Memeing on a Strategy Crime Board for Awkwafina is Nora from Queens

this is from the dailies, sadly this scene was not in the final cut of the series finale!

From the beginning we knew from the scripts we would get a chance to make a fun crime board in the finale of the Season 3 of Awkwafina is Nora from Queens. 

…but then last night watching the finale together with the cast and crew, I realized “THE CRIME BOARD WAS CUT!!!!!!!” 😭

Since this is the one blog post I had already prepared for the finale episode (I have a few more brewing, stay tuned!) I’m just going to publish it anyways.

This was the first version of the script (“pre-production draft”)

last version of the script (green revisions). hmmm maybe we had a clue with Nora’s lines denigrating the whole idea of a board that this scene might get cut…

Honestly the finale was great even with this scene cut and eitherway I’m going to walk you through all the FUN WE HAD making it.

When we started the show I asked Kiran what type of small personal project as a venue for his own jokes (Kiran’s a standup comedian and comedy writer!) he would like this season. I gave him a couple of options and he chose this crime board, so it was something we chatted about all season long. 

Of course when one thinks of crime boards there are a few key enduring images such as the detectives trying to figure out each ring in The Wire, the DEA in Breaking Bad, or Carrie Matheson (Claire Danes) on Homeland.

One persistent pop culture image of a crime board stands out, however, because it is so heavily memed, the one from Always Sunny in Philadelphia. 

an obvious reference image for us

Hilariously I found an academic paper intellectualizing the depiction of crime boards on screen:

The crime board is, in this sense, what Ronald Thomas has called a ‘device of truth’, a representational technology that lends authority to a mode of detection long established in crime fiction. This is a mode in which ‘unique interpretive powers’ render crimes visible ‘only to the eyes of the detective’, powers that remain inseparable from the development of forensic technology.[4] The typical crime board not only gathers together and arranges facts yielded by such technologies, it is also a technology of truth in itself, serving a meta-investigative function by visually rendering a theory of causality, association, and guilt.

Ok…

Anyways, when we chatted with episode 307 director Jordan Kim about his vision for this board he also referred to the Always Sunny in Philadelphia meme, so we knew we were on the right track with our references. 

We took the premise of the board: an engagement plan for Wally to propose to Brenda at the Queens Museum to Mariah Carey and Whitney Houston music and really fleshed out each element as far as we could go with visual artifacts:

• Maps of NYC

• Maps of Queens, particularly the area around the Queens Museum

• Floor plans of the Queens Museum

• Photos of the Queens Museum particularly the map room

• Photos of each character including photos that looked like long lens surveillance photos of Brenda (which we found on Getty stock images!!!!), well we asked graphics to add cross hatch graphics to look like detective show photo graphics. 

• Images of each singer

• receipts, purchases, and rental quotes of items Wally would need

• The much needed red string that each of these crime boards seem to have. 

• To-Do lists for each character (loved Kiran’s jokes here)

Kiran made a playlist on Spotify of the songs mentioned in the script plus other songs that made sense in the context of the story and script, we turned it on and worked on putting together the crime board. 

You can listen to it too here, it has, of course Taylor’s Version of “Love Story:”

Once the crime board was done we had to bring it to set and here is the journey the board took with the set dressers from our office to set through Kaufman Astoria studios with a stop-off at the crew breakfast truck hahhaha.

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.

Hot Ones* on the Lin Family Home Set

To celebrate the premiere of Season 3 of Awkwafina is Nora from Queens, I wanted to share a fun and very silly thing the art department made one day at lunch: our own off-brand episode of Hot Ones. (*not really Hot Ones)

Our two Art Department PA’s Kiran Gordon and Will O’Neal II in our tribute off-brand Hot Ones.

One of the main sets we worked on this season was a bodega set. More on that in another post. But as part of that, we were trying to collect as much product as possible to populate a bodega. As we received more and more hot sauces, someone made a throwaway joke that we should tape our own episode of Hot Ones.

…so one day at lunch we did exactly that starring our wonderful Art Department PA’s Kiran Gordon and Will O’Neal II:

Shout out to Kevin Cabello (Art Department Coordinator) who was working as the camera man and Ashley Bradshaw (Assistant Set Decorator) who was working as gaffer + props. hahha we had fun.

KALEIDOSCOPE EPISODE GREEN: Team Prison

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)