Project Intro - Weird Barbie Scene

This was a student practice production at Creative Media Skills, where we had to recreate as close as possible a scene from a popular known film, in our class category and in collaboration with the other class groups:

• Art Department
• Hair, Costume and Special Effects Makeup
• Directing, Cinematography and Producing

The concept was to do a practice film to help us later for the much more complex end of year production Domiciles.

Here we picked the film we had to do a scene from out of a Hat. I picked the Weird Barbie scene from the movie Barbie. Other groups got the father and Jack Sparrow pirate bar chat from the 4^th Pirates of the Caribbean film, the Android knife around fingers game from the first Alien movie and the fight scene from the move The Darjeeling Limited.

We were divided into small groups; I was with two girls Harriet Waller and Kate Stebbings.

I also was seriously delayed in starting with the others due to problems with my Star Wars prop making group.

Myself Kate and Harriet were the Art Department crew. casting came from the directors.

Costume hair and makeup  also did their share of the production/

<   Please click to download  >
<   Weird Barbie Script   >

< Here  >

This was the film clip script we were given to create and film.

Scene we were assigned to recreate from Barbie

This is roughly the scene we were assigned to recreate as a production. I’ve embedded the closes real clip I could find to are clip script. We were given a very small budget or a couple of £100 pounds if I remember to do this.

Crew Input

Unlike most of the work here, I have had little creative input in this project, Kate and Harriet very much made this their creative expression, so I was more crew this time.

The town mural and the set design were student Kate’s Stebbings who was an excellent illustrator.

I was also looking into making or acquiring a suitable ‘familiar’ weird soft toy companion to be a weird Barbie companion, but could not find the right look to please the set decorator and directors.

I did put in the effort to see the set constructed staying longer hours and worked more days than others when things got started and helped keep their budget down by acquiring large amounts of free paint after joining in later due to difficulties during the my Star Wars Project. Below are Kate's concept sketches.

Set Construction Barbie

Below is the set construction as we learned to build flats. We were in different groups building the flats but did not get to use the table saw. I added addition coats and touched up paint on the dummy. I also did the creative work on the drop-down transportation flag. Harriet had connections to turn my photo bashing from weird vehicles and sketches into metallic foil printing on material due to connections she had.

Transportation Flag Development

Transportation flag development research and development. For the scene where Weird Barbie describes the journey to the real world involving lots of transportation types I tried to find the wackiest images and vehicles I could. I initially looking into kid’s books on transportation from the 50s then got wackier.

Weird Barbie Plus Companion Research

Whilst in the end the directors chose not to give the weird barbie character my ides of a weird soft oy companion you can see what I was thinking of from the research here. The first I looked at were collectable plus soft toys from a company Kill Star with their Kreeptures range that specialises in goth and alternative metal clothing, mostly from young women. I also looked at plushies from Spiral Direct that specialises rock and metal clothing and their bat cat/kitten is a character that features in much of their products.

The body shape being the size and dimensions of a human baby. I also looked into using a jester stick with glowing eye I had made for Halloween.

Characters from the horror movie Five Nights at Freddies were also looked at and I tried to alter a teddy bear to make it look more fetish and weird.