Arrival and Construction of the Scenic Flats

Finally the arrival of the scenic flats meant that we really could get a start on making some serious progress towards the finished set. The whole Scenic flats came flat-packed so the first job was for us to unpack everything and organize it all, Dan one of the HND students took control of this, which was good because it then meant that I could clear the space needed for us to have room to move when assembling them.

Once I had cleared the room and shifted all tables, chairs and bags etc.. to the end of the room there were several piles on the floor of different types of wood. The company hadn't sent us the easiest set of instructions either but we managed to figure out the basic concept on putting one of them together. Dan's approach was for us to put together one of the 1.75m x 3m flats to start with to see how they are meant to be constructed and then do the rest. We also made the decision to leave the Doorway and Window/Fireplace till last as they had a couple of more complicated aspects to them.

The first scenic flat definitely caused us the most problem and headache and seemed to take forever to get together, but once we worked out certain things to do that make life easier we finally managed to get it done, there were several steps to putting together the standard flats:

• Drill in each corner section at each end of every 3m piece of wood
• Then screw in the middle shoes dead center at 1.5m (this we used a measuring tape, and then marked center with a small pencil mark).
• After this was done you had to put wood glue within each corner piece and middle shoe sections.
• you then left this for a couple of minutes before getting the cross sections and slotting them into the appropriate slots.
• and finally clear up waste glue and then lay the flat down for the glue to harden.

 After we had worked out the process of constructing all the flats in a effective manner, I sort of gave everyone certain jobs and we unintentionally created a production line building the scenic flats, we had:

• Hannah and Amy = They were in charge of firstly marking out the center mark (1.5m along the wood) on the sections of wood.
• Me and  Danielle = While they did this I placed screws into each corner section and middle shoes, and then screwed them were they were meant to be positioned, Danielle helped with lining up the middle shoes and holding the pieces of wood in place while I screwed.
• Mark (Also with the help of Hannah and Amy) = then applied the glue to the corner sections and middle shoes.
• Then All of us including Dan (HND) = Slotted in the cross sections to one of the side panels, we then stood this up and finally slotted the other side panels down onto the cross sections.

They then got layed down on-top of each-other with a section of wood between each one and left so that the glue could dry. We then moved onto the next flat and so on.

After we had completed all of the big 1.75m x 3m Flats we moved onto the other differently sized flats, because we now knew what we were doing we managed to fly through these using practically the same system we used for the big flats.

 Here is some examples of the set-up we had for the differently sized pieces, we flew through these and this was down to us all working together and by all full filling the role that we had been given.