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:

Creating a Weed Empire for Awkwafina is Nora from Queens

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.

yes, 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.

ok so now we understand what it takes.

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.

do you see this handcraft?!

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!

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.

Awkwafina is Nora from Queens Season 3 Episode 2: BEHIND THE SCENES OF THE SETS

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.

Awkwafina is Nora from Queens Season 3 Premiere!

Yesterday was the Season 3 Premiere of Awkwafina is Nora from Queens and I’m so excited to share a little of the behind-the-scenes from the sets from yesterday’s episode.

Such a fun project and the season premiere sets the tone of the wacky directions this season takes and lets us know how each character is doing a year after the last season ends.

After a seasonal montage of Nora taking the trash out, she is abducted into an Alien Spaceship Hallway.

The wonderful costume designer Michelle Li holding a sample of the pink carpet we used at the Alien Spaceship Hallway and how it perfectly matched her hair.

Found this really funny post-it on my desk from one day when we were discussing what we needed for behind mystery door #2

The Spaceship Italian Restaurant where Nora and Toe have dinner

The room was actually a blank basement alcove that looked like this:

So we assembled a bunch of reference images of classic old school Italian-American red sauce joints for inspiration of how we could transform this empty grey space into the typical Italian spot everywhere in America where you automatically start hearing “when the moon hits the sky…” in your head upon seeing it.

this was a photo taken for dropping off graphics custody but it is a great glimpse of our wall of italian restaurant inspo photos and my favorite reference from The Lady and the Tramp.

when the crew came in for filming the executive producer Sean Fogel started playing “That’s Amore” on his phone! hahah mission accomplished!

When we first check in with Grandma, she’s at a funeral for a friend.

I actually based this set research on photos of my own beloved grandma’s funeral but we also did some local research.

Kiran and I went to Queens and Manhattan Chinatowns visiting Chinese funeral homes and looking for a Chinese florist specializing in Chinese funeral flowers.

If you can read Chinese, the floral arrangement to the left of the photo actually was sent directly (fictionally) my husband and me in our Chinese names. hah.

So while most of the funerals I’ve been to in my life so far are Chinese ones so the floral style is something I’m familiar with, I’ve actually never attended a Chinese Buddhist funeral before and the script mentioned grandma was interacting with incense.

We did our research and tried our best to collect the right things, but on the day of the shoot the actress who plays Grandma (Lori Tan Chin) and her stand-in Patricia called me over and told me what things they think should be added to the altar to be perfectly authentic.

I totally appreciated that and went out to get the bowl of rice they instructed me to get and at that moment was marveling at what a special experience it was to work on a cast and crew filled with Asian Americans in front and behind the camera and how much it adds to the production on so many layers.

the fun animated version of this set dressing moment drawn by Casi Moss:

via GIPHY

with Patricia, Lori’s stand in at the wrap party (I look very sweaty as there was dancing)

Wally and his workplace bullies

Awkwafina, who directed this episode, had very specific ideas of how she wanted Wally’s two workplace bullies cubicles to look like. She told me “joyful geekdom mancave” with “lots of figurines like Marvel.”

It is very difficult to get copyright clearance for Marvel branded figurines, so Kevin, our art department coordinator and product placement genius and I put our thinking caps on and brainstormed how we could get lots of figurines that communicated “joyful geekdom mancave”that we could get cleared.

Kevin came up with the brilliant idea of Kaiju Big Battel who gave us all the great posters hanging in the cubicles, Kiran and I visited Toy Tokyo the legendary store in the East Village of NYC and they helped me narrow down items we could get cleared, and lastly I thought of Eric Nakamura and Giant Robot.

Giant Robot is a legend in Asian American culture starting out as a bi-monthly magazine of Asian and Asian American culture started by Eric in 1994. The Giant Robot store in CA opened in 2000 and I knew they made their own robot figurines and thought it would be a great fit for the show and the characters.

Luckily Eric agreed and was happy to be part of a show that celebrates Asian American culture like Nora from Queens and sent over some of his iconic robot figurines and gave us permission to show them which you can catch on screen in the set.

That wraps up the season premiere for this week. Stay tuned as the season progresses and I’ll keep on sharing some behind-the-scenes stories and photos of what it took to decorate Season 3 of Awkwafina is Nora from Queens.

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

KALEIDOSCOPE EPISODE GREEN: Spending a Winter at an Abandoned Prison Can Wreck You

For Episode Green of Netflix’s newest heist show Kaleidoscope, we were recreating over eight distinct sets in prison:

1. a visitation and waiting room (over two eras)

2. a prison cafeteria

3. a large working prison kitchen

4. a prison infirmary (that was itself made up of seven different sub sets: treatment room, doctor’s office, nurses’ station, record room, specialty treatment room, pharmacy, and hallways)

5. a security check entrance and guards station

6. a prison auto shop

7. a prison garden and outdoor workout area

8. and a prison cell plus guard booth. 

For my first time working on decorating a prison set that was a lot of prison.

Working as a set decorator means that we all have to eventually work on a prison set.

To be honest I’ve been unusually lucky in my eight years as a set decorator, that this was the first prison set I was assigned. It was my turn, my time had come. 

There are spaces where heightened moments of human life play out regularly: ER rooms, hospitals, police stations, jails, and prisons.

It is where people are often stretched to their extremes, where relationships are pushed to make or break moments, where consequences of previous actions are laid bare, and where actual life or death decisions are made. 

If one is lucky, a normal life of going to work, doing your laundry, paying your cellphone bills, making dinner, and watching something on streaming before going to sleep does not usually visit these sites of extreme human drama that often.

some welcoming gates that say “you made it to work.”

Recreating the spaces where heightened and dramatic reality play out for characters in movies and TV, however, is the job as a set decorator.

That means in turn that ER rooms, hospitals, police stations, jails, prisons are sets my colleagues and I are regularly trying our best to replicate with anthropological accuracy and some artistry.

Most people will intersect with a hospital room or even an ER room in their lifetime because sickness and death are just a fact of life. Prisons don’t necessarily need to be a reality for anyone. 

And yet, in our fun little industry of make believe where we can create fantastical scenes where elves live in cozy homes or where characters break into song and everyone around them joins in to dance in the supermarket, we are constantly recreating the grim and violent reality of prisons.

There are award winning movie classics like Shawshank Redemption or popular streaming hits like Orange is the New Black and Escape from Dannemora.

On one hand, it makes sense as America is the most carceral state in the world so any representations of American life on screen would by extension naturally include prisons. On the other hand, why are we constantly recreating prisons for entertainment? 

There is nothing entertaining about America’s prison system, sadly.

It is so unentertaining that most of the time we like to keep the deadening reality of prison hidden away. Prisons are whole ecosystems tucked away from daily life—purposely built away from society.  And similarly most of us who have that privilege to not regularly interact with the carceral system, have the luxury of pushing prison out of our conscious personal life.

Yet we also happily visit prison regularly on the television and movie screens we turn to for thrills and inspiration and drama and comfort.

For a bunch of people (mostly pretty privileged) who moved to NYC for a creative career that paid well enough that we can spend lunch chatting about cute brunches, live concerts, and international travel, directing a lot of attention towards recreating prison is usually a non-threatening work exercise that has almost no overlap with our personal lives.

And yet two months working on these prison sets affected many of my coworkers and me.

In order to come up with plans, move furniture around, change paint colors and build new walls and doors and attend to the details of creating the eight sets in prison for the episode, key members of the art department initially visited the abandoned Arthur Kill Prison facility in Staten Island, the site for all our sets, multiple times.

Afterwards, together with a group of set dressers, I basically decamped to this abandoned prison and set up shop there from January to early March, everyday 10 hours a day. 

We all walked the long cavernous halls of the abandoned prison that still have a red line down the center of the floor, feeling the cramped feeling of low ceilings, scant windows, and views of endless coils of barbed wire layered upon itself.

We can feel the walls dripping with sorrow and heaviness. Even while empty you could feel the sadness, violence, and despair vibrating off the walls. 

We don’t need to ask “If these walls could talk.” They speak to us in the language that we are trained and professionally work to communicate in: their design, decoration, and built intention.

The stenciled sign of “Limit Calls to 15 min” sprayed above the 5 pay phones affixed to the brick wall reminds us how little connection to the outside world is afforded people who find themselves on this side of the wall.

The sign in Spanish elucidates the statistic that 23% of incarcerated population is Latinx or at least Spanish speaking.

A single stray Hans Wegner style wishbone chair sitting lonely in the hallway stands out like a lost child who inadvertently stumbled onto the wrong side of the tracks.

Every time I pass it I want to ask, what’s a nice chair like you doing in a place like this? A place where stacks of interchangeable plastic chairs and old soulless office task chairs look more at home.

That empty space ricocheting with the collected energy of people imprisoned seeped into the walls was impacting each and every person who walked in there.

Coworkers and I share the anxiety, depression, and scattered effect on the mind working daily in a prison has on us. We talked about how eerie, odd, and dark and heavy it was to devote so much energy on recreating the details of human imprisonment. 

One colleague who was just visiting for a day to help us hook up all the surveillance monitors talked about how spooked he was by the gloom of the site just sitting in the guard’s booth for a few hours.

Colleagues who never have to visit the site of the abandoned prison but are tasked with drawing up construction plans remark on how surreal it is to draw out plans for prison cells on computers even from the comfort of their home offices. 

The challenge was to make each prison set accurate and authentic while also finding a way to stylize the sets to be all shades of green.

One of the conceptual hooks of working on Kaleidoscope, is that each episode is its own color and each episode can be watched in any order. They are categorized by color not chronological order and prison was green. 

The thing about designing and decorating a fake prison for entertainment is: reality is grim, recreating this from reality even grimmer, and stylizing it seems delusional.

So the only way to survive it seemed to be personalizing prison and showing the humanity in the face of this scourge.  This made me determined to get to the personalized and human level of prison research

I talk a lot more about the process of researching and putting together the green sets for prison in this post here.

You could say my emotional state completely domineered by recreating prison is partially my fault for really plunging into the research feet first, and on top of that seeking out all sorts of supplementary engagements with prison outside of work. 

I attended a documentary screening made with a drone about the floating boat fortress prison in The Bronx, watched an opera a colleague designed which is an update on Fidelio (Beethoven’s opera about prison) and commentary on contemporary mass incarceration, read Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s “Is Prison Necessary?” and all of a sudden noticed anything and everything related to prison and America’s mass incarceration problem and ingested it. 

It led me to some really dark corners of the internet. For instance how seemingly proud (?!!?) the official US Bureau of Prisons seems to be about a long historical legacy of using prison labor to manufacture products. I guess I really thought that as a society we might be ashamed of that? 

When I really started to spiral though was when I started to search for the specialized door hardware and locks needed to create authentic prison doors and locks.

I came across many companies that profit handedly at selling specialized locks to prison companies to the tune of around $2,000 a door handle. One company in particular will haunt me for the rest of my life. 

Yes their slogan is “to last a life sentence.” When you call the company to inquire about purchasing items the recorded phone tree message is a cheery woman saying “Built to Last A Life Sentence!” as if she was wishing you a Merry Christmas.

I haven’t stopped talking about this harrowing company slogan to anyone who will listen ever since.

It wrecked me that in pursuit of making our sets as authentic as possible, we were paying so much more money to enrich the literal prison industrial complex and all the specialized companies that create furniture and supplies specifically to serve prisons.

I felt determined that if we were going to spend a quarter million dollars recreating the violence of prison for entertainment and enriching the companies that blithely profit from mass incarceration we had to find a way to support organizations doing good work to end mass incarceration and support people who got out of prison.

A prison industrial complex carbon offsetting credits of sorts.

If it affected us so much to be in an empty prison with the luxury of going home each night, I can only imagine how much more it must affect each person imprisoned there, who works there, and the violent way it chips away at your basic connection to humanity. 

Working together with our unparalleled coordinator Jackie, we approached Netflix accounting to see if we could donate the proceeds of our sale of remaining furniture and set dressing decoration at the end of the show to two organizations that seemed to be doing really positive work:

• Hour Children is a local organization in NYC I’m pretty familiar with that works with families affected by incarceration, particularly children who have an incarcerated parent. I’ve visited the offices and met the people running the programs and touched with their sincere commitment. 

• Rehabilitation Through the Arts (RTA) which “helps people in prison develop critical life skills through the arts, modeling an approach to the justice system based on human dignity rather than punishment.”

Together we were able to donate $25,000 from our set sales and Netflix these two organizations.

For all the money we spent further enriching the companies profiting off incarceration, and the deep emotional toll it took on me personally (I was pretty depressed for three months afterwards), at least we were able to support these two organizations doing healing and positive work in some way. 

I thought that mass incarceration was one of America’s biggest problems for a while, but after the two months in that abandoned prison in Staten Island, and all the research I did about the details of prison radicalized me into a prison abolitionist.

Probably not the intended outcome for someone whose job it was, among other things, to find lots of green prison cafeteria trays.

Kaleidoscope EPISODE GREEN: CREATING A GREEN COLORED WORLD IN Prison

For the newest Netflix heist show, Kaleidoscope, that just dropped on Jan 1, the concept is that each episode is a different color—and we all tried to bring that color theme to the screen.

I’m going to go into the Green Episode and share about the research and method of recreating a green hued prison.

One of the first things I did was research movies and other TV shows that have a very green palette and created a mood board of green sets and images for myself.

Of course the first thing I thought about was Alfonso Cuarón’s movies A Little Princess and Great Expectations where the sets and costumes are exclusively shades of green. They are like green fantasias!

a quote from a New York Times article interviewing Alfonso Cuaron in 1996.

Then of course I thought of the movie I ADORED probably my favorite movie in 2021, The Green Knight, which is also a very green movie and even includes a monologue of Alicia Vikander’s character discussing what the color green means.

Lupin, another Neflix heist show, also has a whole episode in prison that is also very green. And lastly who can forget The Wizard of Oz and the emerald city?

So after assembling that little green mood board for myself I started to dig into the particulars of prison because we were doing eight different sets within prison:

1. prison auto shop

2. prison cafeteria

3. large working prison kitchen

4. prison infirmary (that was itself made up of seven different sub sets: treatment room, doctor’s office, nurses’ station, record room, specialty treatment room, pharmacy, and hallways)

5. security check entrance and guards station

6. visitation and waiting room (over two eras)

7. prison garden and outdoor workout area

8. prison cell plus guard booth

THAT’S A LOT OF PRISON AND A LOT OF GREEN FURNITURE AND SET DRESSING!

doing some research in front of part of my green sets mood board at our production office. I ordered the “definitive book” about Federal Prisons to get lists of what was allowed and what wasn’t and just to learn more authentic details about what life in federal prison was like. 

yes, my photo is oddly reminiscent of this iconic moment from everyone fav show: HBO’s Succession.

To me the biggest challenges were understanding what made a prison auto shop or a working prison kitchen distinct and different than any other auto shop or institutional kitchen/cafeteria.

 I listened to podcasts about cooking in kitchens and even reached out to the authors and people I learned worked in prison kitchens to see if they would share some details of working in the kitchens. Did extensive google image searching to find images of prison kitchens and how they stored their utensils and knives. I searched for prison auto shops and even called one up in Nevada who agreed to a quick informational interview so I could understand more about what tools were allowed and how they are stored. 

I’m going to highlight putting together the auto shop and kitchen below since I think they turned out the most green on screen (well the infirmary and waiting room also looked very green on screen so I’ll throw in some photos of that).

Plus showcase some photos of some sets you don’t really see much of on screen below.

emerald city guard crying for all the stuff we didn’t see on screen.

PRISON AUTO SHOP

Leo Pap in the prison auto shop

One of the major sets for Kaleidoscope over multiple episodes is Leo Pap’s Auto Shop which the set decorator Jessica and assistant set decorator Lindsay did a phenomenal job creating (here’s a fun video of that process).

For the Prison Auto Shop, I was doing a smaller version of their epic set and making it authentic to the particulars of a prison auto shop (all the tools are supplies are locked up) and instead of red making it green.

Lindsay gave me a hot tip of an auction house she went to, to get a lot of things for her set and I lucked out that they were doing a relevant auction right when I was starting the prison auto shop.

So one VERY COLD Saturday in January I drove 3.5 hours north of New York City, with Tony my husband along for the adventure, and attended my first live auction!

the auctioneer spoke out of that loud speaker and sounded just like a cartoon of an auctioneer!

the auction was outdoors 🥶 but this is where we stood in the sunlight as I kept on outbidding all the dudes there 😇with my little auction paddle.

This is how cold it was: frozen crystals on Tony’s eyebrows.

Stuffed my work minivan full of auto repair tools and items from the auction.

But it still wasn’t enough stuff to fill the empty room we were making into a prison auto shop

Set Decorator Jessica Petruccelli and Leadman Craig Capitelli at one of the initial scouts of the room

So I started calling around and responding to people who seemed like they had a lot of used auto related supplies on Craigslist, Facebook Marketplace, eBay, and other auctions.

Below is a checklist I made to make sure all our payments were being made.

Kevin, Jimmy, and Ben were guys in Long Island, New Jersey, and Connecticut that I literally met off the internet I was regularly texting cause they were sending me photos of stuff they had in their garages they were willing to let us buy or rent.

One local municipal auction in CT I called up connected me to Ben who turned out to be one of our best partner vendors cause he hooked us up with a whole used car lift amongst many other things for very little money and was the nicest and most reliably helpful guy.

the set filling up with green prison auto shop things including the car lift!

Finding a car lift that will fit in our location at a good price is one thing, but transporting it and getting it to work was a whole other thing. So when the set dressers successfully did it, it was a big deal!

This photo below is when I followed Kevin to a second location which was a pretty large junk yard and I was like 🤔 should I be more concerned about following random guys to second locations that are a remote junkyard?

So after all that collecting of items and trying to find as many green ones as possible, Jess and I put together a board of the ones we liked the best to see how it was working together.

This gives you an idea of the quantity of green related auto repair shop items I was collecting around the tri-state area with Kiran one of our wonderful PA’s in the background.

Unfortunately we never see a car raised on the lift on screen. 😭 Nor do we see like 75% of all the other set dressing or walls. 😭😭😭

Here are some before and afters:

BEFORE

AFTER

midway point when we are still working out what should go where

close to what you see on screen

BEFORE

AFTER

you recognize any items from the auction???

one wall you did not see on screen:

KITCHEN

What my eBay homepage looked like when I was searching for used green cafeteria trays for the prison cafeteria.

Love how all the greens came together in this little corner of the prison kitchen leading to the cafeteria (which you never see on screen).

props to our favorite Canal Rubber for helping me find a large quantity of green industrial rubber flooring.

From the prison research I learned some prison kitchen details were:

• having all the utensils and knives carefully laid out and hung with a painted silohuette with a strict sign out sheet so that each and every item was accounted for at the end of each shift.

• each knife is padlocked to the workstation so that no knife is ever rogue in the kitchen.

the process of creating our utensil and knife lockup with a delighted Jess in the last photo.

you see the lock-up in the background of this shot.

I feel like you do get some nice hits of green in these two shots of the prison kitchen on screen:

WAITING ROOM

On screen you just see this little corner of the waiting room, when in fact we had also created three other zones you never see in the episode:

a kids play area

A visitor’s vending machine waiting area + prisoner entrance complete with prison grade locks and handles on the double doors by the vending machine.

guard booth with a vintage herman miller GREEN leather office chair and another visitors waiting area as you can see in the background.

INFIRMARY

I felt this shot was a great hit of our gradients of green in the infirmary

we actually spend a lot of time in the infirmary and you really do see a lot of our green work but can you believe we also dressed a bunch of rooms with some great green furniture you never see?

in this shot we get a blurry background glimpse of the nurse’s station on the left.

While it was still a work in progress, we are about 80% done in this photo, but you get to see the cute mint green desk and green desk chairs we used in the part of the nurse’s station you don’t see on screen.

We also did a whole doctor’s office that never made it on screen and sadly I can’t find any photos of but it had a bunch of great green furniture pieces in it.

Here is another shot of the doctor that while super simple, I did enjoy for its feeling of green.

in this shot you see a hint of a pharmacy window

This is when we were half-way done with the pharmacy set behind that window..

There was a time when Leo Pap runs down this hall and we see inside each of the rooms along the hallway behind the actress below.

here is one of those rooms with its symphony of green filing cabinets.

PRISON CELL

There will be a lot more photos of the prison cell in my next post, but in this photo you can BARELY see in the background there is a guard’s booth.

the booth was empty so we filled it with some green

I enjoyed the collection of vintage green office chairs on display here.

Some shots were definitely more green than others but mostly I smiled a little smile to myself with the overall green feeling we were able to imbue the episode with.

Starting Awkwafina is Nora from Queens Season 3

So excited to start on Awkwafina is Nora from Queens Season 3 as the set decorator!

Fun fact: Season 3 of Awkwafina is Nora from Queens and Season 4 of Succession filmed in the same studio in NYC and so the Lin Family Home was two floors above the Roy Family Home in Queens, NYC in the summer and fall of 2022.