as Wally

You can read more behind-the-scenes putting together the sets and everything related to Awkwafina is Nora from Queens Season 3 here.

And for fun with the real star of episode 306:

AN ELF house for Awkwafina is Nora from Queens

Elf House in Iceland

Probably my favorite set to decorate in Season 3 of Awkwafina is Nora from Queens was “the Elf House,” the home of Alfur the elf played by Lea DeLaria in Episode 4 of Season 3, directed by Jordan Kim.

Even though most of the episode was actually filmed on location in Iceland, we filmed this Elf House in Queens, New York City!

that rug is an actual vintage Nordic rug from Sweden!

This is what this part of the room looked like before which is a NYC Parks Department building.

Gathering Inspiration

Where do you start to decorate a fantastical and fictional interior like an Elf House with tangible concrete things available in New York City 2022?

Our set decoration team together with Production Designer Laura Miller started by pulling visual research images to get some inspiration based on ideas like:

• historical Icelandic and Nordic interiors

• illustrations from Icelandic and Nordic fairytales

• how elf residences have been portrayed in other media (haha like the 2003 Will Ferrell movie Elf)

• images of other fictional interiors that seemed to have the right vibe (I was thinking a lot of Mr. Fox’s residence from The Fantastic Mr. Fox).

Hunting for what’s available

Next I visited New York City’s community of prop houses (where we rent furniture and props for shoots) to see what they had that might fit the aesthetic of our reference images.

For instance when visiting the prop house Eclectic Encore, I saw this rustic piano that seemed so perfectly whimsical I decided the Elf House needed it even though nowhere in the script or initial furniture plan does it specify “and we need an elf piano.”

The wonderful lamp is from the lighting prop house City Knickerbocker and everything else are items we bought in a store, online, or thrifted!

you can catch a tiny glimpse of the piano in the corner of the right of the frame!

After hunting and gathering we put together boards of how the items we selected as candidates for serving “elf house” might work together (or not) and finalized what we would rent or purchase.

We had three different zones we needed to outfit for the story: a bedroom, a living room, and a kitchen area

working board for the Elf House kitchen and the bedroom

working board for the Elf House living room

how my desk at work looked that week hahahahah.

Kiran very nicely surprised me with a slice of cake from LADY M!

Set dressing time!

Then we had 1x day to bring all our stuff and transform that empty room into the Elf House you saw on screen. So at 7am we showed up with a truck full of furniture, a small army of set dressers, and got to work.

I wish I had photos of all our boxes and tables of set dressing laid out, outside when we started but sadly I don’t.

I do have this photo of in the midst of dressing and trying out different layouts of funiture.

They certainly don’t have American “Exit” signs in an Icelandic Elf House!

Here is leadman (head of the set dressers) Nate Obey checking out how removable the sign is, and our Shop Electrician Dan Eschuai removing the sign (behind set dresser Allen Ploenes posing with a flower).

FINISHED SET!

And all that work finally results with a finished set!

Living Room

Bedroom

Kitchen

What wasn’t working, were our window treatments. While I’m sure almost no viewer is paying attention, I’m sorry to say it still nags me!

There were a number of constraints that made it challenging for us to get the window treatments perfect:

• we couldn’t drill holes into the historical property’s wood

• we needed the window treatments to be very secure because Nora has to move a curtain to jump out the window

• we needed the window treatments on one side of the house to completely block the view so you couldn’t see the NYC traffic lightpost right outside the window.

I think if we were a bigger budget show we might have been able to come up with a construction facilitated solution but alas we aren’t so the only options we had of how to rig the window treatments made them sit a bit weird on the windows depending on your angle.

But I guess for their key starring moment here when Nora jumps out the window they looked fine and functioned perfectly.

Iceland exterior also in queens

while most of the episode’s exteriors are filmed on location in Iceland, there is one exterior shot that was actually filmed in a park in Queens!

here is a photo of the sign we brought in early morning to set up

Nora sitting on a rock with wildflowers near her feet?

this is set dressers Paddy and Sean and my water bottle with the faux rocks we rented, brought in, “planting” the wildflowers around Nora.

Our set decoration shopper Margie Verghese woke up VERY early this morning to go to the Manhattan wholesale flower market and find flowers and greens that could pass for Icelandic wildflowers, met us at the park which we got to when it was still dark out so set dressers Paddy and Sean, and I could try to enhance this little patch of a Queens park to look like Iceland.

It was a beautiful early fall morning so we were pretending to be cold here to match the Icelandic sign.

You can read more behind-the-scenes putting together the sets and everything related to Awkwafina is Nora from Queens Season 3 here.

KALEIDOSCOPE EPISODE VIOLET: 🔥 BURN IT ALL DOWN🔥!

Kaleidoscope, episode Violet

BABY’S FIRST BURN SET

Through working on the country club burn set in Episode Violet of Kaleidoscope on Netflix, I learned about so many of the technical considerations and details to create a controlled fire to effectively burn down a set on camera.

Working closely with set decorator Jessica Petruccelli and our crew’s special effects team I learned a lot about inflammable and flame retardant materials, how much plastic is sneakily in everything we buy nowadays, and how to buy a whole set that is essentially metal, glass, and 100% natural fibers or materials.

After realizing how much work and careful planning it consists of to create a dramatic fire sequence on screen, I look at all burn with a newfound appreciation of what it takes to make it.

here is the set plans with the fire plans drawn into it with highlighters and fire bars drawn out

As this plan suggests, we were building the country club cigar lounge, spirits library, hallways and office on a stage so that the filming of the fire could be in a controlled environment.

Building a set of this size with all flame retardant materials is an undertaking and here are some behind the scenes shots of how it looked being put together.

THE SPECIAL SET DECORATION ELEMENTS

• curtains that catch fire and burn

• bottles of alclohol and liquor that break and fuel the fire

• books that can burn

• paintings that can catch fire

• leather club chairs that can withstand fire.

• only metal Christmas decorations

this is on top of all the normal set decoration elements of furniture, flooring, hardware, lighting, and well all the decoration that we could only get in stone, metal, glass or all natural material.

CURTAINS

First we swatched a bunch of options of all natural fiber fabric in our desired color palettes and then we sent a few yards of each of the finalists to the Special Effects Key, Johan.

Johan then conducted burn tests on each fabric to see how the burnt and if there were any off-gas fumes that were not ideal.

These were the finalists of the two that burned the best:

yes, we are buying $109/yard fabric shipped from France just to burn 🥲

Roger lights up the panel of curtains to “buy time”

Then working together with our draper I sent the fabric, and these specifications for the curtains to be custom made with some triples and doubles so that there can be multiple takes of burning the curtains.

After the curtains were made we rigged them at a studio and coordinated with a special outside company to come and treat the curtains (and any set dressing made of natural fibers) with flame retardant chemicals.

a moment where you see the whole wall of curtains while Hannah is exploring the room.

Do you think she is thinking “ah yes, all natural fiber shipped directly from France by a fabric mill that Hermes owns and fastidiously treated with flame retardants”?

look at the fullness of those beautiful drapes!!!! now let’s burn them. 😈🔥

BOTTLES OF BOOZE (like a lot of them)

Lily at work at the country club wine cave tasting room and spirits library.

It is scripted that these scenes take place in a liquor library and wine cave and one of the important key actions is that bottles of wine of booze break and literally add fuel to the flame.

When Hannah goes to work with Lily

Well obviously we can’t use REAL alcohol otherwise it would be VERY flammable and really add fuel to the flame, so we had to go about creating hundreds of fake bottles of wine and liquor.

Like a pallet’s worth of bottles.

making vats of fake wine

Our winery workshop in the set dressing shop

Laying out how the bottles and boxes will cascade on the action in the set. These are custom crates made out of a special non-flammable material that is not wood but painted to look like it.

I don’t think you ever see this corner of the wine cave and spirits library on screen but you do see…

this corner which is a modified version of the idea above and more designed from dramatic breakaway of bottles.

BREAKAWAY BOTTLES

There is a special category of item for tv and movies called “breakaways” which are items that look like glass bottles or glass cups or tables which are really made of resins of plastic which look realistic when they break but are more safe to use than real glass to the actors or crew members who handle them.

For this burn sequence we needed a lot of different breakaways in different bottle shapes and decanter shapes in multiples for multiple takes so you could get this effect:

Breakaways are very delicate and pretty expensive so we set up a whole zone near the stage for our on set dressers that I think provided ample warning for people to be careful around all our precious breakaways.

I joked that the amount of signage and caution tape was just a physical representation of two women’s (mine and Jess’s) anxiety.

Each breakaway was calculated to approximate one of the real bottles of liquor or wine we had dressed in (but as mentioned before with just colored water) with multiples for multiple takes or in case of breakage in shipping or handling (they are very delicate).

now months after making this, this paper no longer makes sense to me, but it did when I made it 😂.

I also had to make a key for our on-set dressers so they knew where to find what bottle quickly for resetting the sets between takes.

CUSTOM FLAME RETARDANT CLUB CHAIRS

Since there were going to be leather club chairs in the burn zone, we needed to find many matching multiples of leather club chair made of all natural materials.

The only way to get the multiples we wanted and truly be sure of the materials was to get them custom made and stuffed only with flame retardant materials of rockwool and lined with panther felt.

When you work long enough on a set you start inadvertently wearing clothes that match it…

they really do look disproportionately deep even though it is indeed the printed dimension from the chairs we were imitating. sigh.

ONE OF THE CLUB CHAIRS VERY EFFECTIVELY AVOIDING FLAMES while the room burns down around it.

CERAMIC BOOKS TO BURN

I worked with an antique book seller to get enough old leather bound books to fit the look of our gentleman’s club cigar room.

But then for the burn scene, we also needed to get ceramic book spines made that could withstand the flames and look like the original antique books. So I worked with a fabricating workshop that helped us make these ceramic dupes.

original real ones below, and fake ceramic spines above.

This is a photo before the burn started actually and all the blackened surfaces are the work of the scenic department. We had 45 minutes to turn over the set from pristine to a burned out set and like a well trained army the whole art department descended upon the set doing what needed to be done to transform the space.

PRE-BURNED ARTWORK TO SWITCH OUT

For some reason I didn’t take more photos of this process. But basically we worked with our favorite framer to make 4x versions of some paintings (1x for the normal shot, 1x already pre-burned, 2x ready to burn on camera) and 2x versions of others: a pre-burn and a post-burn version.

As you can see on the photo above, we already had a painting and frame that the special effects team burned out ready to just switch to a post-burn version.

When picking the artwork, I came across this painting from the Metropolitan Museum Collection which I thought not only fit the right aesthetic and vibe of the room we were creating but the subject matter was some nice little story foreshadowing and thematically on point for the episode.

Sometimes being too on the nose is sort of lame, but in this case I think it worked as a subtle hint in the background and glad Production Designer Michael Bricker agreed!

“Hunting Dogs with Dead Hare,” 1857, Gustave Courbet, Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Some more before and after

hey! loving the way the lattice design on the iron table is creating a beautiful pattern in the fire. If you knew how many back and forths were involved about the right table and the right pattern…

On screen as part of the country club, these photos are not from the burn set we built but a location we filmed at and Michael captured Jess and I in a rare moment of downtime waiting for the shooting crew to arrive.

It was actually not easy to find 10x matching standing candelabras and I had to work with a vendor to custom make them for us to rent!

we survived our first burn set!

While the burn sequence sits at the heart of Leo Pap’s motivations throughout the whole series, the burn sequence itself only lasts less than 4 minutes on screen.

Yes, a month of work by many many people and vendors working hard together with us totaling over thousands of hours together to prepare all the elements for a FOUR MINUTE on screen safe and cinematic burn.

🔥

Finding Those Restraint Bars for Tunnel's Elevator

One thing I was not expecting for the 5th season of Search Party was creating an elevator to the center of the earth.

As a long time fan of the show I thought I had an idea of what kind of sets we would be working on: contemporary, millennial Brooklyn, slightly heightened and stylized in an off-beat-gesture-towards-surrealism.

me realizing wait…we are also doing sci-fi?

There was no part of me that was expecting to be working in the genre of sci-fi; in this case a fantastical elevator to the center of the earth.

Part of the fun of working on a show as zany as Search Party, however, is precisely these sorts of unannounced genre detours into sci-fi. I mean it is not everyday you get to work on a surprise elevator to the center of the earth for Jeff Goldblum!

This whole zany high-concept elevator and the surreal payoff is the kind of unexpected left turn that endears so many of us to love Search Party.

Most sci-fi jobs are big budget affairs because getting all the elements right to build something technical from imagination is not something you can usually do on the cheap. …and yet here we were a scrappy little comedy trying to do just that.

the reality of a scrappy little comedy trying to build an imagined elevator in the sniffing zone of technical futuristic fantastical.

So we had to get RESOURCEFUL.

We started with research brainstorming what sort of materials or elements we could get on the cheap on Craigslist or used otherwise that looked spaceship-like so we wouldn’t be building everything from scratch.

Thanks to the wonderfully creative Andrew Behm who came up with so many genius ideas like boating chairs for the seats and used rollercoaster handlebars.

This is my avatar for Andrew Behm’s inspired resourceful creative ideas.

THE CHAIRS

Working during a pandemic, however, also meant we were saddled with the same supply chain problems as the rest of the world.

hate to be that person but literally, supply chain amirite?

The boating chairs we ordered with a 4 week lead time (which is an insanely long lead time for productions schedules) and were still arriving late.

Despite Andrew and me calling the vendor literally everyday for updates, they could not tell us when the specific boating chairs the rest of the elevator was being build around would land, any tracking information, nor any estimation of when we would receive the chairs.

…even though when I bought them they gave us a definite date that was already 1 week past.

Everytime Andrew and I debriefed after calling the chair supplier.

Emergency Plan B

So then we had to go to an Emergency Plan B and I started calling the manufacturer of the boating seats directly, got in touch with one of their warehouse reps, and found 5x matching chairs in stock in a similar style and dimension as the original one we ordered.

The catch was we had to pick-up the chairs in Providence, RI which is a whole day of someone driving back and forth from New York City.

do we have the resources to go to Providence, RI? Not exactly. Do we need to? Yes.

These were desperate times so we decided to do it.

And of course, OF COURSE, the moment those 5x chairs landed at our stage back where we were building the elevator I got a call from the original vendor.

“Your chairs are here and ready for pick up now!”

“Your chairs are here and ready for pick up now!”

THE RESTRAINT BARS

You will notice in all these stills from the elevator scene that one set dressing element that is particularly prominent: the restraint bars securing each character in their seat.

One of the most fun parts of set decorating, is learning about a whole world of specialized vendors that otherwise I would never have the opportunity to intersect with.

In this case it was the world of rollercoaster and amusement park hardware and manufacturers.

We really wanted to find 5x matching meaty restraint bars so that the cast would have something to grip as they were being hurtled to the center of the earth and look like they were strapped into something serious.

Custom making 5x restraint bars and getting them covered with custom moulded foam was a bit out of the scope of our little comedy show’s budget and timeline (again our production was not set up as a sci-fi movie!) so I was on a mission to find someone who would sell me 5x matching rollercoaster restraint bars.

nothing like a good Mission Impossible mission to sink my teeth into.

This search started where all searches start: obsessive googling. …but when you know so little about an industry often times you don’t even know the correct phrases to google? I was googling “handlebars” and after a few phone calls I realized the right term is “restraint bar” or “shoulder harness.”

Once I got an idea of who the players were in the rollercoaster parts world I started calling around.

Sometimes when you explain to people outside of the TV production industry what you are looking for and why, they either:

1. quickly tell you they don’t have X or don’t do Y and hang up.

2. get tickled with the crazy goose hunt you are on and get intrigued.

3. are charmed for a moment that someone from show business is doing something as whimsical as making a fake elevator to the center of the earth while the actual earth burns during a dystopian pandemic.

When I’m in pursuit of something just out of reach and hard to find, I’m always hoping to find someone who is 2) or 3) or a combination of both of those, because then maybe they might help you out and hook you up with some of the deep knowledge they have on their specialized industry.

It is a little bit like cultivating a source if you were doing journalism…I think?

live footage of this process

I talked to people from all over the country working in amusement park ride manufacture and repair.

Anyways, after many phone calls criss-crossing the industry and the country I talked to a woman named Dori from a company called Rides-4-U right in New Jersey! No need to do crazy cross-continental shipping! I was getting excited.

She told me she didn’t have what we were looking for, but she was firmly in camp 2 & 3 and said she wanted to try and help me and would think of someone I should talk to.

me getting hopeful after meeting the angel Dori on the phone

I called Dori a few days later to check-in and she passed me the phone number of a 3rd generation molded foam and metal company in Pennsylvania where they often manufacture these exact things for rollercoasters and often have scrap seconds or extras.

When I called the number, the person who picked up the phone was so warm and casual and nice and in the background I could hear metal shop like sounds.

The man, Seth, told me oh sure they had lots of different restraint bars like that, in fact a bunch that didn’t pass inspection to use on a real rollercoaster

I told him THAT WAS PERFECT for our purposes of total make believe!

…could he send me a photo? Before I got my hopes up too high, I wanted to see what it is he had on hand since our world how it looks is of paramount importance.

When I got this photo sent to me during a tech scout in a decrepit Staten Island hospital I practically yelped from joy:

EXACTLY the type of thing we were looking for!

And then I got this beautiful email message:

The above is a hilarious line from one of our email exchanges that reads almost like a foreign language but that’s whats fun about diving deep into another industry’s lingo and arcana

Not only do they have them on hand, but he had 5x matching, and then came the moment of truth. I asked him how much they would cost worried that it might be out of our price range.

…but he was like “oh I can just give you these for free. they are basically trash to us.”

“oh I can just give you these for free. they are basically trash to us.”

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

This was the moment I had been waiting for FOR WEEKS! Finding that needle in the haystack. That one magical person who not only has exactly what you need, 5x matching ones, but finds it fun and amusing to work with production on our quest to make fake things.

AND FOR FREEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Truly this is the high or scavenger hunting in set decorating that only happens every now and then.

There are of course many little triumphs when searching for things, but this type of open ended search of something so specific and niche taking you to weird corners of manufacturing is not that frequent.

The way I felt after securing those restraint bars for free.

THE HIGH! I was so pumped and floating around the production office.

Of course I insisted on paying something. A situation where I’m DELIGHTED to give someone money even if they are insisting it isn’t necessary. We finally settled on the token amount of what it would cost for the foam.

And afterwards I kept both Set and Dori updated as the elevator was being built, sending them periodic updates of the construction and photos, since they really helped make it happen and were in my mind stakeholders in this silly little set and I can’t wait to send them the stills from the episode.

That’s 10 people focused on 5 restraint bars baby!

Portia's Season 5 Apartment on Search Party

Dory surprises the gang in Portia’s Season 5 apartment

As fans of Search Party know, Portia’s apartment gets a design transformation each season.

Portia’s Apartment design transformation Seasons 1-4

This season we had a lot of fun with Portia’s apartment.

Once we knew that Portia was no longer an actress and mourning her acting career was a plot point (it was a bigger plot point in earlier drafts of the script), Production Designer Maggie Ruder and I started talking about what that would mean for Portia’s apartment this season

A big personality mourning her glory days of being an actress of course calls to mind one iconic character and set: Gloria Swanson as Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard.

hahha look at how over the top this interior is!

While Portia can be a little extra in a Norma Desmond-esque way, Search Party is still a low-budget comedy so we didn’t have the $ to go full excess and had to think up some resourceful ways to communicate the same vibes.

So we did a lot of visual research.

VISUAL RESEARCH

pulling references from Victorian mourning, modern neo-Gothic inspired interiors, Grey Gardens, and of course Sunset Boulevard.

I brought in some interior and design books from my collection that I felt were the vibe we were going for.

as you can see what had a lot of post-it notes of inspiration.

from Maggie’s design deck, that mantel photo is from the Syrie Maugham book.

You can see the Sunset Boulevard stair balustrade details we added in this shot!

we tried our best with the mantel and the oil painting of Portia and Eliot that has appeared in multiple seasons.

PORTIA’S FADED DAYS OF ACTRESS GLORY

The original from Sunset Boulevard

Finding the right collection of frames from a favorite vintage and salvage store

Collecting images and stills from past seasons from Portia’s various acting jobs was super fun.

you can see some of these photos which were spread over the windowsill of the two windows behind the couch

the silhouette of the frames make it in this shot

this is a terrible photo of when we were still working on the set, but allows you to see the photos on the windowsill.

This frame idea is a perfect example of a set dressing decoration element that had a lot of:

• intention (mimicking Norma Desmond’s own journey)

• thoughtfulness (combing the show’s archive for all of Portia’s past acting gigs) shouts to Sydney Barbara who did a ton of research!

• effort, and time (finding the right frames, matching image with frame, measuring all the dimensions, shout out to Andrew Behm!, our beloved graphic designer Loren Kane sizing and printing the photos to work, actually framing them in)

put into an idea that is at most a flicker in the background of the screen that absolutely no viewer can decipher…and yet totally worth it and so fun for us to do!

FURNITURE HUNT PROCESS

What my office wall looked like while we were hunting, gathering, and searching (SEARCH PARTY?) for the furniture pieces for Portia’s Apartment. The circled red part is all the rejects of furniture photos we won’t end up using.

narrowing down

some key furniture pieces we purchased found at five different locations of used furniture around the NYC metro area. Four of these will be modified by us in someway (painted, reupholstered, fringe swap) to make it work for the set.

Maybe you will recognize the furniture above when they were at the store in the finished sets below and some of the previous set photos in this post:

ADDING THAT DECORATION TWIST

Did someone say Re-Upholstering and FRINGE SWAP? (that’s like decorator candy)

a selection of fringe and trim

fabrics we decided on for reuphostering

Katie our Assistant Set Decorator who valiantly swatched fabrics, fringe, and trim around NYC while we have one of our many meetings to narrow down options. And a box of the best LaCroix flavor: apricot

THIS IS THE SAME ANGLE ON PORTIA’S APARTMENT

For more set photos, view this gallery of Search Party Season 5 set photos.

Lance's Character Through His Apartment Artwork

now that Lance is a successful fashion and sneaker designer we wanted to flesh out his creative life as a designer at this workstation. For the sneaker drawings we rented the original sketches of one of our beloved set dressers Aaron.

Like many fans of “The Other Two” on HBOMax my favorite character is the lovable Lance Arroyo played by Josh Segarra, so when working on decorating his apartment set I wanted to give it a lot of intention and care.

We first see Lance’s apartment in Season 1, but since his character has really flourished and experienced a professional glow up (from Foot Locker salesperson to Fashion Designer showing a full collection) we wanted his apartment to reflect that evolution too while maintaining the fun playful spirit of Lance’s character.

Lance and Chase at Lance’s fashion show

Chase backstage with a rack of the colorful clothes from Lance’s collection behind him.

Lance’s fashion line is full of bright yellows and oranges, so we wanted that to be reflected in the apartment accents and artwork too. You see Lance’s apartment before you see any pieces from his fashion line or the fashion show, so it is color preview of sorts.

artwork on the shelf is an original from Elisa Lopez

Since Josh the actor is of Puerto Rican descent, I decided Lance Arroyo was too and we set about looking for young Puerto Rican, Latinx, and artists of color to find artwork for Lance’s apartment that we could rent for the set.

print outs of the artwork we sought out for Lance’s apartment from artists Elisa Lopez, Dana Robinson, Ronald Perez, Chanel Chiffon Thomas, and Alicia Degener hanging on the wall in my office so we could see how it might all work together.

To reflect the streetwear sensibility of Lance’s fashion collection I thought he would probably be inspired by artists with similar vibes in their artwork.

In this shot you can see Ronald Perez’s and Chanel Chiffon Thomas’s artwork.

We were really pumped to find artwork from young art Puerto Rican, Latinx, and Black artists that we were able to feature in the set and best of all which appeared on screen!

A great shot of Chanel Chiffon Thomas’ piece here.

Not always a guarantee, because we decorate a set but have no control over how the scenes are shot and ultimately how the episode is edited.

Ronald Perez’s much loved “Cafe Bustelo” piece gets a lot of screentime in this episode.

Working with independent artists to rent and showcase their artwork in sets is always a ton more work than renting from a prop house or printing from a stock photo service but the results are always ten times more gratifying and uniquely tailored to a character.

And in the case of Lance, totally worth it.

You really get to see Dana Robinson’s wonderful painting a lot when we are in those hilarious bathroom scenes.

one last piece of original artwork we rented directly from an artist (in this case Becca Lowry) for Lance’s backstage room at his Fashion Show in the finale of Season Two (Episode 10.)

Becca Lowry (https://beccalowry.com/home.html) sculpture hanging on the wall.

If you are an artist reading this who is interested in working together to let me rent your artwork for a future set please email me and I would love to find a way to work together!

How Do You Make a Warehouse Look British? 🇬🇧

In episode 6 of The Flight Attendant on HBOMax, we get a few brief shots of Cecilia, Miranda’s associate, in an undisclosed warehouse. What you may or may not have realized is that even though this warehouse was actually located in Brooklyn, NYC it was scripted to be located in London.

So when Jess gave me the responsibility to do this set the first interesting question I pondered was, “how do you make a warehouse look British or that it is located in London?”

I mean if you are in a car and the scene is supposed to take place in London you just need the drivers side to be on the right and voila we have the visual cues we need.

But what about a warehouse? 🤔

The first thing I tried to do was google search as many permutations of the words “London warehouse” “warehouse in Britain” as I could. And believe it or not, the internet is not rife with photos of the insides of British warehouses, and even when they are it’s hard to see anything particularly British about them.

So then I started looking up warehouse shelving and solution companies based in the UK and combing through their brochures, catalogs, and websites to try to get some good reference photos. This method elucidated some good warehouse photos—but they were mostly very sterile looking, huge industrial scale warehouses that looked borderline like stock photos.

The ideal photo I was hoping for was a chaotic-in-the-middle-of-fulfilling-a-lot-of-orders warehouse on a Wednesday morning at 10am with lots of life layers and details I could study. I never found that photo of my dreams.

So I started thinking of ways we could express Britishness (or at least distinguish the space from an American counterpart) and this is what I came up with:

1. A4 paper

2. British office supplies—particularly those file holders I always see on British and European shows but which we don’t really use in America cause we use binders instead.

3. Some British snacks.

4. British style light switch and electrical outlet covers (which are very different since they are on a whole different voltage and outlet prong system).

5. British premiere league football (soccer) team paraphernalia.

Ultimately these are very small and specific details that most people wouldn’t notice on screen one way or another (we’ll get back to them later though). When you are doing a set that is 93% boxed air (literally), you gotta keep it interesting for yourself though.

A lot of the main work of this set was of course filling a completely empty room by finding the shelving, furniture, and a quantity of boxes, crates, and containers of varying sizes, color, and texture to make a convincing looking warehouse that also had visual interest. None of which (boxes, shelving, basic warehouse furniture) was that distinguishable between British vs. American.

Warehouse Before

Warehouse After—93% boxed air.

I also gave myself the added challenge of not using ULINE (for political reasons) for this set—when definitely this is a set MEANT for ordering from ULINE. It would have definitely been the easiest and most straightforward way to get the great majority of shopping done fast and cheap. And normally I advocate for not making things more complicated than they need to be, but…in this case no.

I mean just that above was enough to keep me busy (its the quantity and volume I was talking about!). When you have an empty room, you really gotta make the calculations to make sure you are going to have enough stuff to fill the space with enough variation to look natural and interesting.

The worst fear of all decorators is to be dressing a set and realizing you don’t have enough stuff and no time (or money left) to get it. I wish I had the picture of the paper I used to calculate and plan each shelf ahead of time to make sure we had enough things to fill all the space but I definitely threw that away.

So after I got that taken care of Jess supported me on my mission to find all the British details listed above.

1. A4 Paper.

   I special ordered a carton of A4 paper from a paper supplier to use for all paperwork and printed signs in the warehouse.

Living in Asia for 10 years (for my first career), one of the weird small frustrating things I encountered is how standardized paper sizes outside of the US are different from what we use in the US (haha America likes to do that). So my American folders, document covers, and binders wouldn’t work with the local document sizes. If you want to learn everything about American letter size paper vs. A4, click here.

I thought this was a fun detail that yeah absolutely nobody will notice at home and likely not even the actors, yet it brought a level of authentic realism to the set that at least Jess and I could enjoy knowing.

2. British Office Supplies

I got in there looking for the British equivalent of Staples and scrolled through all their inventory to see what actually looked different than what I would find at Staples, and I discovered quite a lot actually!

This was August during COVID so shipping times and fulfillment were dicey especially for an international order. I even reached out to a few British office supply companies to see if they would work with me on shipping times. They all said no, but one guy suggested Amazon.co.uk which was 💡.

A glimpse of my Amazon.co.uk order (there was more not pictured here too!)

👀 some of the British office supplies from the order? To me those yellow pens are emblematic because they look very un-American to me. You might notice the British electrical cover and some British snacks in here too (we will get to that in a second).

You might be thinking 🧐 “wait a minute, I don’t ever remember seeing this desk in the warehouse…” Which I unfortunately have to say “yes 😔, sadly we never even see this part of the room at all on screen in the final cut!” (The angles that were scouted were not the same ones that ended up on screen in the final cut of the episode).

This actually happens all the time in our work, and 🤷🏻‍♀️ you gotta be doing it for the love of the game and the enjoyment of the process. Because besides that we have very little control of what ultimately ends up on screen after the final edit.

anyways here’s another angle of the desk with all the A4 paper, imported British office supplies and British snacks…

On one hand, it was a slight blessing in disguise because the biggest pieces of distinctive British (and all European actually) office supplies that are visibly different than American ones were the document file holders they use instead of the binders we Americans use.

The ones I ordered got held up, our filming date got pushed earlier, so in the end they didn’t arrive in time 😭.. So we ended up having to use some binders (and it was killing me on the inside because I knew they weren’t right and we had ordered the right ones they just weren’t here on time!). Well turns out either way you never saw the shelf where the document file holders should have gone.

3. Some British snacks

This one was pretty easy, I knew there was a British food importer in Connecticut, and just ordered some snacks off their website, and called them to make sure the shipping would arrive in time. Any food item you catch on screen is from them!

4. British style light switch and electrical outlet covers

You might have noticed from the above image of my Amazon.co.uk order that it included two outlet plate covers. Anyone who has traveled to the UK will realize, hmm we speak the same language, share a lot of cultural heritage, and yet I can’t charge my cellphone here without getting a voltage adapter…

Covering up all the American outlets with British outlet covers seemed like an easy win and way to convey visually this warehouse is in LONDON.

5. British premiere league football (soccer) team paraphernalia.

This idea to communicate British-ness was not only seemingly low-hanging fruit in displaying a different sports culture than America, but it was also intended as a tribute to one of Jess and my favorite prop house warehouse workers: Josh at State Supply Props.

When State Supply was at their Harlem location, Josh’s workspace at the loading dock was a living altar to the Mets. He had so much sports fan paraphernalia hanging up everywhere so we thought it would be fun to make the British warehouse loading dock character’s working space an homage to Josh just with a British football team.

Turns out WarnerMedia’s legal team only gave me the ok to put up ONE branded British football team fan item…so I tried to chose wisely and we put it here:

That’s a British football team scarf hanging over the bulletin board…do you know what team?

Now of course, which team should our warehouse worker character support was a whole thing. As an American and someone who pays so little attention to sports, I had no sense of what fandom of each team signified. Even though I don’t really pay attention to sports, I do understand the many unsaid and understood signifiers of a Yankees fan v.s a Mets fan in NYC.

So I turned to the internet to try and figure out what team would make sense for our warehouse worker, and stumbled upon this wonderful gem from Reddit:

I found this breakdown hilarious despite its…shall we say crudeness. I double checked this with a British friend who said it was startlingly accurate.

“White van drivers called Tony” sounded like exactly the profile of the character I was thinking of, so West Ham it was!

AND YOU ACTUALLY GET TO SEE THE WEST HAM SCARF ON SCREEN!

Those boxes behind Cecilia were custom printed and had kg and cm units of measurement.

BONUS!

Oh one last bonus one: if you notice all these boxes have the weights in kg and dimensions in cm because the rest of the world (including the UK) uses the metric system. We had these boxes custom printed and I asked our graphic designer, Ambika to please make sure the dimensions were in metric.

I’m 100% aware that 0 people watching the show noticed any of these details I went through painstaking trouble to realize and now just recount to you, but I’m so grateful Jess gave me the space and encouragement to do it anyway.

I mean, a lot of times these small decorating details are just for the actors or ourselves or the abstract belief that even if they aren’t noticed explicitly the sum total of their presence creates an overall tangible feeling of authentic natural realism.

Like I said earlier, you gotta be doing it for the love of the game and the enjoyment of the process so that even if the work doesn’t ultimately appear on screen or get noticed by viewers, at least you can be proud of the work.

The Quest to Find All that Shredded Paper

Cassie and Alex in her mind palace of trying to piece together what those shredded pieces of paper mean.

In episode 4 “Conspiracy Theories” of The Flight Attendant, after Cassie stole the shredded paper remains from Janet Sokolov’s office in episode 3, we see her wrestling with all this new and puzzling information in her mind palace space/subconscious with Alex. They are back in the hotel suite but now it is is COVERED with shredded paper.

Cool idea. But when set decorators read a scripted idea like that we think “!!! going to need to find or make tons of shredded paper!”

One of the cool things about set decorating is, it is translating a scripted idea from the writers or design idea from the production designer into an actual physical reality. And sometimes it is the simplest things that are the most challenging. Honestly often it is.

Shredded paper: sure anyone knows how to find that. You go to Staples, you buy a home office paper shredder and shred some paper. Done.

But once you start getting into larger quantities, the kind of quantities to make a cinematic effect and really
”read on screen” like in the shot above, it becomes a lot more challenging. Quantity is a big thing when finding things for sets—I could write a whole thing on that but I won’t right now.

I often say it is being able to buy things in the quantity needed, on our crazy production timelines (need it yesterday), with a limited budget that makes set decorating a profession versus someone who is good at shopping, has a knack for interior design, or is resourceful.

In this case, I’m going to walk you through what a challenge it was.

Jess (THE set decorator for The Flight Attendant) and I talked about how our dream situation was we would find a vendor who already dealt in industrial quantities of shredded paper we could buy mass amounts of shredded paper from (I’m talking 1000 pounds of shredded paper to be exact) that we simply picked up or they dropped-off.

I believed deep down inside that I must be able to find this dream vendor.

little snapshot of the calling journey I took from my work notebook (on the other side was my list of things I was buying for an entirely different set. We are usually working at multiple sets at a time concurrently).

So I started googling and calling around all the shredded paper vendors in the NYC tri-state area. Quickly I discovered this was going to be tougher than I realized because what these companies sell their customers is security and peace of mind re: disposing sensitive documents. All of them said flat out no way were they going to sell me their old shreds—that would violate their whole confidential promise to their customers.

Think about it, why do you want to shred something? Because you have a document you want safely and simply destroyed. (Why did Janet Sokolov shred those documents in her office? To destroy evidence!)

Cassie uncovering the shredded documents in Janet Sokolov’s home office in Episode 3 (another set Jess and I worked closely together on!)

Okkkkk. So we discussed the possibility of renting some industrial size paper shredders, bringing them to our set dressing shop, buying obscene amounts of new paper, and then asking for the manpower hours required to have a few set dressers going to town shredding all that new paper.

We didn’t love this plan for three reasons:

1. omg why waste all this NEW paper (and squander the lives of millions of trees in the process) when the world and certainly New York City is already filled abundantly with people disposing of already used paper?!

2. New paper would lack the texture and dimension that used paper with writing and graphics and different color has. This plan costs way more money (renting the machines, buying the material, and budgeting for the manpower).

3. And lastly, renting an industrial shredder is possible but not as easy as we had hoped. Nowadays most companies who hire one of the paper waste companies get a service where someone comes to pick-up paper meant for shredding which then gets hauled and shredded in an industrial paper shredder truck.

I asked a few companies, what if I provide all the paper, could I hire you guys to shred it in your truck, but the truck just parks outside of our office and when it is done shredding we just take the contents? They all said no to this option citing that the trucks are often filled with multiple client’s paper so they can’t just give us our paper and anyways they don’t do that.

Feeling a bit stumped I even called a few other set decorator friends working on other productions to see if they had done something similar before and had any vendors they’ve used. They all said no and thought the best option was the DIY method (the one we didn’t love for the reasons stated above.)

…I really believed there MUST be the right paper shredding vendor out there. You know maybe a smaller firm less bound by all these corporate contracts, someone with a little more flexibility to cater to this very specific situation…

And just as I was giving up hope I got the call back from a vendor with whom I had left a message on their voicemail. He heard my message, googled this new show “The Flight Attendant” and saw that Kaley Cuoco was starring and his wife loves Kaley! He’s the owner of his paper shredding solutions company in New Jersey, had that can-do spirit that small business owners do, and believed he could deliver what we were hoping for. YAY!!!!!!!!

[I wanted to embed the GIF of Ari Gold from Entourage doing his “I LOVE THIS TOWN"!” celebratory dance after realizing he could negotiate with an intransigent school principal once he realized the principal’s son was interested in working as an agent, but I couldn’t make it work with this website’s interface]

THE HIGH. THE BEST HIGH. When that crazy quest you’ve been on finally sprouts a good lead. I’ll never forget how pumped Jess and I were in the office after I got off that phone call that evening.

I worked out all the price and delivery logistics with my Paper Shredding Guy, his company was going to deliver 1000 pounds of shredded paper to our stage two working days before we needed to film. Great, I can check that off my list.

But of course it is never that easy.

Friday Feburary 14, 2020 I was on location working on the set for Diana’s office (another set I was in charge of) and it was surprisingly a pretty chill day considering the high stress few months proceeding it. (Also little did we know what a calm before the storm it was considering what was about to engulf all of our realities COVID wise in just a few weeks).

Literally kicking back on set at Diana’s Office (Annie’s boss at the law firm) which we were dressing the morning of Feb 14, 2020 and which I was using as my desk to get some work done.

The actual intended use of the desk in the show. (I would like to note that all those awards in the background were custom engraved with the character’s name all sorts of fake honors I made up for her.)

Jess came to set, we were both relaxed in a way we hadn’t been in weeks. We even had time to go do some fun smalls shopping together for the finishing touches of Diana’s office at NYC’s most fun office supply store Goods for the Study.

We are all enjoying life cracking jokes with the set dressers dressing Diana’s set with us, and then we get The Call.

Sara the Production Designer calls us from the stage where they are dressing in the 1000 pounds of shredded paper that have been delivered from our Paper Shredding Guy. Sara says with slight panic, the shreds are not the right shape. It is Friday afternoon, and we are filming this first thing Monday morning.

The shreds the props department created for what Cassie stole from Janet Sokolov’s Office are straight shreds—the kind you get from a simple home office paper shredder. The kind of shreds we currently had 1000 pounds of were cross-cut shreds.

Knowing very little about the details of the paper shredding Jess and I honestly didn’t understand this distinction until Sara sent us a photo. OH. This distinction was something that was never specified to any of us and not one we even knew to ask. (I learned so much about the paper shredding industry that week).

I called my Paper Shredding Guy to see if he could help us. He said “That is the industry standard you know: cross-cut. Cross-cut shreds are what most effectively obscure and destroy sensitive documents because they are much harder to piece together.”

Yeah, exactly. If the shreds were actually cross cut, maybe it wouldn’t have been so easy for Cassie and Max to reconstruct the strip shreds they stole from Janet Sokolov’s office:

The strip shredded paper Max and Cassie were able to piece back together in Annie’s apartment on her shower door (I had to find this unique custom curve shower door but that’s a whole other post)—this is exactly why you don’t strip-shred—its too easy to piece back together—and the industry standard is cross-cut.

And like with so many vendors I’ve had this talk with before I pleaded with him: “I know this doesn’t make sense in real life or in how it actually works in your industry, but can you help us make a bunch of strip shreds to support the fake cinematic world we are creating? Could you also make 500 pounds more and deliver it by Monday morning at 5am?“ (we thought we could layer some of the crosscut under the strip shred for bulk—a little movie magic.)

Like I said before Paper Shredding Guy is a can-do guy and for the right price he said sure he could help us out.

But considering our thin time margin of working hours left, we were going to be cutting it very close (haha paper shredding pun!). We all agreed we needed a Plan B. Because relying on a third party to deliver something we needed to make the shot on Mon at 5am was a risky Plan A. Any number of things could go wrong and we needed a back-up.

So now Jeanelle, the other assistant set decorator joined our little Paper Shredding Crisis Task Force to try and figure out how we were going to come up with 1000 pounds of strip shreds before Monday morning. Did I mention it was late Friday afternoon by this point? The Friday of Valentines Day when many people have plans with their dearest loved ones and are not planning on working a minute later than absolutely necessary?

We revisited some previous plans and I called the places we had inquired about renting industrial paper shredders. Turns out any industrial size paper shredder only cuts cross-cut. Strip shreds are only for little amateur home paper shredders. AGHHHHHH.

I called a bunch of Staples around the city to find out how many strip-shred home paper shredders they had in stock now, and it turns out VERY FEW. Most of that is sold online now, and as anyone who has had experience with a dinky home paper shredder they are not that durable.

In order to make the quantity of shreds we needed, we needed a bunch of these dinky little shredders so that if one died from exhaustion (sorry paper shredder) we had another waiting in the wings. Also we needed enough so that we could have a small army of set dressers shredding all at once. I mean, 2 guys and 2 shredders was not going to cut it (HAH! another paper shredding pun!) Thankfully production agreed to let us pay a handful of set-dressers a 6th day rate to staff the Paper Shredding Crisis Task Force Paper Shredding Factory.

Online though, wasn’t going to be fast enough. We needed these shredders now. So that first thing Sat morning the Paper Shredding Army could get to work.

In the end Jeanelle found a guy who sold on Amazon but had a warehouse of 20+ strip shred home office paper shredders in New Jersey (NJ to save the day again) and could deliver them all in a van to Brooklyn that evening. Katie our set dec shopper was able to procure the obscene amount of paper we needed for the Paper Shredding Crisis Task Force Paper Shredding Factory.

Here is a video of Jeanelle coming into the office at 7:04 pm (you can see the rest of the office is dark and everyone else has long gone home) with one of the paper shredders that had been delivered just to test that it would work.

The huge sigh of relief we all breathed.

In the end my Paper Shredding Guy DELIVERED. He showed up Monday 5am with the 500 pounds of strip-shredded paper as requested and together with the shreds from the Paper Shredding Crisis Task Force Paper Shredding Factory we were able to create the beautiful quantity required to make the shot in time for camera.

PHEW

The Quest + the Intense High Stakes Problem Solving are two things I actually love. So even though they are less about beautiful objects and the design aesthetic side of set decorating (which duh is the best part), they are processes I really enjoy and which keeps me loving set decorating.