I want to recap the week and share what I have learned. First of all, I need to pay more attention to social media. This evening I was offered a job on Facebook. It was sent by “instant messenger”, but I was out drinking beer, chasing women and smoking cigars: or too busy to notice it. People are communicating more and more with social media and I guess I have to get on the bus.
I am old school. I still make phone calls, and if I make plans with you I keep them. I don’t jump to the greatest thing just because I see it on social media.
Currently I am working as a set dresser in the motion picture industry. We have to use our smartphones for a lot of things. Mainly taking pictures. I over take pictures, but I like to have detail for when I need to restore a set or location. Other than that, I stay off my phone. I need time away from technology. When I am not working on a movie set, I am looking for my next job, or working on my computer. I may be doing voice-overs or editing video, but I always find myself checking email and Facebook. I am always connected to the Internet.
When I started in motion pictures I worked in set construction. Being on your phone was verboten, unless it absolutely pertained to the job you were doing. In set construction we got two breaks and lunch per day. That is when you looked at your phone. I left set construction, but I always enjoyed the fact that I was away from the Internet for up to 12 hours a day. I was not able to check the stock marker, social media or even email. I loved the fact that I wasn’t connected to technology for 12 hours.
Now I have to have Facebook messenger up and running. Yes, I was offered a job via messenger. What is next? Twitter? Snapchat? I am afraid to leave my phone in fear that I may miss out on work.
Enough about social media.
I want to talk about what I learned this week. Set Dec. People think we are a bunch of glorified furniture movers, but it is way more complicated that that. You have to know how to dress a set, a scene or part of a set or scene. I don’t think this can’t be taught; it just comes to you.
I have been hypothesizing about this for years, but when you force a person to watch a 16 x 9 box, you cut off a lot of extra sensory information. I believe that your senses take in everything that goes on around you. There is a large amount of information that you take in at any given time. To keep you from overload, the brain filters this information into something you can understand, or only what you need to know, for that moment in time.
When you watch TV or a movie, all you get is what you see on the screen, plus the sound you hear from the speakers. Basically everything in your periphery has been “chopped off”. Therefore, you brain attempts to compensate, by picking apart everything in that 16 x9 box. When there is a continuity error in a movie, your brain sees it and you forget about everything else that is going on within the scene.
A lot of work goes into making the hero product stand out. In a commercial, everything in the scene is meant to make you look at and remember the cereal box. This is a science.
As I started to dress some sets last week, I started to see why things were placed where they were and why certain colors were used. For instance, I was dressing a bookcase with a bunch of books. For starters the bookshelves, were shorter in length on the left than they were in the center and on the right. This is called balance. No matter how I looked at the bookcase, it didn’t balance to me. But, it wasn’t my call, so I have to work with what I had. Next, when I stepped back, I was starting to see books with bright white covers jumping out at me. This will draw attention away from the actor and to the book. So, I put them on lower shelves behind the desk that the camera couldn’t see them.
Later I dressed an office in a hospital. I was told to set up file cabinets and a table against the walls that you see though the door from the camera’s perspective. I stepped back and something was bothering me. On top of the file cabinets was all this negative space that was drawing my eye. I knew I had to break it up. So I added some files and some binders. It filled in that negative space. Now I am not perfect, but the set decorator liked it.
Anyway, even though this office would be in the background, or maybe not be in the shot at all, it had to be dressed properly. If the camera was to look into that office, it would see the negative space, and so would you.
That is part of what set decorating is about. You want to create the set “true” to the screenplay, as well as the art director’s and set decorator’s vision. All of this is planned out. Everything on a set has been put there for a reason.
Now someone will always come back and change your work, but if you dress something properly, at least you give them a good palate from which to work.
Just so you know, you have just wasted your valuable time reading about 950 words of useless information.
