Evil Cave Building for Beginners - Pt2: A Designing a Desk for Domination (Patreon)

No self respecting would-be intercontinental-consolidator would dare embark on a campaign for conquest without a darned snazzy desk to sit at and machinate. Blofeld? Desk. Mr Burns? Desk. Darth Vader? We never see it but you can bet he had one somewhere and it probably had lasers.

If you've seen many of my videos (if not what are you doing here?) you'll know I'm no stranger to desk-based content. In fact some of my videos that don't have desks specifically don't have desks because I was worried I might have too many desks in my videos. The plan for The Fine Print originally called for a desk until I thought 'Gee, I've had a lot of desks lately' and I nixed it!

But for this video the desk was inescapable. The 'Inner Sanctum' of your genius is an entirely desk-centric space in the game (unless you play as Zalika who has a crazy hover chair surrounded by floating monitors, but I've yet to perfect my anti-grav tech for props and I used all of my invisible wire hanging cans a couple of months ago.)

This is the point where I wish I could show you a bunch of cool illustrations I did to plan and design the desk. However, all I actually drew was the set design pictured back in part 1 of this series! That was enough for Nick to know exactly the materials we needed and how roughly to construct it, the rest we improvised on the fly! So instead here's a little look at one of the key inspirations for the design:

This is the surreal 1960s TV thriller 'The Prisoner', to those unfamiliar it's a particularly iconic bit of classic British television about a man who awakes in a perfect village full of happy people that is impossible to escape, where nobody has a name and everybody is simply assigned a number. Above is the office if the sinister 'Number 2' who oversees the village under the command of the never seen 'Number 1'.

I love the visuals of The Prisoner, it's a wonderfully weird program and I thought it'd be fun to give a nod to it in this video, with the 60s aesthetic lending itself perfectly to the era that Evil Genius pastiches.

So a van load of wood and a couple of day's prodding it and hitting it with things and we end up here:

That's definitely a desk, alright!

Did you know you could get BENDY plywood? Because I didn't and it is life changing information. Big sheets of wood perforations all the way along that is incredibly flexible and lets you make curved surfaces. Expect more round things in future videos.

A little plain though... Perhaps a splash of colour?

Number 2's desk features all of it's lovely big buttons in a recessed panel in the centre of the desk but we opted not to follow it so closely for two reasons. Firstly, 2's chair is actually quite comically far away from his desk, unusably so, it's honestly a bit less of a desk than it is just an elegant control panel, there's very little space for putting a cup of tea or writing a ransom note for a world leader. You'll see 2 use it as a foot rest more than you'll see them using it as work surface. I needed a desk I could place props on and interact with as it was going to be far closer.

Secondly, that would have been way trickier to build.

So we opted to push the controls outwards to the sides and raise them up off the desk instead of lowering them into it.

Remember those two vacuum formed 'portholes' that I mentioned in part 1? Well here's where they come into play!

Here are the desk's two control panels in progress! These large plastic platforms were actually designed to be 'portholes' in the catalogue, they were clear plastic and designed for making spaceship/submarine windows but I had the idea that laid down on the desk they'd make great raised panels for buttons. We initially played with the idea of fitting screens into them for displays but came the the conclusion it would be a lot more work than it was worth to not just mount old spare iPads into them but also to animate things to appear on them. So we just went with buttons! Lots of buttons!

I sourced a whole bunch of different decorative desk doo-dads to prop-populate the panels. I found some wireless keyboard num-pads for laptops as well as just a big set of spare keyboard keys. I found some light up buzzers for using in quizzes and games as well as a retro style telephone that matched the look of the in-game phones perfectly.

I also had some big 'switches' from the Peter Evans' catalogue that were really just non-descript little plastic arches that I opted to make into a series of sliders, though you can't see that here just yet.

Which meant lots more painting!

Once everything was disassembled and laid out I primed everything in white then I popped the keys off of the numpads and painted all of the keys in neon orange, yellow and red (the spare keys were actually already orange but not orange enough!). The casings for the buzzers and the bodies of the num-pads had to be silvered and the phone needed to be red. (The phone was a bit of a nightmare and I ended up having to dismantle it fully and re-paint but that's far too boring and longwinded for me to write about in any detail.)

Not pictured here is the 'big red button' which I painted a bit later. The keen eyed of you may recognise it as the 'Emergency Meeting' button from 'An Impostor Calls' with a new paint job. We actually had a spare one of those buttons as the lights in the first one broke before we filmed the Among Us video. (Then the lights in the replacement broke too just as we complete filming.)

Also I made that helmet silver and ray-gun white. Not desk related but it happened here.

So jumping a bit further down the timeline, here are those panels in situ: 

Some final extra detailing! I used sharpie and a handful of silver painted keyboard keys to make the coloured plastic 'switches' into sliders, probably for slowly lowering things/people into shark tanks.

The little glowing lights are actually frequent guest stars in my videos. I originally bought them for 'A Matter of Factories', you can see them around the desk as projectors for the holograms. One was also used in 'Slide Into the Void' to add the light into the lower unit for Darling's HRA. I'm sure I've used them elsewhere at some point too. Here I stuck a few around as little colour changing buttons. One of the key things to making and set feel alive is movement, no matter how subtle and the 'movement' of little blinking lights was a great way to elevate the desk over just plain static ones.

Finally, the microphone! Which isn't a microphone at all. It's actually a clip on desk lamp that happened to look exactly like the style of cartoony goose-neck microphone seen in game on the doomsday device control panel.

Fun fact about the lamp-rophone! It was actually donated by Dan Bull. Back in November when I was talking about ideas for this project (Rebellion had expressed an interest in working with me as early as 2019 but nothing was officially in place as a deal until a couple of months ago) Dan, unprompted, knocked on my door with the lamp and asked if I wanted it because it 'looked like the sort of microphone a supervillain might have at their desk', so that little microphone was the very first prop acquired for the video!

Not pictured here but we also gave the desk surface a covering in the middle. The big expanse of white was a little plain, so we cut a curved section of orange paper that fit the middle area of the desk between the panels just for a bit of colour detailing. The paper actually came off of the big roll of backdrop paper we used for the video!

And that about covers everything there is worth saying about the desk! Oh... wait...

...yeah, we also stuck my logo on the front.

This was actually a real last minute addition! The big empty space on the front of the desk bothered me. I'd thought about having the logo there already but painting it was just too much work for the short time frame we had. Then once the desk was finished I realised I could just have the logo printed as a big adhesive vinyl decal! So this was added pretty late in the set building process.

Also we added lights but we'll talk about THAT in a later post!

So for now that concludes this instalment of Evil Cave Building for Beginners! I'll be back with a part 3 some time shortly!

Thanks for reading!