MidMod Squad

Producers of Educational Entertainment.

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Building the NEW Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood – Part 5

June 13, 2017 by the Chief

An important part of the original Mr. Rogers’ show was the opening shot of zooming into his miniature neighborhood set. Pee Wee’s Playhouse used a similar device in its opening shots as well. There is nothing quite as charming and engaging as a miniature world of make believe and the Green Room is determined to follow in the steps of the greats!

Detail Shots

Many of the buildings have homages to special people who have been part of the historic preservation scene in Los Angeles and beyond. Their names appear on billboards, building signs and other hidden spots around the set. These are often called “hidden mickeys” (from Disneyland) or what they call “easter eggs” in the business. Radio DJ Javas Bachelor Pad has a coffee shop, historian architect, Alan Hess has a hotel, historian author Chris Nichols has a bank, the Pasadena Doo Dah parade operate a motel, musician Mark Tortoricci runs an Italian restaurant / jazz club, and other friends are represented throughout.

The city is filled with ecology conscious buildings or concepts, from an organic farm to an alternative energy power substation based on hydroelectric power, to a clean green vegan snack bar.

  

The Final Project

The establishing shot starts on Fred Rogers’ house and sweeps across the city following the monorail up to the green house green room. Since we did not own or know anyone who owned a steady cam or fancy hanging camera setup, we tried using a tripod and all sorts of makeshift dollies. But in the end a steady hand held camera – along with some anti-shake software helped us get the final shot. Here you can see how shaky some of the original footage was!

http://www.midmodsquad.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Neighborhood-Passover-test.mp4

You can see the entire neighborhood for yourself. It is on display at the Valley Relics Museum in Chatsworth, CA. They are open every Saturday afternoon and admission is FREE! http://www.valleyrelics.org


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The Green Room Sizzle Reel

Filed Under: General News, the Green Room Tagged With: alternative energy, ecology, fred rogers, Little city, miniature, model city, monorail, Mr Rogers, Neighborhood, Pee Wee Herman, PeeWee's Playhouse, progress city, vegan

Building the NEW Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood – Part 4

June 6, 2017 by the Chief

An important part of the original Mr. Rogers’ show was the opening shot of zooming into his miniature neighborhood set. Pee Wee’s Playhouse used a similar device in its opening shots as well. There is nothing quite as charming and engaging as a miniature world of make believe and the Green Room is determined to follow in the steps of the greats!

Building the Buildings

The first and most important building was to find the house that would be Mr. Rogers’ home. There is a company that actually made that very model building. We acquired it, but it had to be slightly modified to match the original. from left to right (original-model-our adaptation).

Mr. Rogers’ home now is surrounded by fruit bearing orange trees. We think he’d like that!

The main “Green Room” green house was next in line. It had to be something fairly fun and innovative. And there was a wonderful Googie inspired MidMod house HO scale model from the 1960s that fit the bill perfectly… once it was painted lime green.

The remaining main character next door neighbors homes were all specially customized. Best gal pal Ruby’s house is done in red and pink colors. Colonel Bombay is maroon-white-and-blue. And Billy the Beachcomber lives in an A frame tiki shack surrounded by palm trees.

  

Then there was an entire neighborhood blocks and city buildings to make, paint, and customize… Some were vintage HO models from her dad’s train set that Mary-Margaret grew up with. These were old German HO model house buildings repainted and spruced up to look fresh and new.

 

Stay tuned for Part 5 with some wonderful detail shots of the final set.


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The Green Room Sizzle Reel

Filed Under: General News, the Green Room Tagged With: fred rogers, model city, monorail, Neighborhood, Pee Wee Herman, PeeWee's Playhouse

Building the NEW Mr. Rogers Neighborhood – Part 3

May 30, 2017 by the Chief

An important part of the original Mr. Rogers’ show was the opening shot of zooming into his miniature neighborhood set. Pee Wee’s Playhouse used a similar device in its opening shots as well. There is nothing quite as charming and engaging as a miniature world of make believe and the Green Room is determined to follow in the steps of the greats!

Building the Base

The plywood base was 4′ x 5′ with detachable galvanized pipe screw-in legs making it easier to transport. Some of the initial buildings were rough placed to see how it would all fit together.

Everything had to be very lightweight for easy transport, so rather than build the hills out of the standard chicken wire and plaster, 2″ thick house insulation styrofoam was glued to the plywood.

 

http://www.midmodsquad.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/building-the-base-set.mp4

Once the foam base was built, additional realistic geographic features were added, including grassy hills, a stream and waterfall. Prior to finalizing these details, rough assemblage of some buildings was done to check placements:

  

Then to apply the concrete (grey cardboard) pavements and grassy hills and make the stream and waterfall.

   

Stay tuned for Part 4 where we discuss the model buildings.


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The Green Room Sizzle Reel

Filed Under: General News, the Green Room Tagged With: model city, monorail, Mr Rogers, Neighborhood, Pee Wee Herman, PeeWee's Playhouse, styrofoam, train set

Building the NEW Mr. Rogers Neighborhood – Part 2

May 23, 2017 by the Chief

An important part of the original Mr. Rogers’ show was the opening shot of zooming into his miniature neighborhood set. Pee Wee’s Playhouse used a similar device in its opening shots as well. There is nothing quite as charming and engaging as a miniature world of make believe and the Green Room is determined to follow in the steps of the greats!

Designing a Layout to Accommodate the Monorail

The scale chosen was standard HO scale due to the availability of a wide variety of building, trees, accessories, and other “set” pieces. A layout was designed that would include places where alternative energy could be demonstrated: solar, wind, hydro-electric, as well as a gardening and recycling centers, etc. The initial layouts looked like this:

About the Monorail

Like Mr Rogers’ Neighborhood Trolley, a moving monorail is essential to the script and story development. It serves as a transition device between real world events and imaginary world events. The Australian Darling Harbor Harbourlink toy was chosen as the best for scale and design.

 

Tests were done with various transformers to make sure the vintage HO monorail purchased through ebay worked.

http://www.midmodsquad.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Monorail-test.mp4

Background movement was provided by a Matchbox Motor Speedway which would allow matchbox and hot wheels cars to move around the city. We had a 3 car pileup at the Giant Donut shop while testing out the track! Luckily, since it was a donut shop, the police were nearby!

 

http://www.midmodsquad.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Succesful-installation-of-new...-The-MidMod-Squad.mp4

Stay tuned for Part 3!


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The Green Room Sizzle Reel

Filed Under: General News, the Green Room Tagged With: fred rogers, miniature, model city, monorail, Mr Rogers, Neighborhood, Pee Wee Herman, PeeWee's Playhouse, styrofoam, train set

Building the NEW Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood – Part 1

May 16, 2017 by the Chief

An important part of the original Mr. Rogers’ show was the opening shot of zooming into his miniature neighborhood set. Pee Wee’s Playhouse used a similar device in its opening shots as well. There is nothing quite as charming and engaging as a miniature world of make believe and the Green Room is determined to follow in the steps of the greats!

Designing the Neighborhood

The neighborhood model city set was inspired obviously by the original Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood along with a little PeeWee’s Playhouse intro. It was also inspired by the vision of Walt Disney and the never-built Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow (now to be confused EPCOT) and the model city which appeared at the 1964-65 World’s Fair and later at the Carousel of Progress in Disneyland. (Now it was cut up and parts of it appear in Walt Disney World on the People Mover).

  

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fHxvWwBtAFU

So the neighborhood city we built has a 1960s approach to the world of tomorrow, approach with a little Googie thrown in for good measure. The set needed to be built to accommodate many future episodes that might have the lead visit many unusual diverse locations.

Stay tuned for Part 2 – About the Monorail and more…


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The Green Room Sizzle Reel

Filed Under: General News, the Green Room Tagged With: carousel of progress, disneyland, fred rogers, model city, Mr Rogers, Pee Wee Herman, PeeWee's Playhouse, progress city

Building the Green Room Sizzle Reel SHAG Puppets – Part 4

May 9, 2017 by the Chief

An important part of the original Mr. Rogers’ show was the World of Make Believe which was inhabited mainly by puppets and occasionally by humans. The Green Room’s world of make believe is inhabited by marionette style puppets inspired by the work of the artist, Josh Agle also known as SHAG. You can learn more about his work on his website. http://www.shag.com

How to green screen a puppet on a budget?

We quickly realized that it took at least 3 sets of hands to make all of the little parts move pleasantly…

Testing against make-shift green screens in Doug’s garage with different lighting.

http://www.midmodsquad.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/INSIDE-with-different-lighting.mp4
http://www.midmodsquad.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/puppet-test.mp4

Some final footage with the moon background. Of course in the reel show they would have an actual SHAG designed set to play in.

http://www.midmodsquad.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Puppets_shorter.mp4

So please wish us well that we get this show going!

And thanks for checking our progress out.


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The Green Room Sizzle Reel

Filed Under: General News, the Green Room Tagged With: bob baker, dolls, marionettes, puppets, SHAG, strings, team america, thunderbirds, vintage

SCTC Sitcom Contest Semi-finalist

May 2, 2017 by the Chief

MidMod Squad is a Second City Semi Finalist!!!

The revered hall of fame comedy training center, Second City, based out of Chicago, has nurtured talents like: Dan Aykroyd, James Belushi, John Belushi, John Candy, Steve Carell, Stephen Colbert, Chris Farley, Tina Fey, Eugene Levy, Jane Lynch, Andrea Martin, Tim Meadows, Bill Murray, Mike Myers, Catherine O’Hara, Gilda Radner, Harold Ramis, Joan Rivers, Amy Sedaris, Martin Short, George Wendt and Fred Willard, among others, including of course the cast of the now infamous SCTV series. … and incidentally – The Strattons of MidMod Squad are also SC alum…

Most recently, they held a writing contest – The SCTC Sitcom Contest. We are more than pleased and honored to announced that Finalists and Semi-finalists have been announced! and the MidMod Squad pilot for The Green Room – television show for children of all ages was a semi-finalist!!! Congratulations to the finalists and winners, and a big thank you to SCTC for having such good taste!

http://www.secondcity.com/sctc-original-sitcom-contest

Filed Under: General News, the Green Room

Building the Green Room Sizzle Reel SHAG Puppets – Part 3

May 2, 2017 by the Chief

An important part of the original Mr. Rogers’ show was the World of Make Believe which was inhabited mainly by puppets and occasionally by humans. The Green Room’s world of make believe is inhabited by marionette style puppets inspired by the work of the artist, Josh Agle also known as SHAG. You can learn more about his work on his website. http://www.shag.com

Making the Old Fashioned Marionettes

Making the heads from styrafoam. clay, chopsticks, and acrylic paint.

 

It was fun to figure out how to design the arms and legs to mimic the pencil thin pointy style of SHAG’s limbs and appendages.

 

These dolls were very fragile, so all sorts of funny things happened while making them!

http://www.midmodsquad.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/20150914_121002.mp4

Next to give the marionettes their moment in the spotlight… Stay tuned for Part 4 where we tried to green screen the puppets.


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The Green Room Sizzle Reel

Filed Under: General News, the Green Room Tagged With: bob baker, dolls, marionettes, puppets, SHAG, strings, team america, thunderbirds, vintage

Building the Green Room Sizzle Reel SHAG Puppets – Part 2

April 25, 2017 by the Chief

An important part of the original Mr. Rogers’ show was the World of Make Believe which was inhabited mainly by puppets and occasionally by humans. The Green Room’s world of make believe is inhabited by marionette style puppets inspired by the work of the artist, Josh Agle also known as SHAG. You can learn more about his work on his website. http://www.shag.com

The next thing we had to do was to chose the characters to be demonstrated and then actually build marionettes for the sizzle reel.

Visualizing SHAG in 3D

Picking out the SHAG characters and background was a fun exercise. We wanted to make sure we included a man and a woman character and also  to make them diverse.

We narrowed it down to 2 characters in our pilot script:

SHAG Josh Agle design puppet character

SHAG Josh Agle design puppet character

SHAG has several existing three dimensional toys out such as those by Disney and others. So they were helpful to analyze how to interpret SHAGS work in the 3D world.

We did try to find someone to model them in 3D animation software through fivvr campaign. That proved to be disastrous. Poor attempts from 3rd parties to create a puppet in 3D programs are below.

 got turned into these: 

We decided it would be best to do it the old fashioned way…

Stay tuned for Part 3.


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The Green Room Sizzle Reel

Filed Under: General News, the Green Room Tagged With: bob baker, dolls, marionettes, puppets, SHAG, strings, team america, thunderbirds, vintage

Building the Green Room Sizzle Reel SHAG Puppets – Part 1

April 18, 2017 by the Chief

An important part of the original Mr. Rogers’ show was the World of Make Believe which was inhabited mainly by puppets and occasionally by humans. The Green Room’s world of make believe is inhabited by marionette style puppets inspired by the work of the artist, Josh Agle also known as SHAG. You can learn more about his work on his website. http://www.shag.com

The first thing we had to do was research how other marionettes were made and make a simplified version of them for the purposes of demonstration for the sizzle reel.

Looking at armatures of other marionettes.

Olvera Street sells cheap little marionettes very simply crafted. It was this style that we ended up using for the sake of the demo. The actual show will require more complex marionette action.

We also looked at videos of Thunderbirds are a go, Team America, and other random armatures

    

Here is producer Mary-Margaret backstage at the Bob Baker Marionettes Theater in downtown Los Angeles

  

Stay tuned for Part 2!


Please like our page on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/midmodsquad/

The Green Room Sizzle Reel

Filed Under: General News, the Green Room Tagged With: bob baker, dolls, marionettes, puppets, SHAG, strings, team america, thunderbirds, vintage

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Confidential. This document and the information contained therein is confidential and should not be disclosed, duplicated, in whole or in part. Television Treatments and Pilots are REGISTERED WGAw. Show Bible and Pilot Script available on request.
  • Home
  • Projects
    • Dear Cherry PRX (Public Radio Exchange)
    • The Green Room Children’s TV
      • BETTER Tomorrow!
      • What is a Green Room?
      • Diverse Players
      • Merchandising
      • Underwriting
      • Sponsorship
    • Lotta Livin’ Modern Lifestyle Show
    • Sugar! Sugar! Musical Comedy Theater
    • Additional Show Treatments
  • Principles
    • MidMod Squad Principles m&m
    • MidMod Squad Principles – Cary
    • MidMod Squad Principle – Michael
    • MidMod Squad Principle – Steve
  • Latest News
  • Home
  • Projects
    • Dear Cherry PRX (Public Radio Exchange)
    • The Green Room Children’s TV
      • BETTER Tomorrow!
      • What is a Green Room?
      • Diverse Players
      • Merchandising
      • Underwriting
      • Sponsorship
    • Lotta Livin’ Modern Lifestyle Show
    • Sugar! Sugar! Musical Comedy Theater
    • Additional Show Treatments
  • Principles
    • MidMod Squad Principles m&m
    • MidMod Squad Principles – Cary
    • MidMod Squad Principle – Michael
    • MidMod Squad Principle – Steve
  • Latest News

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