Portia's Season 5 Bedroom and Bathroom on Search Party

Portia and Dory in bed

Even though every season Portia’s apartment gets a redesign on Search Party, we don’t actually see her bedroom every season and we’ve only seen a glimpse of the bathroom once.

But this season we were doing both a bedroom AND a bathroom! Bed, Bath, and Beyond!

Portia and Dory in the bathroom

For the bedroom, Maggie Ruder the Production Designer, wanted to keep the look close what we did for the rest of her apartment but with a different color palette and from the same reference books we were consulting for the rest of Portia’s apartment found this photo:

So we basically copied it as best we could with the budget we were working with.

Maggie giving directions of what was happening on that opposite wall which we NEVER see. I must note this was before we fixed the hem of the sheers.

For the bathroom Maggie said she wanted to do a wallpaper and…you know me I LOVE WALLPAPER.

…the one hitch was the producers wanted us to find a wallpaper design where the company/designer would sign off clearance on the design (a first for me) which made the search slightly more challenging.

But we did find something I loved that met the necessary criteria.

Here’s Maggie’s design file for the bathroom

Ok not Dory’s finest moment but this shot lets you see our great bathtub hardware, and the hallway you don’t really see otherwise.

LOVE Portia’s fabulous robe in this bathroom scene

while we are still working on the set I sort of love this photo and it shows off our cute little sink that you never see on screen.

I was taking this photo to show the set dressers something, but I love how the mirror’s shape lines up so nicely with the design of the wallpaper, which you also never see on screen.

Ok you might notice in the photo above that that bar soap looks WAY too new and like it was just taken out of the plastic wrapping.

So in order to age it I brought it over to the nearest bathroom to wash it down and at least soften the hard edges to look a little more used, aged, and lived in.

Well, while I was doing that Katie our Assistant Set Decorator came into the bathroom and stood in the doorway so we could do one of our daily recaps and touching of base on what we still needed to do for our upcoming sets.

It seemed normal enough as a way to use time effectively, but at a certain point I realized how absurd this set up was, and I was like hold on I need to take a photo of this moment.

There it is, me with the soap I’m washing down and Katie with her notebook.

That’s it for Bed, Bath, and Beyond Portia’s Season 5 Apartment on Search Party!

To see more photos of Search Party Season 5 sets, click here for the portfolio.

Finding Those Restraint Bars for Tunnel's Elevator

One thing I was not expecting for the 5th season of Search Party was creating an elevator to the center of the earth.

As a long time fan of the show I thought I had an idea of what kind of sets we would be working on: contemporary, millennial Brooklyn, slightly heightened and stylized in an off-beat-gesture-towards-surrealism.

me realizing wait…we are also doing sci-fi?

There was no part of me that was expecting to be working in the genre of sci-fi; in this case a fantastical elevator to the center of the earth.

Part of the fun of working on a show as zany as Search Party, however, is precisely these sorts of unannounced genre detours into sci-fi. I mean it is not everyday you get to work on a surprise elevator to the center of the earth for Jeff Goldblum!

This whole zany high-concept elevator and the surreal payoff is the kind of unexpected left turn that endears so many of us to love Search Party.

Most sci-fi jobs are big budget affairs because getting all the elements right to build something technical from imagination is not something you can usually do on the cheap. …and yet here we were a scrappy little comedy trying to do just that.

the reality of a scrappy little comedy trying to build an imagined elevator in the sniffing zone of technical futuristic fantastical.

So we had to get RESOURCEFUL.

We started with research brainstorming what sort of materials or elements we could get on the cheap on Craigslist or used otherwise that looked spaceship-like so we wouldn’t be building everything from scratch.

Thanks to the wonderfully creative Andrew Behm who came up with so many genius ideas like boating chairs for the seats and used rollercoaster handlebars.

This is my avatar for Andrew Behm’s inspired resourceful creative ideas.

THE CHAIRS

Working during a pandemic, however, also meant we were saddled with the same supply chain problems as the rest of the world.

hate to be that person but literally, supply chain amirite?

The boating chairs we ordered with a 4 week lead time (which is an insanely long lead time for productions schedules) and were still arriving late.

Despite Andrew and me calling the vendor literally everyday for updates, they could not tell us when the specific boating chairs the rest of the elevator was being build around would land, any tracking information, nor any estimation of when we would receive the chairs.

…even though when I bought them they gave us a definite date that was already 1 week past.

Everytime Andrew and I debriefed after calling the chair supplier.

Emergency Plan B

So then we had to go to an Emergency Plan B and I started calling the manufacturer of the boating seats directly, got in touch with one of their warehouse reps, and found 5x matching chairs in stock in a similar style and dimension as the original one we ordered.

The catch was we had to pick-up the chairs in Providence, RI which is a whole day of someone driving back and forth from New York City.

do we have the resources to go to Providence, RI? Not exactly. Do we need to? Yes.

These were desperate times so we decided to do it.

And of course, OF COURSE, the moment those 5x chairs landed at our stage back where we were building the elevator I got a call from the original vendor.

“Your chairs are here and ready for pick up now!”

“Your chairs are here and ready for pick up now!”

THE RESTRAINT BARS

You will notice in all these stills from the elevator scene that one set dressing element that is particularly prominent: the restraint bars securing each character in their seat.

One of the most fun parts of set decorating, is learning about a whole world of specialized vendors that otherwise I would never have the opportunity to intersect with.

In this case it was the world of rollercoaster and amusement park hardware and manufacturers.

We really wanted to find 5x matching meaty restraint bars so that the cast would have something to grip as they were being hurtled to the center of the earth and look like they were strapped into something serious.

Custom making 5x restraint bars and getting them covered with custom moulded foam was a bit out of the scope of our little comedy show’s budget and timeline (again our production was not set up as a sci-fi movie!) so I was on a mission to find someone who would sell me 5x matching rollercoaster restraint bars.

nothing like a good Mission Impossible mission to sink my teeth into.

This search started where all searches start: obsessive googling. …but when you know so little about an industry often times you don’t even know the correct phrases to google? I was googling “handlebars” and after a few phone calls I realized the right term is “restraint bar” or “shoulder harness.”

Once I got an idea of who the players were in the rollercoaster parts world I started calling around.

Sometimes when you explain to people outside of the TV production industry what you are looking for and why, they either:

1. quickly tell you they don’t have X or don’t do Y and hang up.

2. get tickled with the crazy goose hunt you are on and get intrigued.

3. are charmed for a moment that someone from show business is doing something as whimsical as making a fake elevator to the center of the earth while the actual earth burns during a dystopian pandemic.

When I’m in pursuit of something just out of reach and hard to find, I’m always hoping to find someone who is 2) or 3) or a combination of both of those, because then maybe they might help you out and hook you up with some of the deep knowledge they have on their specialized industry.

It is a little bit like cultivating a source if you were doing journalism…I think?

live footage of this process

I talked to people from all over the country working in amusement park ride manufacture and repair.

Anyways, after many phone calls criss-crossing the industry and the country I talked to a woman named Dori from a company called Rides-4-U right in New Jersey! No need to do crazy cross-continental shipping! I was getting excited.

She told me she didn’t have what we were looking for, but she was firmly in camp 2 & 3 and said she wanted to try and help me and would think of someone I should talk to.

me getting hopeful after meeting the angel Dori on the phone

I called Dori a few days later to check-in and she passed me the phone number of a 3rd generation molded foam and metal company in Pennsylvania where they often manufacture these exact things for rollercoasters and often have scrap seconds or extras.

When I called the number, the person who picked up the phone was so warm and casual and nice and in the background I could hear metal shop like sounds.

The man, Seth, told me oh sure they had lots of different restraint bars like that, in fact a bunch that didn’t pass inspection to use on a real rollercoaster

I told him THAT WAS PERFECT for our purposes of total make believe!

…could he send me a photo? Before I got my hopes up too high, I wanted to see what it is he had on hand since our world how it looks is of paramount importance.

When I got this photo sent to me during a tech scout in a decrepit Staten Island hospital I practically yelped from joy:

EXACTLY the type of thing we were looking for!

And then I got this beautiful email message:

The above is a hilarious line from one of our email exchanges that reads almost like a foreign language but that’s whats fun about diving deep into another industry’s lingo and arcana

Not only do they have them on hand, but he had 5x matching, and then came the moment of truth. I asked him how much they would cost worried that it might be out of our price range.

…but he was like “oh I can just give you these for free. they are basically trash to us.”

“oh I can just give you these for free. they are basically trash to us.”

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

This was the moment I had been waiting for FOR WEEKS! Finding that needle in the haystack. That one magical person who not only has exactly what you need, 5x matching ones, but finds it fun and amusing to work with production on our quest to make fake things.

AND FOR FREEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Truly this is the high or scavenger hunting in set decorating that only happens every now and then.

There are of course many little triumphs when searching for things, but this type of open ended search of something so specific and niche taking you to weird corners of manufacturing is not that frequent.

The way I felt after securing those restraint bars for free.

THE HIGH! I was so pumped and floating around the production office.

Of course I insisted on paying something. A situation where I’m DELIGHTED to give someone money even if they are insisting it isn’t necessary. We finally settled on the token amount of what it would cost for the foam.

And afterwards I kept both Set and Dori updated as the elevator was being built, sending them periodic updates of the construction and photos, since they really helped make it happen and were in my mind stakeholders in this silly little set and I can’t wait to send them the stills from the episode.

That’s 10 people focused on 5 restraint bars baby!

Portia's Season 5 Apartment on Search Party

Dory surprises the gang in Portia’s Season 5 apartment

As fans of Search Party know, Portia’s apartment gets a design transformation each season.

Portia’s Apartment design transformation Seasons 1-4

This season we had a lot of fun with Portia’s apartment.

Once we knew that Portia was no longer an actress and mourning her acting career was a plot point (it was a bigger plot point in earlier drafts of the script), Production Designer Maggie Ruder and I started talking about what that would mean for Portia’s apartment this season

A big personality mourning her glory days of being an actress of course calls to mind one iconic character and set: Gloria Swanson as Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard.

hahha look at how over the top this interior is!

While Portia can be a little extra in a Norma Desmond-esque way, Search Party is still a low-budget comedy so we didn’t have the $ to go full excess and had to think up some resourceful ways to communicate the same vibes.

So we did a lot of visual research.

VISUAL RESEARCH

pulling references from Victorian mourning, modern neo-Gothic inspired interiors, Grey Gardens, and of course Sunset Boulevard.

I brought in some interior and design books from my collection that I felt were the vibe we were going for.

as you can see what had a lot of post-it notes of inspiration.

from Maggie’s design deck, that mantel photo is from the Syrie Maugham book.

You can see the Sunset Boulevard stair balustrade details we added in this shot!

we tried our best with the mantel and the oil painting of Portia and Eliot that has appeared in multiple seasons.

PORTIA’S FADED DAYS OF ACTRESS GLORY

The original from Sunset Boulevard

Finding the right collection of frames from a favorite vintage and salvage store

Collecting images and stills from past seasons from Portia’s various acting jobs was super fun.

you can see some of these photos which were spread over the windowsill of the two windows behind the couch

the silhouette of the frames make it in this shot

this is a terrible photo of when we were still working on the set, but allows you to see the photos on the windowsill.

This frame idea is a perfect example of a set dressing decoration element that had a lot of:

• intention (mimicking Norma Desmond’s own journey)

• thoughtfulness (combing the show’s archive for all of Portia’s past acting gigs) shouts to Sydney Barbara who did a ton of research!

• effort, and time (finding the right frames, matching image with frame, measuring all the dimensions, shout out to Andrew Behm!, our beloved graphic designer Loren Kane sizing and printing the photos to work, actually framing them in)

put into an idea that is at most a flicker in the background of the screen that absolutely no viewer can decipher…and yet totally worth it and so fun for us to do!

FURNITURE HUNT PROCESS

What my office wall looked like while we were hunting, gathering, and searching (SEARCH PARTY?) for the furniture pieces for Portia’s Apartment. The circled red part is all the rejects of furniture photos we won’t end up using.

narrowing down

some key furniture pieces we purchased found at five different locations of used furniture around the NYC metro area. Four of these will be modified by us in someway (painted, reupholstered, fringe swap) to make it work for the set.

Maybe you will recognize the furniture above when they were at the store in the finished sets below and some of the previous set photos in this post:

ADDING THAT DECORATION TWIST

Did someone say Re-Upholstering and FRINGE SWAP? (that’s like decorator candy)

a selection of fringe and trim

fabrics we decided on for reuphostering

Katie our Assistant Set Decorator who valiantly swatched fabrics, fringe, and trim around NYC while we have one of our many meetings to narrow down options. And a box of the best LaCroix flavor: apricot

THIS IS THE SAME ANGLE ON PORTIA’S APARTMENT

For more set photos, view this gallery of Search Party Season 5 set photos.

Search Party Season 5 Streaming on HBOMax Today!

Assistant Set Decorator Katie Lobel (R) and me (L, looking very tired)

In honor of Search Party’s Season 5 drop today on HBOMax, I wanted to post some fun behind-the-scenes photos of the Set Decoration and Art Department teams working on the sets of the show when they were still just construction sites and ideas we were trying to bring to life.

First up, the most gratitude to Assistant Decorator @msladykobel the woman that made it happen. It was a two woman set dec team (!) and somehow we did it in a global pandemic thanks in large part to the ingenuity and detailed hardwork of @andrewbehm_ !

Our set dressing crew laying the flooring on the LYTE HQ set.

Huge thanks to the wonderful set dressing team @bowangkeo @aaronschraeter @ndprokopp @callmeluciferbaby pictured in Lyte HQ when it was but a construction site.

Production Designer Maggie Ruder and me in the LYTE Meditation Room.

All hail our fearless leader Maggie Ruder truly the most generous, kindest, and wonderful person to get to collaborate with creatively and who gave us the beautiful vision. Here we are together in the happy place (the meditation room with comfy floor cushions where I would escape to when it got too loud and crazy)

Art Director Katie Fleming, Production Designer Maggie Ruder, and Assistant Set Decorator Katie Lobel and I take a meeting on what we still need to do to finish this elevator to the center of the earth.

And the whole awesome Art Department and Set Dec team that made Search Party Season 5 a joy to work on: Loren Kane, graphic designer extraordinaire; Katie Fleming, Art Director Queen of the Plans, Art Dept Coordinator who held it all down Kevin @kuyakeben Sydney who cut all those graphics and more @sydbarbera and @nmontag25 who literally saved me once again.

Together we are as according to Tunnel aka Jeff Goldbum also apparently “the team that designed selfie castle!” 🌈

Katie Lobel testing out John Water’s chair out for him.

Also yes, that’s actually John Waters.

More in depth behind-the-scenes blog posts coming soon!

In the meantime view this gallery of Search Party Season 5 set photos.

Starting a New Job: Kaleidoscope (formerly known as Jigsaw)

Starting the way all jobs start nowadays: with some serious Covid Testing. Jan 2022, the first Omicron wave is sweeping the nation, everyone is coming down with Covid, so things were extra strict at work.

With our Penthouse Offices (hah) with a view in Bushwick! We were one of the few productions in the brand new Netflix studios in Bushwick, Brooklyn which were really nice.

The best office roommate: Jessica Petruccelli herself!!!! We had a grand time working together again in the same office room as we have on at least 7 other projects.

The Other Two S 2, Episode 9-- A Perfect Episode

toasting to a perfect episode The Other Two style

All of Season Two of “The Other Two” on HBOMax is laugh out loud hilarious, but I think Episode 9, “Chase & Pat Are Killing It” is a perfect episode of the specific type of humor The Other Two excels at: joke filled ridiculous situations that tenderly humiliate the characters while perfectly satirizing American pop culture and celebrity media to ultimately pay off with pathos and and affection for the characters.

It is also an episode with A LOT of sets!

Here are some little behind the scenes moments on some of them in the order they appear on screen.

the episode starts with Brooke and Cary flying First Class from New York City to LA

our challenge was to try and elevate a very old 1970’s plane set into something that could come somewhere in whiffing distance of a contemporary First Class Cabin.

Katie Lobel, the Assistant Set Decorator, and I both worked on The Flight Attendant, so we both knew a little bit about plane sets…but I’ll just say that the budget for The Flight Attendant and The Other Two are not the same at all. Think the difference of ground altitude and cruising altitude (a difference of 33,000 feet yet the numerical difference in budget is way more than $33,000).

Anyways so we had to get resourceful we thought changing some textiles would be a good bang for buck (we reupholstered the flight attendant’s chair, made custom curtains, and used fabric to recover the wall panels, and made custom seat headrests), screens and screen holders, and all the little details (magazine holders, safety cards, headphone cases etc) that make a space a believable plane.

evaluating fabric swatches for the plane cabin in the office.

I’m sure when you look at this photo you notice all the feet and perhaps not the custom curtains that are a nice tonal contrast to the fabric covering that wall or the custom embroidered and cut seat headrest pieces.

This is the crew dressing the set posing for a photo to send to the showrunners so they would see how the scripted feet gag might work.

Next set is the Sauna at the LA Hotel Brooke and Cary are staying at where Brooke runs into Alessia Cara. I can take no credit for the actual LA Hotel they filmed in because they filmed that in LA.

We built this sauna set on a stage in New York, and addition to our fancy sconces getting some on screen time I was pleased some sauna specific details we splurged on (because they are relatively small details they were something of an indulgence for a low budget comedy show) made it on screen!

our fancy sauna rock heater

The luxe sauna bucket and ladle and you can also see the bank of spa lockers we bought secondhand which was the first purchase I made for season 2.

When a set is more spare (like a sauna) each little detail matters sort of how like when you are cooking a simple recipe the quality of each ingredient matters more.

The next run of sets is when Cary visits a bunch of lawyers in LA for help in his photo going viral predicament. We were going to see three different lawyers offices, and while they were all filmed at actual NYC lawyers offices in midtown we were supposed to figure out a way to telegraph LA in the set dressing.

We came up with three different personas for each lawyer’s office based on stereotypes of LA and found artwork and set dressing details to flesh out these ideas:

1. a hiking outdoorsy lawyer

2. a health and wellness lawyer

3. a surfer who is really in to Japanese culture

I’m sorry to say you don’t see on screen much of what we brought in art or set dressing wise to create these personas for lawyer 1 or 2 (they even had real LA Legal magazines on their desks!), but you do see some of that surfer who is really into Japanese culture in this lawyer’s office:

somehow the cactus that was in the hiking outdoorsy lawyer’s office got moved into this set during filming. alas, have learned to try my best to let go once I leave set. anyways I’m sure most everyone like myself was most preoccupied with squealing at the Bowen Yang cameo.

Ok the next set that was super fun to work on was the underwear party nightclub.

To fully appreciate it I need you to go back to March 3, 2021 when most of us in NYC had been confined to our homes for almost a year. The idea of going to a packed nightclub was an exotic forbidden thought or a far distant memory.

In the vacuum of dance parties and crowded venues of fun, we stepped into an empty Elsewhere which had been vacant for a year to set up the LA nightclub set.

what it looked like when I arrived to the location to start dressing the set.

Yes, the stairs in the video are the ones you see on screen here:

Elsewhere provided some in-house technical staff to help us with lighting and etc and we had the fortune to work with the wonderful Dom Chang who indulged us, when I walked into a totally empty nightclub and thought well we should at least be pumping some tunes on their nice sound system while we work in here today.

please ignore my “middle aged mom visits the kids at the club” vibes.

Not only did Dom ask me what music I wanted (Robyn’s “Dancing on My Own” being the most appropriate in this situation obviously) HE DID THE LIGHTS FOR US to truly imitate being in a club and it was such a moment of sheer joy for all of us party-gathering-starved-in-a-pandemic-New Yorkers.

We were waiting for the set dressing truck to land, so our locations contact Will, Leadman Bo, and I had some fun. (can you believe that? FUN!)

Ok one last video of our merriment: Will our locations person hamming it up and Dom taking it one step further by enhancing with lights.

Sometimes production work can be a long marathon of stress so whenever there are openings of fun and joy you got to snatch it up and marinate in it.

Our moment of dance club euphoria was such a bright spot in an otherwise pretty glum winter that it almost doesn’t bother me at all that the part of the club we spent the most work on and overcame a logistics feat to dress didn’t even make it on 😐.

Thank you Absolut for all the product placement!

That wraps it up for my Behind-the-Scenes blog posts for Season Two of “The Other Two.” Hope you enjoyed watching the season as much as I did!

You can read all the posts I wrote about working on “The Other Two” here.

Lance's Character Through His Apartment Artwork

now that Lance is a successful fashion and sneaker designer we wanted to flesh out his creative life as a designer at this workstation. For the sneaker drawings we rented the original sketches of one of our beloved set dressers Aaron.

Like many fans of “The Other Two” on HBOMax my favorite character is the lovable Lance Arroyo played by Josh Segarra, so when working on decorating his apartment set I wanted to give it a lot of intention and care.

We first see Lance’s apartment in Season 1, but since his character has really flourished and experienced a professional glow up (from Foot Locker salesperson to Fashion Designer showing a full collection) we wanted his apartment to reflect that evolution too while maintaining the fun playful spirit of Lance’s character.

Lance and Chase at Lance’s fashion show

Chase backstage with a rack of the colorful clothes from Lance’s collection behind him.

Lance’s fashion line is full of bright yellows and oranges, so we wanted that to be reflected in the apartment accents and artwork too. You see Lance’s apartment before you see any pieces from his fashion line or the fashion show, so it is color preview of sorts.

artwork on the shelf is an original from Elisa Lopez

Since Josh the actor is of Puerto Rican descent, I decided Lance Arroyo was too and we set about looking for young Puerto Rican, Latinx, and artists of color to find artwork for Lance’s apartment that we could rent for the set.

print outs of the artwork we sought out for Lance’s apartment from artists Elisa Lopez, Dana Robinson, Ronald Perez, Chanel Chiffon Thomas, and Alicia Degener hanging on the wall in my office so we could see how it might all work together.

To reflect the streetwear sensibility of Lance’s fashion collection I thought he would probably be inspired by artists with similar vibes in their artwork.

In this shot you can see Ronald Perez’s and Chanel Chiffon Thomas’s artwork.

We were really pumped to find artwork from young art Puerto Rican, Latinx, and Black artists that we were able to feature in the set and best of all which appeared on screen!

A great shot of Chanel Chiffon Thomas’ piece here.

Not always a guarantee, because we decorate a set but have no control over how the scenes are shot and ultimately how the episode is edited.

Ronald Perez’s much loved “Cafe Bustelo” piece gets a lot of screentime in this episode.

Working with independent artists to rent and showcase their artwork in sets is always a ton more work than renting from a prop house or printing from a stock photo service but the results are always ten times more gratifying and uniquely tailored to a character.

And in the case of Lance, totally worth it.

You really get to see Dana Robinson’s wonderful painting a lot when we are in those hilarious bathroom scenes.

one last piece of original artwork we rented directly from an artist (in this case Becca Lowry) for Lance’s backstage room at his Fashion Show in the finale of Season Two (Episode 10.)

Becca Lowry (https://beccalowry.com/home.html) sculpture hanging on the wall.

If you are an artist reading this who is interested in working together to let me rent your artwork for a future set please email me and I would love to find a way to work together!

When you make jokes about cool church...

…God gets the last laugh!

Episode 5 of “The Other Two” season 2, takes place almost entirely inside a fictional “cool church” called “Christsong.” A ripe area for hilarious jokes and one of the sets we worked hardest to nail the very specific and unique vibe of the “cool church” phenomenon.

When I detail the true saga of dressing this set and finally filming it, you will see what I mean by “God gets the last laugh.” And by saga I mean S-A-G-A.

First joke to me, was when we scouted the rooftop pool party and baptism location in mid-Feburary with literal ice still on the ground:

you tell me we are going to film a pool party with actors in the water out here in a few weeks? Pictured on. the tech scout: Leadman Bo Wangkeo and Production Designer Maggie Ruder.

Ice or not, Maggie the production designer and the set decorating team got to work pulling references of the aesthetic of cool church mixed with a Coachella pool party (another touchstone mentioned in the script) to inspire and ground our design and decoration.

Maggie even found this INCREDIBLE research reference: a graphic designer who specializes in design for cool church and defining that aesthetic.

For instance for this very real magazine “Bible Study Magazine.”

Fast forward to mid-March on a nice sunny Friday when spring truly feels right around the corner, we are dressing the pool party set. We secure the valances we custom made and installed with zip ties crossing our fingers they will be secure over the weekend for when we film on Monday.

That Sunday cold winds were howling across New York City, and I only had one thought: I HOPE OUR VALANCES STAY PUT.

I kept thinking about how the maintenance workers at the pool said the winds can get so intense where the pool is that they have seen pool furniture and umbrellas lift right off the roof in the wind 😱.

I had a full body moment of anxiety even wondering if I should stop by the pool location (two boroughs away from where I live) to check on the valances and the set. But I was able to talk myself down and remind myself my grandma’s favorite saying “que sera sera.”

So I set my alarm for the next morning at 4am 😭 since we were scheduled to finish the pool set that morning before filming, said a small prayer for our valances and went to sleep.

Remember that saying “Beware the Ides of March?”

Monday March 15 was unseasonably cold. LIKE BELOW FREEZING COLD (25 F). ☠️ ☠️ ☠️Remember this is a pool scene where actors get inside the pool???

Here’s a little snapshot of the Art and Set Decoration team getting to work at 5am:

can you hear how cold that is?

Leadman Bo with set dressers Mina and Sean.

Regardless we all keep on gamely dressing the set getting it ready for filming or for someone to call off filming those scenes today (whichever comes first). Our fingers were literally freezing.

And then we get to the famous hurry-up-and-wait portion of tv making.

I’m extremely grateful everyone kept a good attitude going when it would have been perfectly understandable to be cranky at this point.

And finally we get the set finished! After those weeks of research and planning it has materialized before our eyes…

the whole pool party vibe makes it look so much warmer than it actually was. You can see more set photos here.

…and of course once everything was ready to go, the call was finally made to not shoot the pool party scenes that day. A VERY SENSIBLE DECISION.

You might think that’s what I meant by saga, but hahaha that’s only the beginning of the journey of dressing this set and what you finally see on screen in Episode 5.

We have decided to now film these pool party scenes a week later on March 23. Ok great. So we start taking everything down and securing it all to film again in a week.

On March 22, I had a tech scout, but I get a photo from the set dressers that everything is going well. It is even warm enough for one our set dressers Aaron to get in the pool to wrangle everything.

Things are looking great for filming the next day, but then all of a sudden Monday afternoon we get some abruptly shocking news: our production is shutting down for two weeks because of a COVID outbreak in our cast and crew. 😱.

So the next day we take down all the dressing again for two weeks later when we can film this scene finally…

When that time comes now, in early April…we get shut down AGAIN because of another COVID outbreak. (Yes, if you are keeping track at home that is THREE TIMES we have dressed this set only for weather or pandemic viral outbreak to prevent us from filming the scenes…an “Act of God” you might say?”)

Finally mid-April (at which point I’m no longer on this job because the next job I’m decorating has already started and I found another decorator to replace me to oversee the fourth time this set will be dressed) the pool scene (in wonderful warm weather) is finally shot.

More than 1 month later than originally planned, 4 times dressing and taking things down:

HALLELUJAH

To see more shots of this set, please see the portfolio section of my website here.

Ok, one little extra behind-the-scenes tidbit related to this set:

During one production meeting showrunner, creator, and writer Chris Kelly expressed his wish that not only would there be jokes in the lines and the set up of all the cool church scenes, but that visually each frame shot in these scenes would contain jokes from the wardrobe department, hair and makeup, props, and in the sets. In essence we were all coming together to really milk all the comedy potential from this premise.

Growing up in a Southern Baptist church, years of Sunday School, Bible Studies, Vacation Bible School I felt this was a challenge I was uniquely positioned to answer. So I started the wheels turning in the background of my mind of how we could add in some jokes in the decor details…

One weekend while going through Manhattan it dawned on me JESUS TURNING WINE INTO WATER! That should be the theme of our centerpieces in the VIP section of “Christsong” and the bar area near the pool.

Graphic Designer extraordinaire Loren Kane came up with these drink menus based on the idea.

You can also see the drink menus as centerpieces when we get into the VIP church members only party.