The walls

Printed foamex walls

The walls of the house were to be made of printed Foamex on a lightweight wooden frame.  This was going to absorb a major part of the budget , so I needed to get the go-ahead from Joe and Michal, the producers, because it would eat up all our contingency, but I felt it was the most practical solution.  While the producers considered it, and tried to raise more money, we went ahead with the build of the frames.  This, as it turned out, was a mistake.

The framework for flats

It seems that “8x4 sheets” is a variable beast, so while Janneke built the frames at 1220mmx2440mm, the foamex sheets turned out to be slightly wider at about 1230mm, which meant that each fragile sheet protruded beyond its support, with the protrusion incrementally getting larger and larger.  This caused much extra hassle while touring.

McGowans gave us a good deal on the printing of the Foamex, but unfortunately weren’t very efficient.  I had never had a problem with them before, but everything went wrong on this job.  I first got a call that the image wasn’t high enough resolution, and that the print was pixelated, so I reworked the image and tried again.  Still too pixelated.  I substituted another image drawn from a much higher resolution source, and asked to see the test print.  It still hadn’t been printed when I got there, but eventually they ran off a print while I waited.  It’s still too pixelated, they said.  I checked it.  “No” I said “ that’s a paint effect filter. It’s supposed to look like that.  I explained this in the original email that I sent with the original image.”  Two weeks delay and late nights redesigning because someone didn’t read an email properly!

McGowans didn’t deliver the sheets the next two times that they promised, and when they did they had accidently duplicated two of the images and left off two others, so Janneke spent days simply sitting in the Focus theatre waiting for promised sheets of Foamex that never showed up.  And it’s so difficult to shout at someone when they are doing you a cheapie.

When we eventually put the pieces together, though, it looked great and I still think was the most efficient way of creating the  walls. If anyone knows a better/cheaper solution let me know.