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:

prison auto shop
prison cafeteria
large working prison kitchen
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)
security check entrance and guards station
visitation and waiting room (over two eras)
prison garden and outdoor workout area
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

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

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 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

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.