Evil Cave Building for Beginners - Pt1: A Plethora of Plastic Preparations (Patreon)

Have you ever dreamed of running an evil empire from a secret underground location? Craved a subterranean existence to escape the stresses of the surface world? Or perhaps you just want to save money on the heating bill by living with the luxury under-floor heating powers of magma?
If so then boy-howdy do I have a treat for you! Here's the process behind the design and building of the Stupendi-Lair from 'Fiend Like Me!'

The game sees you fill the shoes of one of four geniuses to take over the world. So herein lies the first problem. Obviously I want to BE a genius for the video, but which? Two of the geniuses (genii?) are female and of the two male ones, one is a huge muscular Russian chap and the other is a tiny round bald man. They each have their own unique persona and visual aesthetic to their lair's but none of them I could convincingly portray!
So what to do? I guess if I can't be one of the game's villains... I'll have to be my own! What would my lair look like?

Maybe something like this?

This is the initial concept design of the set. (Well, the cleaned up digital version, the initial design was akin to a series of scribbles on a napkin. This is the first design I could show someone and retain some credibility as an artist)

I think you'll agree we got pretty close! There were complications along the way, some minor changes had to be made, we added elements as we went too, but I'm very happy with how close we got to my original idea!

So from here I'll try and summarise how we went from initial design to completed set. I took photos as we went but not in any thorough or regimented manner so I'll do my best to put things in an order that makes sense!

Here goes!

Back in late 2019 I was made aware of a company here in the UK called Peter Evans Studio. They specialise in making scenic elements for the UK theatre industry. They have a HUGE catalogue of awesome things; architectural fittings, wood panels and stonework, industrial fixtures, sculptures, doors and windows, all available to order in large vacuum formed plastic sheets.
I knew that I wanted to raid that catalogue for a video at some point. Then 2020 happened and videos suddenly went back to being 'made in my living room on a tiny green screen' affairs.

Now I have moved to be local to the studio the travel restrictions can't keep me from using it and with Evil Genius being a sponsored project it was the perfect opportunity to go all-in on a big complex set. (I've got another already built and filmed on the way too!)

So a phone call to Peter Evans and his team and a week later two of their chaps show up in a van with this:

A huge trolley load of vacuum formed stuff! 11 rock walls 10 girders, 8 arches, 2 'portholes' (we'll get to those) and a bunch of buttons! All a bit grey looking though...

Cue two days of painting!

...Ok, not quite painting. Turns out vacuum formed plastic needs a specialist primer for paint to adhere to it properly. This primer is entirely translucent. So cue a whole day of painting awkwardly shaped plain plastic with a substance that is near totally invisible when applied, making it incredibly difficult to tell how effectively you are covering things or what parts you've done already.

Phew. Ok, NOW we can get to the two days of painting!

We spent a day doing the base coats of everything, all of the silver for the metal and all of the black for the rock.
On day two we detailed everything. We gave all of the metalwork a coat of chrome spray paint, not a full heavy coat but a long range misting with a wide nozzle. The base paint we'd used was a metallic silver house paint (see above) and though it was metallic it wasn't really shiny enough. Luckily I had a large can of incredible chrome spray paint for prop painting which I'd already finished with and there was just enough left to give all the metal work a light coat before the can died. Even the lightest coat made a huge difference to how the light reacted to them.
That same day we dry-brushed a lighter grey over all of the rock faces to give them definition. I knew I wanted the rock dark. This was for two reasons, one to give the rock an ominous black slate look to them but also, more importantly, for contrast. The metalwork was a shiny silver but silver is still just luxury grey and having the rock too light would have gotten muddy visually, the metalwork and rock would just have got lost in each other. By having the rock as dark as possible we avoided that and also gave a great backdrop for the white scenery in the lair to pop against.

...Did I mention we used a LOT of paint on this project? I think in total we needed about 22 litres to paint the entire set.

The next job I didn't document in photo form because it wasn't terribly interesting and we kind of did it in small batches as and when pieces were needed.
To those of you who may be unfamiliar with vacuum forming, there is a mould, often carved from wood though it can be anything sturdy, of the thing you want formed. Then a large sheet of thin plastic is placed over it and the space between them made airtight. Then all of the air is sucked out from between them and the plastic is stretched over the mould to make a lightweight hollow plastic version of whatever the mould was.

What this does mean though, is that everything is part of a sheet, you have a lot of excess to remove! So there was a lot of craft-knifing off the spare plastic. So much plastic it was ridiculous. I didn't think to snap any pics, but here's what those arches look like freshly shaven:

So concludes our plastic-prepping odyssey! And so too concludes today's instalment!

There's an awful lot to write about so I'm going to split this over a few posts over the next week or two! Stay tuned for more! And if you have any questions about the set and how we built it (or anything else about the song/video) do please ask away in the comments! I can either answer directly or I may cover it in a later post!

Catchy you later, minions!

Now back to work. That doomsday device won't build itself!