Creating a Weed Empire for Awkwafina is Nora from Queens / May 30, 2023 by Charlene Wang de Chen

you can see the special swivel throne chair we got for Kingpin grandma here, those much labored about hanging buds drying in the “dehum” section, AND the right old food container tupperware on top of the fridge in the corner! I go in depth about the tupperware that had their star moment in 302 here.

Episode 5 in Season 3 of Awkwafina is Nora from Queens is maybe the funniest episode of the season. Grandma and Nora build a weed empire together with the help of Grandma’s senior center friends and Grandma breaks bad.

We learned a lot about the details of creating an at-home weed operation (work research!), activated all the wings of the art department to come together to create a large quantity of realistic looking fake weed buds still on the plant, and had a lot of fun leaning into pimping out kingpin grandma’s room.

Grandma is the Wolf of Wall Street (Queens Blvd?)

When I read the script (written by Kyle Lau) for ep 305, the scene above noted “Major ‘Wolf of Wall Street’ and Theranos vibes” (see script excerpt below).

So we immediately with the help of Kiran, got to work pulling images from iconic scenes in the movie “Wolf of Wallstreet.”

When I saw the hint of different clocks denoting time zones and suggesting a world empire in the “Wolf of Wall Street” still above, it reminded me of a very funny “different time zones” clock set up I saw once in an office in Manhattan years ago.

spotted this in a Manhattan office space in 2019

In our set: of course Queens is in the middle!

When I saw this still from “Wolf of Wall Street” (below) I thought maybe we could ask our fantastic graphic designer Dan-ah Kim to make a really silly graphic of glass bricks to mimic the background of the speaker in the image to frame grandma.

Fortunately the Awkwafina is Nora from Queens is a very open and collaborative set where truly everyone feels like they are delighted to be there and play around for the best joke possible.

So when I proposed doing a version of this idea in our set to the production designer Laura Miller, she liked it and encouraged me to pitch it to the director Bill Benz.

Bill chuckled and said sure!

Making all that fake HANGING weed

For those of us who didn’t have any experience in a homegrown weed growing and distribution empire (uh, me), production provided us with a detailed breakdown of step-by-step what this would entail from an interview someone in the writer’s room did.

here’s an excerpt of the detailed process breakdown provided by production (hahaha, seriously!) and my notes calculating how much material we would need to buy to make buds…

Margie our set dec buyer called around different prop houses to find who might already have fake weed we could rent.

these are buds we rented from a prop house put in different containers we and props bought. Margie even bought old jam jars to accentuate the DIY feeling of the operation.

She found a person in Atlanta who had fake plants, fake bricks, and fake buds (all which we rented) but nobody who had buds drying on still on a plant what is noted above as “Cutting/Trimming Process/dehum.”

Laura found some great reference images of home “dehum” stages and we were aiming to create a visual like the image below for the set.

Though to add an even more DIY and Immgirant-chic aesthetic we wanted to use the hangers that look like the ones in this hilarious drawing I found amongst my set notes.

Well since nobody had any branches of buds of weed we could rent, (and I even talked to real growers who might sell us real branches in this stage!), we had only one choice:

MAKE IT OURSELVES.

First, Ashley the assistant set decorator went to a fake plant warehouse to find branches and leaves that looked closest to hemp plants that we could attach some homemade buds to.

Then, Ashley went and bought all the supplies to make a bunch of buds.

To test out ideas, make some prototypes, come up with best practices and see what would work and what wouldn’t the UPM Amanda Distler let us set up a little faux bud making workshop outside her office and our office elves got to work.

Once we had some prototypes made, it was time to bring in the big guns: we set up a real bud making assembly line workshop in the set dressing shop and the set dressers GOT TO WORK.

Then after assembling our fake buds on the vine, we brought them all over to the scenics in their shop to help us paint in even more realistic finishes.

Then when the filming crew was at lunch, we had 1 hour to install our weed operation.

There’s also a mailing operation which we also dressed in:

pimping out Grandma’s Room

Nora and Grandma start their little grow operation in Grandma’s closet with the help of Doug.

I know the point of these scenes is really about the weed plants growing and the funny DIY home growing operation of it with tin foil, but for me it was about getting a Chinese grandma’s closet right.

I thought a lot about the memory of my two grandma’s closets (one in in Queens and one in Boston) and tried to evoke the feeling of each and the particulars of a lot of folded up bedding, mismatched hangers, old vintage cases and lots of random colored plastic bags with mysterious items in them.

Closets are always such an opportunity to do character and backstory storytelling through items thrown together and packed in. It’s about accurate true-to-character details but it is also about visually balancing materials, textures, shapes, and colors to create a feeling of visual harmony.

Even though to look right it should look like a lived-in natural haphazard chaos of years of life, it is actually a detailed process of putting together (hopefully) an artfully stage managed still life.

we really adorned each lampshade with gold chains. as many gold chains as our little show could afford 🤑

we also got Grandma a fur coat, a cane! (Ashley found some great canes as well as all the burner phones on the bed at a prop house and bought the fur coat at a thrift store).

IG story Awkwafina shared from set on the day they filmed this scene featuring the set dressing cane and burner phones Ashley our assistant set decorator found!

The Chinese Calendars

Lastly, the pile of Chinese calendars you see in the deep background of the upperhand left corner deserves its own shoutout thanks to our WONDERFUL graphic designer Dan-ah Kim.

the only calendar that was still with the set dressing from Season 2 was a Year of the Dog (2018) calendar so I knew we needed to make a few more since COVID was a reality in the show’s timeline.

One day in Manhattan Chinatown I took photos of these calendars on the wall as great reference images to pass along to Dan-ah.

Dan-ah is an accomplished graphic designer for movies and TV (and a published children’s book author and illustrator!) working on some of the biggest productions in NYC, yet she noted to me this was her first time to get an opportunity to make one of the ubiquitous grocery store or bank calendars seen in many Asian American spaces.

and of course Dan-ah made three spectacular calendars with so many perfect details all aligned with the Chinese zodiac.

As you can see, this episode was quite a collaboration amongst our whole art department and beyond. Fun in the silliest way, it was also gratifying to see it all come together to deliver maximum laughs.

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

my fav graphic that Casi Moss made for this episode. It works on so many levels with the jokes in the episode!

Awkwafina is Nora from Queens Season 3 Episode 2: BEHIND THE SCENES OF THE SETS / May 8, 2023 by Charlene Wang de Chen

Episode 302 of Awkawfina is Nora from Queens is mostly a hilarious spoof of reality shows that is somehow a mix of Love Island meets Squid Game meets Survivor.

We all had a great time working at the location that was the setting for the “Too Hot to Survive” reality show house.

It was towards the end of the job so most of the crazy stress was over and the day we were dressing was a BEAUTIFUL day to be in a mansion overlooking the ocean.

…sadly the day of filming was raining and overcast so you don’t get to see as much of the house on screen as we enjoyed the day before working to put together the set.

Me and Ashley our assistant set decorator enjoying the beautiful day by the water on the terrace

Leadman Nate chilling on the same terrace where they filmed the shot below

Ashley, Soph our locations rep, and me having a fabulous lunch in the sun

Kiran working at set after doing a location run in around the same spot Nora shot this tag

That Giant Pink Bear

to heighten that over-the-top-nothing-is-too-loud aesthetic of reality TV show homes, we rented some oversize bright colored animal statues like the pink bear you see here:

But that pink bear statue HEAVY.

It took 6x set dressers to safely carry it across the room when we were putting the house together

THE CRAZY BIG BED

The script mentioned there was a “GIANT BED”

When I was shown the size of the room we were putting the bed in (usually the family’s living room) and measured how big everyone wanted the bed (15’ feet wide x 12’ feet deep) I knew it was going to be a little bit of a challenge since it was far more enormous than any commercially available bed.

Luckily Assistant Set Decorator Ashley Bradshaw got to work figuring it out and calculated we could use 6x queen sized mattresses and bed frames to create a bed this large, so what you see below are SIX QUEEN MATTRESSES!

the set dressers putting together this epic bed comprised of 6x queen sized beds

From L to R: Ashley Bradshaw, assistant set decorator and the queen who figured out this bed; Laura Miller our wonderful production designer, and me looking very tired.

FUN TRIVIA

The actress, Greta Titelman, who plays poosh in “Too Hot to Survive” is also the same actress who…

Greta Titelman on “Too Hot to Survive” in Awkwafina is Nora from Queens

who played the “Countess Leonora” in Season 5 of Search Party which I also decorated! You can learn all about the Lyte HQ set she appeared in on the blog here.

TURNINg a C TOWN into a G mart (AKA H Mart)

One of the other storylines in this episode is Wally and Grandma’s power struggle over her old stool and eating healthier.

The script had them shopping in “G Mart” (obvious spoof/dupe of the legendary Asian grocery store chain H Mart).

Seeing as our production was based in Queens, seems crazy we didn’t just film inside one of the HUNDREDS of Asian grocery stores in Queens right?

Nope, we actually filmed in a C-Town in Queens a regular degular supermarket that didn’t even have an “Asian Foods” aisle…

this establishing exterior shot? A LIE. We were filming in a C-Town grocery store that didn’t even have an Asian grocery aisle!

So we had to BUY a few three aisle segments worth of Asian groceries to replace on the C-Town shelves for filming.

I went one day to Food Bazaar (one of my favorite NYC supermarkets and actually owned by Korean-Americans) with Kiran and we bought three shopping carts worth of Asian groceries. It looked something like this:

C-Town to G Mart pretending to be H Mart a hilarious NYC supermarket alphabet soup.

The Tragedy of the Tupperware

The episode starts with Grandma using her treacherous stool “Jessimae” to reach some high piles of tupperware.

Once I saw that in the script, I had our whole Art Department keeping old takeout containers and rounding up old food containers to use as tupperware.

Cause as anyone related to Chinese immigrants knows: Grandma isn’t going out and buying any new tupperware! The only tupperware Chinese grandmas know are recycled food containers they refuse to throw out but prefer to reincarnate into tupperware!

Set Dec buyer Margie even bought a few lots of old food containers off of eBay so we could create a beautifully chaotic menagerie of immigrant “tupperware.”

So you can imagine my heartbreak when watching the show and seeing in consternation what ended up on screen was a bunch of VERY new looking tupperware 😭😭😭😭😭

Sometimes things like this happens: we have all the right stuff, we dress it in, and then what actually happens when they are filming is something else entirely. Most of the time I’m not on set so I wasn’t around when these choices were made.

How I felt seeing the wrong tupperware when I know we went through a lot of care and intention to gather the “right” kind of tupperware:

how I felt seeing what tupperware was actually used for the scene and shot

Here’s my actual grandma holding one of her favorite “tupperware” receptacles: reused soft tofu containers to do some gardening in her home in Boston.

You can read everything related to Awkwafina is Nora from Queens Season 3 here.

KALEIDOSCOPE EPISODE GREEN: Team Prison / January 8, 2023 by Charlene Wang de Chen

The team of wonderful set dressers (Team Prison) who were with me everyday for two months working on all the sets for Episode Green in Netflix’s Kaleidoscope. Here pictured on our last day all Leo Pap’s prison cell.

working on the light fixtures in Leo and Stan’s prison cell.

A fun video of how the set dressers moved the VERY HEAVY bunk bed from one part of the prison to the set.

The electricity went out so set dressing by candlelight (cellphone flashlights) that looked like a Northern European painting.

All the set dressing gathered together in another prison cell.

We would eat breakfast every morning in the prison cafeteria.

my usual prison breakfast was an oatmeal, but one morning I decided I needed a grilled cheese sandwich for breakfast.

Testing to make sure the cafeteria tables were strong enough for people to stand on.

There was almost a 1/2 day spent just moving around all the very heavy equipment in the kitchen to accommodate the needs of the shots and scenes, fit into the space, and make it make sense for a working kitchen

a moment with the special effects team setting up the steam effect for the cooking pots

Dieter everyone’s favorite carpenter working on the mortise prison doors.

hallways of the Prison Infirmary which we purposely took out some old tiles to pepper in some green tiles.

remember when Wordle Mania swept social media feeds everywhere? This was during Peak Wordle, and I couldn’t help seeing this new tile configuration we added as a Wordle box. For the record I’ve never played!

a set dresser’s tool bag as we were putting the infirmary together.

One final little video about TV/Movie making magic/lies (depends on you see it)

KALEIDOSCOPE EPISODE VIOLET: 🔥 BURN IT ALL DOWN🔥! / January 1, 2023 by Charlene Wang de Chen

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.

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.

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!

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.

🔥

Lyte HQ: Rainbows and Enlightenment Search Party Season 5 / January 16, 2022 by Charlene Wang de Chen

Not only was Lyte HQ ambitious in terms of scale and components needed for the narrative, the Lyte HQ set was also very important design and aesthetically wise for the tone of Season 5 of Search Party.

The Lyte HQ set had to embody the themes of enlightenment, millennial wellness influencer culture, cults, grandiose claims in tech startup culture, and the aesthetic of wellness in the 21st century explored this season.

Our small little 30-min comedy show had a few builds going on at the same time:

Portia’s Apartment Season 5 Redecoration
Portia’s Bedroom + Bathroom add ons
Tunnel’s Elevator to the Center of the Earth

While those three builds listed above were fairly ambitious for the scale of Search Party (a low-budget comedy!), nothing was as ambitious as Lyte HQ.

Here’s a little walkthrough of how the ideas, themes, mood of a set go from concept to actual physical space actors are running around in and which you see on screen:

CONCEPT AND DESIGN PROCESS OF LYTE HQ

We started with this mood board for the season that the show-runners Charles and SV shared with department heads.

HAHAHAHAA I actually printed out the Charles and SV Showrunner Pinterest mood board to hang on my office wall so I could look at it which is totally not the point of Pinterest and the scale of printing out a screenshot of a Pinterest board is hilarious. Post it note that Assistant Decorator Katie sweetly left for me in my office for scale.

And then Maggie takes all that mood board from the showrunners, what she knows needs to happen in these sets from the scripts, and designs the actual sets along with some of her own reference images to further flesh out the ideas.

Then I, as the Set Decorator, take Maggie’s designs and figure out how to find the furniture, decoration, hardware, and elements to bring the ideas to life from items in the real world.

For instance I found a matching set of these vintage Italian chairs at a salvage store in New Jersey and thought the curvilinear lines had the right vibe for our themes and the set and would be cool chairs for the disciples.

especially if we painted each of them the color corresponding to each disciple….

the scenic painting department did an amazing job. Love the way this turned out.

LYTE HQ UNDER CONSTRUCTION

And the Art Director Katie Fleming figures out how we are actually going to build out these ideas architecturally and construction wise:

The large collection of Lyte HQ construction plans collected in my office

See what I mean about construction site? Our great set dressing team hanging lights

Yuko the super talented scenic painter who headed up all of the beautiful paint work in these set.

Zach, a set dresser and I trying out placement ideas

Bo our Leadman is also a graphic designer and a careful and meticulous artisan and here he is putting a very specific Bo touch onto the set: hand gluing each sequins to create the ombre effect sequins fade out. The video Maggie took of Bo is on her instagram:

Working on a set like this is like working at a construction site and all the attendant loud noises and hubbub.

The place I went every time I needed to just recenter and go somewhere quiet and hide a little bit was the meditation room (handy to have one on set!). That was my happy place on the stage.

MEDITATION ROOM

I would sit in this hidden corner and this would be my view. Also I’m SO pleased with how this carpet turned out.

We couldn’t find wall-to-wall carpeting with the right outer space astral look I was imagining for this room, but Assistant Set Decorator Katie Lobel did find these rugs and I thought we could just seam them together to cover the space and the set dressers did a great job making that happen.

You only really see this room on screen when it is a hostage room. Originally there was a lot more scripted in here.

DISCIPLES BUNK BEDS

These six murphy beds for the disciples were practical and Katie Lobel did an excellent job finding great sheet sets and bedding to correspond to each disciple’s rainbow light color.

ALL THOSE CUSHIONS!

Since Dory became an “enlightened” guru cult leader, she’s meditating all the time we felt we needed meditation cushions and cushions in general all around Lyte

Maggie the Production Designer lounging amidst the cushions on set

What it looks like to buy all these cushions actually:

Katie our Assistant Decorator who found all these cushions in our perfect color palette sent me this hilarious photo of her loading up the cushions in our car after purchase for our set.

Product Placement Hall of Fame

This fabulous and the worlds most ergonomically comfortable desk chair from Fully.

Bo the Leadman and I would also take turns using this desk to actually work from.

Since this was intended to be an *~InFluEnCeR House we thought it would make sense for a bunch of groovy wellness products to be on the shelves for the disciple characters to ostensibly be making tiktoks and IG posts about (in addition to Enlightenment)…

Many thanks to the many different beautiful small companies who partnered with us to product place into our set so many precious items we could never afford on our own.

Also I’ve learned that Maggie is soooooooo good at reaching out to product placement and we had the extreme privilege to have Associate Producer Charlotte Gilbert help us out for a few weeks who is an absolute product placement GODDESS.

PICTURED IN THIS STILL: Three Gems tea sets, Glacce Crystal water bottles, Herbivore skin care products, and Vitruvi oil diffusers.

In this photo: Glacce Crystal water bottles, Herbivore skin care products, and Vitruvi oil diffusers, Seedlip spirits, and Lateral Objects cups, and Cusineart tea kettle and mini fridge.

LYTE LAB

Well if all of that in Lyte HQ was not enough we also had to do a whole scientific lab doing “cutting edge” research, animal cages, and a very special medicine cabinet.

another shout out to Fully for another product placement chair for Dr. Benny’s office desk

THAT MEDICINE CABINET

This was the before, when I had to send dimensions to our graphics and scenics teams. And like most of my “on-the-job” selfies, it incidentally also captures myself in a reflection while taking a measurement photo.

In order to have that beautiful 5.2 degrees C graphic that the wonderful Loren Kane made

I had to take the measurements and send them over…

I find this measurement selfie extra funny because it is like an accidental self-portrait on the job, I’ve decided it is actually the most appropriate work profile photo.

Loren also made little labels FOR EACH OF THOSE VIALS!

That’s it. It was a lot of work but when it all finally came together, we felt the way the characters do here seeing Lyte HQ for the first time.

Search Party Season 5 was a wild ride but it was also a ton of fun. Loved the way the series ended and will miss its particular flavor of absurd funny biting satire.

Click here see more set photos from all of Search Party Season 5.

Portia's Season 5 Bedroom and Bathroom on Search Party / January 14, 2022 by Charlene Wang de Chen

Even though every season Portia’s apartment gets a redesign on Search Party, we don’t actually see her bedroom every season and we’ve only seen a glimpse of the bathroom once.

But this season we were doing both a bedroom AND a bathroom! Bed, Bath, and Beyond!

For the bedroom, Maggie Ruder the Production Designer, wanted to keep the look close what we did for the rest of her apartment but with a different color palette and from the same reference books we were consulting for the rest of Portia’s apartment found this photo:

So we basically copied it as best we could with the budget we were working with.

Maggie giving directions of what was happening on that opposite wall which we NEVER see. I must note this was before we fixed the hem of the sheers.

For the bathroom Maggie said she wanted to do a wallpaper and…you know me I LOVE WALLPAPER.

…the one hitch was the producers wanted us to find a wallpaper design where the company/designer would sign off clearance on the design (a first for me) which made the search slightly more challenging.

But we did find something I loved that met the necessary criteria.

Here’s Maggie’s design file for the bathroom

Ok not Dory’s finest moment but this shot lets you see our great bathtub hardware, and the hallway you don’t really see otherwise.

LOVE Portia’s fabulous robe in this bathroom scene

while we are still working on the set I sort of love this photo and it shows off our cute little sink that you never see on screen.

I was taking this photo to show the set dressers something, but I love how the mirror’s shape lines up so nicely with the design of the wallpaper, which you also never see on screen.

Ok you might notice in the photo above that that bar soap looks WAY too new and like it was just taken out of the plastic wrapping.

So in order to age it I brought it over to the nearest bathroom to wash it down and at least soften the hard edges to look a little more used, aged, and lived in.

Well, while I was doing that Katie our Assistant Set Decorator came into the bathroom and stood in the doorway so we could do one of our daily recaps and touching of base on what we still needed to do for our upcoming sets.

It seemed normal enough as a way to use time effectively, but at a certain point I realized how absurd this set up was, and I was like hold on I need to take a photo of this moment.

There it is, me with the soap I’m washing down and Katie with her notebook.

That’s it for Bed, Bath, and Beyond Portia’s Season 5 Apartment on Search Party!

To see more photos of Search Party Season 5 sets, click here for the portfolio.

Finding Those Restraint Bars for Tunnel's Elevator / January 9, 2022 by Charlene Wang de Chen

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!”

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:

quickly tell you they don’t have X or don’t do Y and hang up.
get tickled with the crazy goose hunt you are on and get intrigued.
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?

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.”

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

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 / January 8, 2022 by Charlene Wang de Chen

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

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!