Making of the Wood Planks

After looking at images of prison warden’s office desks, I noted that majority of them where constructed of a dark toned hardwood, and some of their other furniture was made from brighter toned hardwood. Now knowing what wood, I needed, I went to Rob, my school’s DT technician, to ask him if the school could spare a few scrap planks of wood, he happily obliged and dug out 2 boards of spare wood they had in storage, one dark toned hardwood and another lighter toned softwood. I drew out rectangular shapes on the boards in the exact number of planks I needed, 8.

Using the ban saw he then cut out 4 planks from each board.

(plus 1 extra from each board, just in case)

  

After he cut the planks out, I explained to him that I am using them for a movie project and told him a summary of what the movie is about. He suggested why don’t we ruin the planks a bit and misshape them to make them look roughly carved out and old/overused. I really liked his suggestion and carried it out. Rob gave me and Libby, my project partner for this movie, hammers, files and a chisel, we then set out on our anger management course. (with robs supervision, obviously)

(I accidentally ended up breaking that hammer in the image, woops!)

Rob and a friend of mine joined along and we ended up finishing in around 40 min.

  

 

The next step was to research emotions to put on these planks, so I did some internet research and eventually found this image which provides a chart on the main emotions humans feel along with their sub-emotions. I chose the emotions that I liked from each segment. 

The next day I sat down and drew out each choice onto each plank, the pessimistic emotions where drawn on the dark wood and the optimistic emotions on the light wood, because I want there to be a visual difference between them, so it looks more organised. 

Rob then provided me with a Linus tool to carve out the words.

 It was very hard to carve, it took way to long, and gave me a lot of splinters from the light softwood, (softwood is the splintery type of wood, hardwood doesn’t splinter). A single plank took 1.5 hours. So, I stopped after Anger, and asked Rob if he knows another way to carve these planks, he looked over my shoulder at the planks on the table, stared, squinted for a solid minute and a half, and replied “Yeah”, with a smile. He picked up a plank and using a big machine started drilling holes inside the letters. After inspecting the drilled plank, he did the same for the rest of the planks.

He then gave me a chisel and told me to carve out the letters, the holes where there to make it easier, as there is now less wood in the middle of each letter. I didn’t manage to finish it all during school, so I took the rest of the planks home and did it there. It took far less time to do each word, around 35 min per plank. I found my own chisel in my houses tool box and did it on my room floor, with a vacuum on standby to clear out the saw dust after every plank. 

After finishing the carving I noticed how the words would be difficult to distinguish in a dark setting from a distance, and that some planks where starting to break apart (I guess I chiselled too hard). So, the next day I asked Libby if she could apply PVA glue into the letters, thinking that it would solidify and give the wood a darker, more reflective tone (because wood darkens when wet) and hold the planks together.

Later that day, when I came to check up on it the glue solidified, but it didn’t darken the wood within the letters.

  

I took the planks home again and dug out a black paint bottle with a brush, and started painting the inside of the letters. The end result was much better. These are the final planks.