Antonia Popova
The barber shop had been closed up for years but he saw real potential – Hair cuts and tattoos !, Im going to call it “Figaros….”
Set in 1970's New York, a young man enters an abandoned barber shop named "Figaros". As he walks around, he reminisces of the busy, lively and valuable part of society the shop used to be. Furthermore highlighting the contrasts a few decades have done to the place. The character stumbles upon the secret tattoo studio on the second floor of the barber shop. The moonlight shinning through the blinds, he looks through the various popular at the time designs.
The main objectives of the project were to create a sort of time capsule, which captures the cultural significance of the New York barber and tattoo shop. To achieve a drastic contrast between nostalgia and reality without moving props or flats, the project needed to rely heavily on lighting design. The short film has no dialogue, which places further significance on the set becoming a character and interacting or leading the protagonist throughout the shop. The set transforms multiple times from a dusty,cold and forgotten place, to a soft and hazy dream or fantasy.
I designed the facade and interior of the barber shop, as well as the interior upstairs tattoo studio. After researching and making the construction drawings in AutoCad, I painted the flats and made the Figaros sign. The project involved set dressing and prop making.
My thesis explores how set design and imagined spaces are not only neutral backdrops, but fully live and interactive storytelling devices, narrators and characters. They aid audiences in understanding the deeper cultural and social backgrounds of the fictional worlds. Furthermore, characters are able to interact with them, which helps viewers understand characters’ dynamics and relations between each other and between their surrounding worlds. Imagined spaces can be used not only as architectural satirical critique, but as a critique to spatial threats. Furthermore, they can be extensions reinforcing political regimes and ideological systems through spatial layout, materials and architectural references. Architectural elements in cinematic imagined spaces determine how homely or unhomely places feel, which predicts characters’ emotional responses and actions. Features like grandiosity/scale, repetition, symmetry and building materials contribute to the feelings of the uncanny, as well as shape how characters view the fictional world and interact with and withing it. These elements are also linked to enforcing mass surveillance systems in all of the primary sources reviewed.
As a Design for Film graduate, specialising in Production Design, I have spent the last four years learning to draw technical drawings in AutoCad, SketchUp,rendering in Twinmotion, making card models, as well as gaining valuable practical experience.
I aspire to design sets that act as storytellers, live creatures, which interact with characters or reflect their world and inner thoughts.
Watching Bulgarian puppet theatre from an early age has made me appreciate the art of live theatre performances and abstract set design and props.
