Crossing Swords – Season 2

Set Dresser

Stoopid Buddy Stoodios

2021

Project Synopsis

Crossing Swords is a ribald, medieval-themed show starring knights, kings and peasants that look like they came straight from a Playskool set. It’s irreverent take on swords & sorcery provided great opportunities to stretch my abilities as a set dresser.

The fast-paced production of Crossing Swords offered a great opportunity for me to fill in gaps in my Stop Motion toolbelt, and to feel confident dressing multiple intricately-decorated sets on a tight schedule.

Set Dressing

THE CIRCUS

Dressing the Crossing Swords sets was a new and interesting challenge for me. It was the first time I dressed sets with buildings and props I hadn’t built myself. While I thought this would be a big frustrating headache, it was actually very liberating. Having just recieved the elements of the set, I wasn’t hemmed in by pre-conceived notions of how the stages ought to come together, and with no familiarity or preciousness inherited from the building process, I found myself making bold choices and feeling out what worked for each setup.

The Circus was full of all kinds of iconic tents and props, and it was our job to bring the medieval ambiance to life. I enjoyed the challenge of switching a handful of buildings around to create the illusion that we were traveling deeper into the festival.

Circus! Circus! Best day of my life!

The Circus Performers

How would you make Elephant poop?

Alex Steale running away with the circus

Inside the Tent

Acrobatics, Clowns, and Strong Men all had robust performances inside the main circus tent. This stage required constant re-dressing to accomodate for the various angles used to capture the puppets’ performances.

Dressing can be very sparse if need be!

Cotton Candy Stand

We spent precious hours dressing the sticks of cotton candy trying to get them to stick to anything and getting them at just the right angle. It goes to show you: You never know what’s going to cause a set-dressing headache. Sometimes the littlest thing causes the biggest problems.

Knights gather around the stand

Cotton Candy looking just right

JUNGLE TREEHOUSE

The treehouse that the King and Queen retreat to was one of my favorite stages to dress. The layers of tree trunks and palm frond foliage gave great opportunities to create intersting compositions. It got tricky to reach through the trunks once we had installed them all, but the trouble of reaching around was worth it to bring this unique set to life.

Reaching through the trees

Final dressing

DRESSING ROOM

The dressing room had a lot of special pieces that needed attention. This one was fun to see a little peak behind the curtain.

Evan setting up the dressing room

Putting everything in its place

FLOWER FIELDS

This flower field was the opening shot of season 2, so it was important to make it look great. It took a lot of experimentation to get the lines of red tissue paper to look great, but we took it as a great opportunity to do a lot with a little.

Alex and I

Evan making sure the flowers stay in the frame

SNOW WHITE WOODS

One of the great cutaway gags in this show is to an unattended Snow White who is getting mauled by wild wolves. For this one-shot gag, we built and dressed a large part of the forest from scratch, and dressed the broken glass bed with red wax. It was a quick set up but ended up being one of my favorites.

Before trees

After trees!

Lights, Camera, Action!

Setting up the wolves

The grisly scene

TOWN SQUARE

The town square is the hub of activity in the land of Crossing Swords. Peasants and knights from all around seem to come to this spot to share news of the day. We had a lot of fun imagining what kinds of conversations the towns folk were having with each other.

Gathered around the poster board

Wide shot of the stage set up

Fun in the Town

There are so many small details to help build a town on a miniature scale. Set Dressing is almost always about the little details you include to build out the world. I was particularly tickled by the various band posters on the town’s post board, and the abandoned mugs of ale littering the town streets.

Checking the camera

Piecing together the posters

Touch Ups on the Tent

COLISEUM

Creating this crowd scene had a lot of great challenges. We were given a ton of generic townsfolk to litter the stands with, and lots of banners had to get put up. Decorating the walls with the occasional blood spatter also gave the Coliseum a sense of danger. I worked on this one alone, and since I couldn’t reach everything from the ground, I typically had to sit on the stage to do any kind of dressing.

Sitting on the set

Low Angle shot to make me feel huge

Coliseum from ground level

Blood spatters

Hard at work

Crossing Swords was a unique learning opportunity for me. It helped me get good fast at set dressing, and gave me insight into how to successfully time manage between multiple stages, as well as many of the build needs a set dresser must have to effecively do their job.