Last night was Alice in Wonderland. Alice awakens in her bedroom and discovers things are a bit different. As she walks from one room to another, she discovers it is going to be difficult. Specifically, she either gets larger, smaller, or both.
This is non-Alien fantasy, so Cayuga should like that.
This episode is a doozy. It really highlights poor decision making and poor time management.
First we have crazy lady. She sets out to do three rooms, and show Alice normal, huge, and tiny. She wants to do something creative and different like nothing that has been seen before. And largely, the judges think she accomplished that. The only problem is that never seen before doesn’t equate to good. And I have a quibble about that, because she used black and white room at the beginning and vibrant colors at the end to signify the transformation, which is just the same thing done by The Wizard of Oz.
So crazy lady’s idiot number 1 is the crazy lady herself, who sets up the concept with her team, then runs off to buy all the props she needs. Except she doesn’t have a list of props, she just starts renting anything and everything she sees that strikes her fancy. She’s got a tree stump, oversized flowers, giant mushrooms, animal casts, a huge birdcage - more shit than I can remember. So much that the stuff filled the stage area before they even built the set. So she had to send a lot back.
Then she goes around changing the concept and changing design ideas and asking to move the set walls around. She’s got 3 days and she’s making major adjustments to work that is done. Her helper was ready to slap her.
Which brings us to idiot number 2, that helper. The next day he is sent off to get more props, because apparently all the crap she got the day before isn’t what she really wants and needs, now she needs some columns and stonework. Well, he rents a bunch of actual granite and stone items. Now the thing is, real stone is heavy, and thus really expensive. So he blows almost $2000 over the alloted $15,000 budget they have to work with. She sees this, and calls him out to the truck to bitch him out.
His response was at least sensible, “Okay, I screwed it up, I suck. Yelling at me now won’t fix it, so how do we go forward?” She had to go assess the budget and ended up returning just about everything she rented on the first day and sweettalked the store manager into refunding store credit, because if she’d overrun the budget she’d have been disqualified.
Then she decorated the set with some wild clock motifs, printed on wallpaper, and applied it all over the rooms and floors. She’s rolling around covered in wallpaper trying to lay black and white clocks on the steps in the first room. The third room has vibrant colored clocks to tie the motif. Intersting if bizarre and confusing.
Finally they’re out of time and film the scene. Her’s was odd to me in that she didn’t have transitions in how Alice changed. Alice awakens normal sized with odd doors on her wall. She opens one and walks through to find herself huge, then slides through a slot in the wall with an eye motif and is in another room but all huge. I didn’t like that, but in retrospect the script didn’t tell her how Alice accomplished the size changes, so it is acceptable that it was the house that was topsy turvy, so Alice stayed the same size, and the world around her was wacky.
But her biggest disaster was her choice of what props she actually used were not properly scaled to convey the impression of making her huge and making her tiny. The room where she’s huge had animal statues that were close to normal sized, disrupting the illusion, and the room where she’s tiny had sculptures and statues that did not emphasize the illusion. There was a life-sized statue of a man at the back of the room, on the same scale as her, while she’s supposed to be tiny and standing next to an oversized birdcage.
And the birdcage was a special element of suck, because she had a small one in the first room and a huge one in the third room, supposedly the same room, but she didn’t have a bird. So she made some dreadful paper cutout with a huge eye on it for the bird. Gaah!
Half-baked disaster.
Meanwhile, the other competitor was overanalyzer. He wants to do all three scales, and comes up with a two room concept to use forced-perspective to show the scale changes as Alice moves around. He makes a tiny bedroom with a sloped floor and walls, leading to the front of the stage and a huge, oversized door. She steps through the door into a hallway, and then slopes back to make her huge at the back of the hall, before turning and going through another tiny door.
He sets out to use his computer and do a lot of mathematical scaling. If he had a week or two, that would definitely be the right approach, to ensure his scale stays consistent in different places and through the transforms, but with 3 days, he is killing himself with the planning and eating up all the time. Finally he discovers mid day 2 he’s going to have to wing things a bit. Because of his time management, however, things are not close to complete and they are scrambling to finish putting together, nevermind finishing touches like making sure all the corners are painted.
He even builds one of the doors. He’s not a builder, but he had hands, so he built the tiny door. With the precision of breaking sheet of balsa wood to make the paneling. The carpenter sighed his ass off over that one. “He made a door, but what wasn’t wrong with it?”
Filming his scene works pretty well overall. She starts on a tiny bed, but he does one element there wrong, he makes the window behind her normal-sized, and it breaks the illusion. The she leans over and picks up some kind of tube or bottle, and sniffs. He had a lighting storm going on, and for some reason the lights come on when she sniffs, which made it look like she somehow turned on the lights by snorting a lamp or something. Anyway, she starts walking forward, and shrinking, and reaches the door that is huge. From that point, the scale elements really worked pretty well. She opens the huge door, steps into the hallway, she’s small. She smells another pipe thingy, and then walks down the hall, and starts growing, till she’s bumping the ceiling. He did a really good job of scaling the lamps on the wall and such to keep the distance and size disparity appropriate, so it sells her growing really well. Finally she turns down a short back hall to the tiny door. That part didn’t work quite right for conveying her growing, but mostly that was the effect of the size of the set and getting the camera into the corner.
So the judge had warned him about the window on walk through and he didn’t fix it, and it stood out in the filming, but his filming did a good job of covering the quality issues with the finish, and his forced projections worked well. His story had demonstrated causes for her size transformations in the form of sniffing the lamps. So in that sense it worked.
In the end, he won, because he got the forced projections better on screen.
