Siren Season 1 + 2 sets cont.
On this page I want to highlight some of the more interesting design and build requests from my first two seasons of Siren . From ship builds, submarines to weapons and mermaid language, we Art depts were given lots of interesting challenges..
The Pilot house and mess were built on a steel frame with an FX air bag system . Water was sprayed as the Pilot house rocked by 5 ft either way … It completely felt real, really a successful build for Baron Shaver and crew and our FX team under David Allison .. We also built separate fish holds with wild walls to shoot captured Mermaids ….
One of the typical design issues in film is creating visual space and shooting room in places that don’t often have that. One of these instances was a scripted need to have fight scenes and running space in the sub hull of a Fishing boat. In reality it just does not exist, so with the help of FX Master David Alinson and crew and Baron Shaver Construction and crew, we designed and constructed a 49 ton Fishing Boat Sub Hull gimbal set, and a 19 ton Pilot house and crew mess in a separate special stage. Josh Plaw’s Set Dec crews and Cam Boon’s amazing paint team finished it all up. It even had water troughs and a rat …
Some other water related pieces were the boat hull we had to submerge in the 48’ across 1,100,000 + Litre water tank .. Again Baron had his folk fabricate the hull to my specs and it worked great in the tank. It allowed our actors to swim along a fishing vessel hull without the inherent dangers and cold.
Below is a oil drilling ship platform model I designed for Props . It turned out very well ..
We needed to build a set for a scene on the oil drill platform ship where the massive tower collapses. It was a very tight shooting space but it ended up looking fine
One the more interesting, and rather rare requests, was to develop a Mer hieroglyphic language. I had some initial ideas of the look and shapes, but Joanna Dunn Art Director came up with a series of compound and convex curves coupled with straight and wavy lines and circles, that truly set the tone. Michelle Pan (art coordinator) took it from there and developed a working icon based language to etch on the walls of the caves I designed.
