Brief:    A woman shopping and running errands  wants reliability and sportiness out of her vehicle. Touting the spacious well appointed interior and  the powerful performance drivetrain of the Mazda 626, she puts her car to the test getting groceries and coffee at a pit-stop type market.  Make a suburban raceway in the same vernacular as the original Cool World motif, a block world inspired by a child’s imaginative arrangement of blocks into a familiar landscape.

(1,2)  Maquette I built to demonstrate my concept for the raceway and how I proposed to acheive confining our photgraphic world to this suburb: by super elevating the curves like a real raceway; and what would go where for motion control ‘blocking’.  Simple cardboard and Monopoly houses painted black.

(3)  The raceway under construction, with our  work area in the background.  Again, we used actual photographs I’d taken in neighborhoods near Los Angeles, Seattle, and Santa Maria (to create a diversity of looks - which was a tongue in cheek comment on suburban sprawl, since they don’t really look very different at all!)

(4,5)  Different views of the miniature with a scale  ‘blocking’ vehicle in place (under the harsh house lights of the stage).

(6)  This is a digital print of the CAD model we 
used to produce the complex curves present in my raceway maquette.    It was a necessary step to translate the maquette into a giant pattern that 
easily recreates the complex forms at the proper scale.

(7)  The award winning Chuck Schuman (VFX/
Miniatures Cinematographer - Lord of the Rings) in for “scale” (ha ha), during the shoot of the live action miniatures, motion control portion of production.

(8)  The longest and widest view of the raceway miniature set.  There were essentially three neighborhoods, the ridge: larger homes with better details; the North col de sac of smaller less adorned homes and fewer trees; and the South col de sac, with middle sized homes and some trees.

(9)  This overhead shows the lay of the land at 
the South end of the table.  I have always loved the forms of a cul de sac, with it’s serpentine entrance and exit leading toward or away from the bulbous terminus of a journey, the destination along this path, or simply the  absence of place that so many cul de sacs can add up to.  A sort of non-place type of place, or a street that has meaning only in context of one’s home, or the residents. I digress.

(10,11)  This is where all the “action” occurred for our heroine.  She drives  in through the entrance (10), and up to the service area, or “pit-stop”, under the fluorescent awning made with miniature fluorescents.  The crew comes out and using a tank much like is used to fill race cars with petrol, they fill her coffee cup!  Then others from the pit crew check tires and place groceries into her trunk... and she is on her way!

(12)  This closer detailed shot of the South cul de 
sac, shows the middle homes, with their fences and streetlights.  Everything in these worlds had to be built by blocks - or segments thereof - and though this was a restricting factor, it also helped to define the specific solutions and execution of the architecture.