Tuesday, 12 October 2010

Designing Fawlty Towers

I've studied the set of Fawlty Towers by watching and taking numerous screenshots of the show and doing line drawings to produce a replica of the hotel. I chose the 5 rooms where scenes were mostly shot so the audience would be able to immediately recognise and relate to them: Bar, Dining room, Kitchen, Office and Lobby. This took longer than I thought it would as I had to try to include as much detail as I could in each room, in addition, the quality of the screen shots were quite poor so sometimes I found it difficult to pick out the tiny details that contribute to the familiarity of the hotel.






Next I need to figure out how I'm going to design the layouts I've made, what media to use. Possibly use found paper as the wallpaper and carpet of the rooms. Another alternative is to do watercolour drawings and then use a fine liner to fill out the shadows to give it definition. The final way is to transfer the layout to the computer and colour it in using Photoshop or even trace the outlines using vectors in Illustrator. At one point I did think about making the designs look really traditional and old to fit with the old style of the programme and interior design but I think I want to give the new hotel I'm creating a more modern twist and use this opportunity to bring it forwards from the 1950s. I will do testers on each technique I've talked about and see which one works best.

After that I need to re-watch the episodes and pick out key events that occur to Manuel and find objects that he would like or rather not have in his hotel. I doubt I will have time to make a model of the hotel which is a shame because I would have liked to have given this a go. Maybe after the critique if I have time during other projects I can at least turn one of the rooms into a 3D model.

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