Room Design

After we had all gone off to look into our own items, we had another meeting to look at the room itself, we set out to put down the layout of the rooms so we could see how much room we could allocate to each piece of furniture and still make the room workable. we were going to lay it out in masking tape, but after drawing out a quick sketch on the white board a few issues were pointed out by Stuart, first was how would all the windows and doors work together with the doors and windows being on completely oposit sides in both rooms meaning the building was either really oddly shaped or tiny, then how would this work with how a fire is situated in the building, meaning the flute would normally be in the centre of the building and windows cant be to close or all the heat would leave the room. A few of us had a long discussion over where each window and door could be and how it all worked in a block of flats and in the end we settled on this floor plan.

Which would be situated easily in a block of flats.

After we had figured all this out I took all the dimensions and drew out the floor plan putting it all to scale so it was easier to understand, I also put in the furniture working out their scale against real life objects and I placed them in as well. This meant the next day when we came into our lesson we would have a clear floor plan to work off.

Living room: w = 10ft l =12ft

Bedroom: WD = 10ft WB=7ft l=12ft

Windows W=2.16ft (27") l=4ft (48")

Doors: W=2.416 (29")

Fire place: W=3.5ft (42") D=12"

arm Chairs: W=3.4ft D=2.9ft (35")

Dining Table: W=3.5ft(42") L=4.5ft (54")

Chairs: W=1.75ft(21") D=1.75ft(21")

Sofa: W=46ft(56") D=2.6ft(32")

Writing Desk: W=5.5ft(44") D=2.416(29")

Bed = L=6.66ft(80inch) W=3.33ft(40")

The next day we had our first lesson with Henry who will be showing us how to build a set. first we looked at all of the Autocad images we had and the designs that hadn't been processed on the computer, then we looked at the floor plan and Henry told us how to properly scale, it was something I had never had to do before so I felt it wasn't such a tragedy that the first time I did it on such a large scale piece It wasn't a success, but now I know how to do it properly. The next thing we did was to make the set out of foam bored so we can see if it did all fit together. The only problem the group ran in to here was that most people hadn't got the measurements for their items so we had to spend a bit of time measurement anything we could find for a suitable replacement. People who were doing walls and doors were tasked with making the full set to size so it would all stand up together, it was a little wobbly when finished but it did stand and we were able to put all the furniture in.

As you can see on the picture it was a tight squeeze to fit everything in, there wasn't a lot of room for moving around and it really wouldn't have been a liveable environment. The next day during tutorial we were told that we could make our rooms 16'x16' if needed giving us the freedom to create some more space, out final decision was to make the rooms 16' long 12' wide in the living room and in the bedroom they'd be 12' long by 12' at the door end and 8' at the bed end. we remeasured this out and found that we would have more than enough room to make it look liveable.

Gregor's Chair

I started my research for the chair by looking for 1900's Czechoslovakian chairs but I wasn't having much luck, someone had mentioned that we look at Art Nouveau because this was the style that was in fashion at the time, this brought up a few more searches but I wasn't finding Anything that I wanted to use to base my chair on. Then Eleanor put up a good website on the blog a very useful website that sold antique furniture, I was able to pull out quite a few chairs that would be interesting to use as inspiration.

I found these two chairs interesting because of the organic shapes included in them, almost as if vines and plants were draped over the wood work. I had thought of doing a design like this, including natural aspects as if Gregor's bug form was making him see like this as well with everything in his room resembling nature, but after a tutorial and then a meeting this idea was scrapped, we decided not to make it too literal.

I liked the elegant but simple look of this and felt that this could be interesting when it came to designing the chair, but when it came to the final design I went with a different look.

This was interesting, it was as elegant as the others, simple but it would still be interesting to use, the design mainly going into the material used on the seat. But I felt that it would look to much like a dining chair and not enough like a desk chair.

I finally went with the shape of this chair, you get the fluid lines of the first tow chairs but you can create the simplicity of the second two, its not too over the top. Once I knew what shape I wanted it to be I had to measure out the size it would have to be to fit in the room and then I could draw it to scale, for this I used a normal modern chair just for the hight of the seat to the floor and the and the width of the seat. width = 21'' , depth = 21'', back hight = 3'3'', front height = 18''

Designing

We'd had quite a few meetings about what the rooms should look like and what we needed to include in but no actual decisions had been made about what was going on apart from the time and the place it would be set and what size the rooms would be, so I sat down and wrote out a list of what things were important and what would need designing, we had quite a few smaller items that could be bought before the shoot and things that were un-designable such as the red apples we needed and the dust balls we were going to have in Gregors room bit there were lots of other important items. Once I had the list we sat down and everyone was assigned to something to design for the set, any one who didn't turn up or who had not already asked me if they could bee put down for something was given what had been chosen. We didn't have any problems with this system and almost every person got one thing, a few people got two because their items were smaller such as the photo frames. I chose to do the chair that Gregor has against the window so that he can see out his window. I knew it needed to fit with the desk, which was being designed by Sarah Longbottom, because it most probably would have been used as a desk chair to begin with.

LIVING ROOM:

Arm Chairs (there are two but they'll probably be identical) = Laura

Dinner Table = Eleanor

Fireplace = Emily

Windows (just this room) = Karen

Walls = Katerina

Chairs for dinning table = Hannah

Coffe Table = Sarah W

Gass Lights (wall Brackets) = Jesca W

Picture frames = Sarah W

GREGOR'S ROOM

Walls (wallpaper) = John

Carpet (both rooms) = Ben

Sofa = Adam

Bed = Emma

Writing Desk = Sarah L

Chair under window = Jess F

Window (and the curtains) = Jo

Doors = Stuart

The Room

We needed to make a decision on the shape and size of the room, each room was allowed to be 12'x12' and then any variation we could think of between, we wanted the maximum amount of room possible for the living room but we all agreed that the room would look wrong if it was a perfect square so we went with a 10'x12' room. We were going to do the same with Gregor's room just slightly smaller but we wanted the room to feel cramped and off, in a lot of our meetings we had talked about making the viewer feel very uncomfortable but it being something about the room they don't like, So we talked about making the proportions off, giving the room a warped look but leaving all the furniture the same size. The room would looked warped but claustrophobic making our audience feel off. So one end of the room would be 10' the other 7' and the length 10' as if his room had been square. The important thing with Gregors room was to have a window on one side then a door that could go into a corridor and one into the bedroom. In the living room we decided on 2 windows, the door into Gregors room, one into the hallway and a fire place.

first living room design first bedroom design

Prague

In the 19th century Prague became the centre of the Czech revival, Industrial productivity rises and labourers find themselves needing to move to the city to keep up with the times. With the rise in people and industry the city grew rich and areas of the city were torn down to make way for new modern buildings the style of Cubism, Art Nouveau and neorenaissance as well as the city expanding into new areas, The city was growing all the time.

( image :http://www.ucira.ucsb.edu/the-prague-quadrennial-of-performance-design-and-space-june-16-26-2011/)

http://www.myczechrepublic.com/prague/history/prague_history.html

http://www.lonelyplanet.com/czech-republic/prague/history

http://accommodation.ibts.eu/prague-history.php

2nd meeting

Once we had come back together to discuss what we had been looking at started to make decisions on the rooms, one of the most important of which was the time and the place that we would be setting the story, as we do not have a director this decision was left to the group which is where we had a few problems, most of us agreed that setting it the same time the story was written which was a 1915, a few people though other times such as one suggestion that maybe we could base it in the 1960's with psychedelic colours and patterns, or a modern day set meaning the whole story would need re-looking at to see how it would be changed to make it more modern. Neither of these ideas were accepted by the group so we settled on 1915, but realised that we would be looking at early architecture and furniture because the family were not rich enough to have everything completely new. I think that if we had decided to do modern or in the 60's this would have been really interesting, for the 60's we could have looked more into the movies being made at the time in the psychological thriller genre and what was influencing them, then used this when designing the set. Or a modern day version thaw it wouldn't have been as interesting to make we could have looked at the genre now, what audiences today feel make this a movie thrilling to watch, the seen how the text can be twisted to meet modern conventions.

We then talked about where it would be set, Czechoslovakia had already been mentioned before but along with this we had said Russia and Germany but it was definitely that area of the world we wanted to set it, I had mentioned New York but no one had been very interested in that idea, there was then a heated discussion over which of these three countries was the best, but it was noted that Kafka had been born in Prague and so we decided to set it there. This meant that we needed to look at Prague 19century architect and turn of the century furniture.

Meeting 1/Tutorial

For our first meeting as a group we discussed the story and what we felt were the important elements, such as what scenes would be vital, the time we were looking at, what rooms could be used, where it would be set and other topics that we needed to look at in our own time so at the next group meeting we would be able to bring our research together and answer the basic questions like where the best country for the sets to be based and year the story would be then we could look at the design of rooms for that period and place. But at this stage we were all happy with the idea of using the bedroom and living room for the set, and we wanted the family to be lower middle class family. One of the ideas we had looked at was just doing the bedroom and the hallway out side because in the story just after Gregor is turned into a bug his sister talks to him from the hallway but after further discussion and a think about the point in the story we would be setting it we decided that the living room would be a more important room to set it in, this is the room where mast of the story is set and it would be interesting to create the extreme difference between Gregor's room which has become dirty and dilapidated against the living room that is being over cleaned out of worry and stress. So I would be looking back at the story and how you can turn the text into a set for a psychological thriller.