Behind The Scenes: Cobra Kai Dojo (Patreon)

You might have noticed, that I really enjoy making pop-culture references and reacting to recent TV and movie releases :) And Cobra Kai has a special place for me, as it is the ultimate homage to my childhood hero movie series Karate Kid. They were even able to gather up all the actors from the old movies, and that doesn't happen a lot.

Season 5 introduced new and evil version of Cobra Kai, as it was imagined by Silver's grand vision. And I really like, how they approached the art direction here as well. Low key lighting with a lot of neon lights and contrast of red and blue colors, high-tech equipment and amenities. It had everything an evil villain lair should.

Visit the full Pinboard here

There are several ways, how a project like this could be approached. First of all, you need a good glimpse of how the real space looks like. So I've gathered all the references I could into one place, but didn't stop at the one dojo. I expanded my search and included the older depictions as well as other dojos that appeared in the series.

Thing is, you can just take the space as it is portrayed in the show and rebuild it. You might run into few troubles though. First of all, the scale of the place might be too large to fit your desired format and lot of recognizable details could get lost in the process. And the other thing is, you might miss details from other places, that help define the space as a recognizable dojo.

That's why I kind of disassembled the new dojo references into pieces I wanted to include and added few others from older versions. After that, it was time to get a blank sheet of paper and play lego with those pieces.

For example, some walls in the new dojo are just too long, and I wanted to compress the scene into a square floorplan. So in the final render, you can see I left out two neon sticks and replaced them with a partial writing on the wall from another frame. Same with the trophies, I could fit only two of those.

But that's enough to keep the place recognizable, include all the shining bits and parts from the new Season, while still maintaining my standard square floorplan format for a room diorama.

You can watch the process video on Youtube