When
I’m not applying for jobs, sleeping, playing assassins’ creed or watching the
third season of Boardwalk Empire I’m working at Professor Puzzle in grand old
Shepperton. Having shown my boss Ben my animation work and set building skills
he came to me a couple of weeks ago with an idea for a stage at the toy fair in
Nuremberg. Whilst he was travelling around Hong Kong he noticed some frames
with a fabric stretched over that when tight resembled sheets of MDF that would
weigh next to nothing. So the challenge was passed over to me to try and create
these backing boards the only difference being that Ben wanted two walls one 3m
high by 3.5m and the other 3m by 7m! So I started drawing up some plans and
checking out some ideas online to get a rough idea of what I was going to need
to build and how I was going to go about doing it. After researching through
some ideas I came to the conclusion that I needed to make three 3m high by 3.5m
long canvas frames built almost exactly like a normal canvas frame just with
much more support as they would be a lot larger. The other issue was that I was
building these in Shepperton and they had to be shipped out to Nuremberg in as
small a size possible but also not so small that it took forever to put back
together at the other end in Nuremberg. The Toy Fair begins on the 27th
and the last date for sending out pallets was the 17th so this gave
me a week to draw up the designs, source and buy the correct amount of wood and
then build the three walls but then also take them apart into small sizes and
ship them safely on a pallet.
I decided having measured the size of a pallet that could be
sent to make the three walls in quarters so each quarter would be 1.5 by 1.75
in size and could all be stacked alongside each other for transport. This also
made buying and transporting the wood a lot easier than trying to fit 3.5m
lengths of wood into a car boot. As you can see in the images above I built the
four corners and then laid them all down and joined two so I had halves and
then finally pulled it all tight screwed it together to form the one wall. My
measuring wall all correct and the frame stood and fitted together very nicely.
My mate Tom stands in the third photo to show the size of the walls.
As you can see above after building the first one I decided
that the joins needed much larger pieces of wood to secure the frames and make
it much stronger as they had to stand for over a week and not bend or snap. I
followed the way to build a canvas frame but just added in the element of
having to have the frame in four pieces. I had to make sure that on the front
facing side that it was all flush and in line as when the fabric is pulled
tight over the top I didn’t want any pieces of wood sticking forward a tiny bit
and ruining the effect of the fabric. I tried to make all of the middle support
beams sit lower in the frame and when the larger 1m support pieces were added
to the frame I made sure that they sat at exactly the same place as the outside
frame to really give a flat finish to the front. After taking about 2 days to
make the first frame and source the materials I managed to make the second two
(a lot better) and a lot faster, since I knew what I was doing and had the
first to look at and reference.
I then started the process of taking the three frames apart
and drawing up instructions of how to put them together again as I won’t be
there in Nuremberg at the start (although I did manage to convince Ben to fly
me out for the end of the toy fair to help out and have a look around and take
the stage down!) I colour coded each frame and numbered each corner and its corresponding
metre long supports. After that it was just a matter of finding a larger enough
pallet to ship the frames and then loading it up with Nuremberg stock and
making sure it was all wrapped and secure for its drive over. Overall the whole
process went very well and I only had to make small changes to the original
idea and plans, I was quite happy to take up the challenge and be building
again.
