Production Design Documentation: Morgan's Factory Station

One of my official roles on the shoot this last weekend was "Oobleck Wrangler". The premise of this fantastical factory in factoryland, is that it manufactures widgets and widget manufacturing accessories. This is slightly ironic, as the term 'widget' is actually loosely a meta-syntactic variable for a manufactured object or device. As a formic manifestation of this somewhat central metaphor of the story, we resolved to have the widgets born of melted plastic.

Morgan's job at the factory is to inspect the widgets as they are spit out by the unfathomable machine that performs this task, and to maintain the correct mix of melted plastic so that they are not malformed. Because Morgan is largely indifferent in regard to his job, he often throws malformed widgets into the accepted tube, and correctly formed widgets into the rejected bucket, the latter of which is periodically taken down to the 'Melting Pit' to be melted back down and continue the unending and inane process. The Melting Pit is where Morgan's friend Mark works.

The following video shows a little bit of the methods we used to create the 'melted plastic squirting out of nozzles' effect.



There are 3 tubes, two with colored oobleck (of a slightly more liquidy mix, in order to facilitate its travel through small plastic tubes) tubes, and one larger one filled with the normative white oobleck. Though just a simple combination of corn starch and water, oobleck is quite the otherworldly substance. Brad can be seen resolutely providing the air pressure for the squirting of the oobleck out of the nozzles, and Morgan can be heard and seen operating the camera. Jed can also be seen occasionally overseeing the goodness of the oobleck.

While our production design may be slightly less than Hollywood, created on essentially zero budget, I think that we have achieved a sufficient level to get our ideas across to a viewer in an interesting way, and that is the important issue to us as student filmmakers.