Uncategorized

Aurora, from the leaf team, here. I never got around to talking about our process for creating the leaf path, so here goes. By design, the leaves needed to cover a a large swath of ground in an attractive way, lead visitors through the habitat, and allow young visitors an opportunity for safe interaction. To achieve these ends, the leaves took two different forms: a ground cloth fixed in place and individual loose leaves. Both of these elements needed to glow under black light.

My teammate and I knew from the beginning that time, durability, and cost of materials would be major constraints. As much as we would have liked to use real leaves for the loose leaves, we knew they weren’t practical. Laser cutting our own leaves from heavy card stock proved to be an advantageous solution. We could create shapes that mimicked those of the real leaves on site; they would move and rustle similarly to real leaves, and they would eventually biodegrade if they manages to escape our installation.

After much thought and testing, we settled on a layered approach to creating the ground cloth. The under layer, a plastic construction fencing, would provide stability and durability without retaining or trapping water. The upper layer, a perforated blue camouflage cloth, would give dimension when expanded and glow under the black light. I came up with the idea of attaching to two layers to each other with a tagging gun, the kind used to affix price tags to clothing.

The area underneath the nest structure proved to be its own unique challenge. Our original idea had been to fill that entire space with loose leaves ankle deep, but we could afford neither the time nor the materials to create so many leaves. The groundcloth from outside the nest, wasn’t quite right either; it just wasn’t strong or flat enough to to be a good walking surface in such a high traffic area. What, I thought, if we turned it upside down? That would solve the durability problem, but didn’t look all that great. We changed out the construction fencing for a garden fencing with a more screen like appearance. That did the trick.

Coming into this experience, I didn’t really know what to expect or what I wanted to do for the Creek Monster Habitat. As a stage manager, I don’t usually get to be super involved in the design and fabrication processes. I wanted to get the opportunity to break out of my shell.

After being given the task of creating a ground cloth that formed a leafy path, we didn’t know where to start. We explored many different ideas including weaving garlands, painting fabric, and painting actual leaves. Eventually, it was suggested that we experiment with construction fencing that we had as well as a camo hunting blind that had been purchased. Thus, our first prototype was born.

Once we created our first prototype, we decided this was how we wanted to proceed with making the ground cloth. We ordered more construction fencing and camo netting and began planning the assembly of our ground cloth. My teammate, Aurora, managed to create a map to determine the necessary sizes and shapes of ground cloth pieces based on the ground plan.

We began assembling the pieces by cutting construction fencing to the proper lengths and zip tying chunks together to fit our needs. Afterwards, we attached the camo netting using a tagging gun and rolled each of our six pieces to transport to the site.

We were also given the task of creating loose leaves to encourage audience interaction. We figured the best way to do this was to use a laser cutter to cut the leaf shapes. We tested with and researched a variety of materials from which to cut the leaves. We ended up choosing to cut the leaves out of a heavy paper. To increase UV visibility, we decided to splatter the leaves with UV reactive paint.

We had to be strategic about installation, laying the center piece after the nest was halfway assembled to hold the edges of the piece down and attaching the remainder of the piece with landscaping pins. After the nest was fully assembled, we began laying the remainder of the groundcloth pieces and securing them with landscaping pins.

After opening, we learned how destructive over 60,000 people can be. Throughout the process, the ground cloth was pulled up and ripped, and we had to make repairs by repinning spots to fill the gaps.

Overall, this project helped me learn to be a better collaborator by better communication, how to manage time, and how to plan a project from design to fabrication,.

When this course first began, not many of us knew what to expect.  I mean, a course focusing on creating a Creek Monster Habitat… what does that even mean?!  However as the weeks passed, the amazing guest artists came and went, and all the groups had to collaborate not only within themselves, but with other groups, the designers, and our fearless leader, Karen Maness – we all learned exactly what creating a Creek Monster Habitat entailed, and just how much work and trouble shooting was ahead…

Throughout this past semester, as a member of the Eye Team, I got to learn firsthand how critical prototypes are to either prove or disprove a concept before mass production on a fabrication project – and wow, by the end of the semester we had sure worked through some vastly different prototypes. I also learned how difficult making several blinking monster-eye sets (with 8 blinking eyes each) is to create via animatronics in a team where… no one really had substantial animatronics experience. Needless to say, despite a lot of great information and encouragement from our awesome Meow Wolf guest artist, Parker Jennings, we were ultimately so happy to scrap the idea of eye-blinking animatronics in favor of a more simple light & paint based eye-blinking tactic, but of course, that was only the beginning of the real work…

With only a few weeks to go before the show opened, and our mass production plan only now falling into place, we were lucky enough to have the skilled Emma Craig to lead us through the next few weeks of quick production.  This entailed pulling all the vacuform eyes, cutting their luan mounts, painting the eyes and boxes, sealing the boxes, disguising the eye-edges to blend in with the nest skin, and collaborating with the lighting team to figure out blinking logistics.  

But before we knew it, it was the day of installation and was amazing to be apart of this wacky and fun project!