DOWAN BARAK'S DFSA STUDENT BLOG: Professional Toolkit

Still image of the finished set, and what it would roughly look like during filming

So yesterday was a good day at the set build. We had managed to get all the old wallpaper and paint off the set walls. It took some time as there was wallpaper after wallpaper after wallpaper. We all took turns as there was only four scrapers provided. Using hot water and some solution I sponged the the wall I was scraping to help make it easier to take off. It took a few hours to do the whole wall.

Scrapping off layers of old wallpaper - never again :|

After the walls where complete. I had borrowed a hammer from Chris in which I double checked the walls for any nails sticking out, and used the hammer to remove them and flatten anything else that would stick out of the fresh wallpaper that we started to put up that day.

Just before we where ready to get the wallpaper up we had noticed that a small portion of the wall was sticking out. I had got Chris in which he let me borrow the drill. He helped me straighten the wall and add another bracket to the set to keep the wall straight. Now the wallpaper was ready to go up, and with only half hour left in the studio. We had decided to only put up wallpaper to one section of the wall, and finish the rest off on next weeks build.

Brown tape to cover the joints of the wall

Before we could put any wallpaper up we had to use this special brown tape to cover the gaps between the walls. Chris mentioned that he had a big roll we could use, so he went and got it for us, and so Rob, Lucy and I had started working on covering the gaps. Using a wet sponge I applied a bit of dampness across the tape, to get the stickiness active (like the sticky part of envelopes), and we stuck it vertically across the gaps of the wall. Firmly pressing against it making sure the tape stuck.

One side of the wall completely finished

Placing two tables together we had a big enough pasting table for the wallpaper. Lucy had made the wallpaper paste in a bucket. Once everything was prepared. We had laid out the wallpaper across the table, using a measuring tape to get the right measurements in place, and cut the pieces we needed. We started to put the wallpaper up. The next day we fully completed the wallpapering.

Both walls fully wallpapered

Unfortunately I wasn't around for the painting as I had an accident, in which I had to go get checked out at the hospital that day, and instead made sure I came in for the flooring and the rest of the studio set up.

Flooring nicely fitted after a re-do

The next day I arrived into the studio and noticed that they already started on the flooring but wasn't put together right. So I had to take the flooring completely apart, and started from scratch. Me, Marko and shahid had started on the flooring again to make sure that the flooring was properly joint together. It took a while, especially with the end pieces as one of the walls where crooked. So we had to separately measure each side flooring board just so it could fit.