First of all, how is it that we never knew you visited the set of Sesame Street on multiple occasions? That’s astonishing to me! For my entire life I have always wanted to see the Sesame Street set and I’ve never known anyone who has had access to it. You play it off somewhat casually but I can’t tell you how jealous I am! I want a virtual walk-through! Even if you Google it not much comes up. It’s like you won the golden ticket, how cool! I can’t believe you met the cast members! I was born in August 1969 and Sesame Street premiered 3 months later. This always reminds me of how old the show is and, sadly, how old I am.
I've been fortunate to be getting email updates on this entire process. My favorite detail is below (and I'm quoting Jordan directly so I get it right).
"The trick to window glass is that it's NOT FLAT. Once you start to get a wave into the surface it starts to look much more real. Kind of like the FX dudes' commentary about adding the droplets of spray to the "watcher in the water" scene in The Fellowship of the Ring, which made all the difference."
I'm glad you consider that a reason to be 'fortunate,' Octo! My emails have been so constant and so obsessive that I've wondered whether anyone could have the patience for them.
Still, my favorite was the most recent, where I described all my false starts making the backdrop and used the MGM cartoon-style "LAME-O" (with the foghorn, etc.)
JPX, I started in 2006 (as I mentioned in my blog post). I stopped after a while, restarted in 2008, stopped for a while, and then came back to it this year for the final two-month crunch that finished it.
The 2012 version is actually called "Sesame Street 2," since I realized (in the immortal words of Octopunk) that "the best thing I could do was start over," leveraging everything I'd learned from my Kubrick Space Pod project, which you can see on the same page: http://www.jordanorlando.com/ns/index.php/cgi/
Of course I wasn't completely starting from scratch; there were many elements that I could carry over from the first, aborted version.
I still can't believe I finished it (or, at least, got through my checklist; there are still pieces that aren't there, such as Oscar's trashcan, those multicolored oil-drum props in the courtyard, two more painted backdrops etc.) but I had to draw an arbitrary line: I would only build the set and none of the props (except the trees, hydrant, mailbox etc. that are "street architecture."
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My father worked for Children's Television workshop through the 1970s, starting as a public relations consultant and as the speechwriter for Joan Ganz Cooney, the founder of CTW and, basically, the creator of Sesame Street. He was involved in the earliest stages of the show's creation and evolution in 1969-1970, when the idea of publicly-funded programming for children that was firmly grounded in academic principles of pre-school education (as well as a sociological and political/economic understanding of the needs of modern children, particularly in inner cities, where television often took the place of parenting or schooling). Dad worked closely with Cooney and others to develop the presentational materials that were used to draw attention to the project and even attended the White House Conference on Children and Youth in 1970. Sesame Street was very much a product of the social upheavals of the late 'Sixties, and its ideas and methodology (including the Marshall McLuhan-esque idea of creating "advertisements" for the numerals and letters of the alphabet which "sponsored" the show), while commonplace today, were groundbreaking and revolutionary at the time. Also, not least, Sesame Street introduced the world to Jim Henson's Muppets (which, to Joan Cooney's decades-long chagrin, could at one time have been bought outright by CTW but were not).
In 1971 or 1972 my father brought me to Sesame Street to see the set and meet the cast. It was, to say the least, an unforgettable experience. I still vividly remember our first arrival there, on a rainy day, heading East on 81st street to the grimy, windowless side-door (the Vaudville Theater's original exit door) which was opened from the inside (by some mysterious pre-arranged signal) and gave on a dark corridor of black-velvet draperies that led to a brilliantly-lit space where I saw something that blew my mind for good. I had been expecting to visit a street (the actual, fictitious place I imagined that I was seeing on our black-and-white television), but, instead, I was inside a brilliantly-lit room where the vividly-colored buildings had been (apparently) re-built at an arbitrary angle and surrounded by painted backdrops and dozens of pieces of theatrical equipment. I was allowed to wander around the set for a long time, looking up-close at the wooden construction, the painted sidewalk, the plastic trees, and at some point it fully sank in that this was Sesame Street -- that the imaginary, sunlit stretch of Harlem I was so familiar with was where I was standing at that moment. I went back several more times, but I think that first visit was one of the most important moments of my childhood; an entire raft of cinematic and architectural ambitions and obsessions (which still burden me now) were ignited on that day.
In April 2006 I visited the New York State Museum in Albany (with my friend Brendan Kennedy and his daughter Annabella), where the original 1970 "123 Sesame Street" building façade is on exhibit, along with a display panel depicting a reproduction of one of the original construction blueprint floor plans. At that time, I was just beginning to teach myself digital CGI modeling and rendering (I had not yet done my animated "Buehrig Design" film (for the Auburn Cord Duesenberg Automobile Museum's gallery of my grandfather Gordon M. Buehrig's revolutionary car-design methods) and the Sesame Street facade and plan (which I photographed exhaustively on that day) were the basis for my first large-scaled Maya project, a full reconstruction of the original Sesame Street set.
"1970 Sesame Street: My Digital Recreation"
8 Comments -
super cool all 'round.
May 31, 2012 6:03 PM
First of all, how is it that we never knew you visited the set of Sesame Street on multiple occasions? That’s astonishing to me! For my entire life I have always wanted to see the Sesame Street set and I’ve never known anyone who has had access to it. You play it off somewhat casually but I can’t tell you how jealous I am! I want a virtual walk-through! Even if you Google it not much comes up. It’s like you won the golden ticket, how cool! I can’t believe you met the cast members! I was born in August 1969 and Sesame Street premiered 3 months later. This always reminds me of how old the show is and, sadly, how old I am.
June 01, 2012 5:06 AM
And second of all?
June 01, 2012 8:01 AM
Second of all I love how you recreated it! I can't imagine how much time that must have taken.
June 01, 2012 8:06 AM
I've been fortunate to be getting email updates on this entire process. My favorite detail is below (and I'm quoting Jordan directly so I get it right).
"The trick to window glass is that it's NOT FLAT. Once you start to get a wave into the surface it starts to look much more real. Kind of like the FX dudes' commentary about adding the droplets of spray to the "watcher in the water" scene in The Fellowship of the Ring, which made all the difference."
June 01, 2012 8:18 AM
I'm glad you consider that a reason to be 'fortunate,' Octo! My emails have been so constant and so obsessive that I've wondered whether anyone could have the patience for them.
Still, my favorite was the most recent, where I described all my false starts making the backdrop and used the MGM cartoon-style "LAME-O" (with the foghorn, etc.)
June 01, 2012 8:36 AM
JPX, I started in 2006 (as I mentioned in my blog post). I stopped after a while, restarted in 2008, stopped for a while, and then came back to it this year for the final two-month crunch that finished it.
The 2012 version is actually called "Sesame Street 2," since I realized (in the immortal words of Octopunk) that "the best thing I could do was start over," leveraging everything I'd learned from my Kubrick Space Pod project, which you can see on the same page: http://www.jordanorlando.com/ns/index.php/cgi/
Of course I wasn't completely starting from scratch; there were many elements that I could carry over from the first, aborted version.
I still can't believe I finished it (or, at least, got through my checklist; there are still pieces that aren't there, such as Oscar's trashcan, those multicolored oil-drum props in the courtyard, two more painted backdrops etc.) but I had to draw an arbitrary line: I would only build the set and none of the props (except the trees, hydrant, mailbox etc. that are "street architecture."
June 01, 2012 8:45 AM
Brilliant!!
June 06, 2012 7:16 PM