Stardust

Did you see the movie Stardust? It's a sweet fairy tale, but the eye candy by production designer Gavin Bocquet is what sold me.

Bright, colorful marketplaces.

Shops that sell lightning (to airship pirates!)

Spooky Grand Halls

Gypsy Caravans

And did I mention airship pirates?

The Extraordinary Adventures of Adele Blanc-Sec

IndigoViolet suggested we might enjoy this eye candy -- a French file that looks "fantastic" in the very traditional sense of the word...

In Bruges Set

Halley DeVestern recommended I check out this set from the movie In Bruges, of a shabby opulent gun dealer's home.



I agree, it's great in it's cluttered, antiqued, fabulous look!

The Good, The Bad, The Wierd

Bria sent me this eye candy -- trailers for relatively obscure Asian films -- which I thought would be appropriately fun for the holiday week



I have to say, though, that diving helmets and aviator googles are so out of place in the Wild West that I laughed out loud!


Watch at least until you see the flying machine!

20th Century Props Auction

Cherie sent me this:

20th Century Props seems to be closing it's doors with a humongous webcast auction of it's warehouse July 28th - August 1st.

When 20th Century Props decided they had
enough, Great American Group was chosen to
sell everything down to the bare walls. With
over 40 years of collecting and buying, renting
and selling, Harvey Schwartz, the owner of 20th
Century Props is ready to retire. You’d be hard
press to find any movie or television show that
hasn’t had one of these props on the set. You’ll
find the futuristic shower Tom Cruise used
in “Minority Report” to an armchair that starred
with Marilyn Monroe in multiple films to the Art
Deco chandeliers from “The Aviator” &
“Titanic” with Leo DiCaprio. Whether you are a
movie buff, a collector, an interior decorator ar
just a person with a thing for leopard skin
furniture, you’d be crazy not to attend this
auction. Bid on site or bid online from the
convenience of your PC! Log onto our website
at www.greatamerican.com and view over
200,000 square feet of furniture, collectibles,
antiques, figurines and artwork from every
period in the history of the world.


There's a Windows Media video tour here and a pdf brochure here.

Some advice here? No 6 foot high statues of anything (unless you have 20 foot high ceilings, and then only maybe). Stay away from fiberglass. Focus on the furniture and housing accessories -- it looks like they have some great antiques. Your best deals are probably on the earliest and latest auctions each day -- when people haven't warmed up yet or have already spent their money. Remember, there's a 10% buyer's premium and if you don't live in LA you've got to figure out how to get it home -- and freight shipping is probably not cheap.

9 The Movie

Automata (or golems -- it's hard to tell if it's magic or science that created them), mad scientist creator, the obligatory airship, post apocalyptic. It's nicely dark and grungy. It's 9 The Movie.



There's some good mad scientist bits here:
http://www.filminfocus.com/focusfeatures/film/9

I'm looking forward to more of the sets.

City of Ember

City of Ember is a movie coming out in October based on a young adult book set in a post apocalyptic world where the only remaining people on earth live underground with light and power provided by a generator. The generator is failing....



I haven't read the book, although I just ordered it, but the movie preview shows some very promising sets centered around an aging industrial electrical environment... one might even be able to call it steampunk.


The trailer:

These photos (and more) at IGN.

Design notes on The Golden Compass

Jordan College

I finally saw The Golden Compass last week, and would describe it as "beautiful with moments of trite." (But then, I'm not the biggest Philip Pullman fan, petering out somewhere in the middle of The Subtle Knife.) Since this blog is all about how things look, however, I definitely think it's worth a viewing since the sets were fantastic.

Lord Asriel's Study

What I really liked was how the sets managed to blend styles from multiple eras -- Gothic at Jordan College, Art Deco at Mrs. Coulter's house, an old west feel in Trollesund, and then an almost 1960s lab in Bolvangar.

Mrs. Coulter's

Production designer Dennis Gassner is quoted at About.com on how he created the look: This will be the turn of the century to the '40s. We have that window of 40 years to say…' For costume, for props, everybody needed to have a window in time to deal with. But it's a broad window of time. We're dealing with a generality and that opened things up. It's much more fun for the audience to look at because it is a fantasy, even though we're basing it in a reality environment. We're saying, 'This is a real time, real place that you're in now.' But it gave me the scope to play with a lot of elements of time. And that accumulation is the exciting part about getting to do something like this.”

Jordan College

He calls it "cludging. It's taking one element that exists and another element that exists and putting them together, combining into something else.” A very steampunk perspective, no?

I had also read that he based his aesthetic for the movie on the circle.

Trollesund

Actually, I learn from the interview with Gassner, is that it's a bit more complicated.

“The question that I had for everybody was what is The Golden Compass? And to me, I deal in symbols, I'm the architect of the film. How do you get into a world like this which is a very unusual world, one that I haven't created and nobody has? So you start with that, something simple,” explained Gassner. “The simplicity for me was actually the sphere which became the golden compass. The protagonist and the antagonist of our films, you need symbols, simply become that. The symbol for purity for Lyra and then the antithesis of that would be for me the oval, which is the extension or manifestation of that symbol. So it's nice to have a contrast, and you can start to build the world from there. That's how I started, very simply and very direct.

Bolvangar

Both of these ideas -- design inspirations that span 40 years, the circle as a recurring design element -- are ones that you can incorporate into your own home. My own home, which is slowly becoming more and more steampunk, has elements drawn from Victorian, Art Nouveau and Art Deco fraternizing quite nicely together. I also use the circle -- a very steampunk shape -- in many of my home accessories -- mirrors, a large copper bowls on the dining table, etc.


Ugo has a video about steampunk and the look of the movie.
Ugo's Gallery
About.com's Gallery
IMDB's Photos