Yesterday was the Season 3 Premiere of Awkwafina is Nora from Queens and I’m so excited to share a little of the behind-the-scenes from the sets from yesterday’s episode.

Such a fun project and the season premiere sets the tone of the wacky directions this season takes and lets us know how each character is doing a year after the last season ends.

After a seasonal montage of Nora taking the trash out, she is abducted into an Alien Spaceship Hallway.

Found this really funny post-it on my desk from one day when we were discussing what we needed for behind mystery door #2

The Spaceship Italian Restaurant where Nora and Toe have dinner

The room was actually a blank basement alcove that looked like this:

So we assembled a bunch of reference images of classic old school Italian-American red sauce joints for inspiration of how we could transform this empty grey space into the typical Italian spot everywhere in America where you automatically start hearing “when the moon hits the sky…” in your head upon seeing it.

When we first check in with Grandma, she’s at a funeral for a friend.

I actually based this set research on photos of my own beloved grandma’s funeral but we also did some local research.

Kiran and I went to Queens and Manhattan Chinatowns visiting Chinese funeral homes and looking for a Chinese florist specializing in Chinese funeral flowers.

So while most of the funerals I’ve been to in my life so far are Chinese ones so the floral style is something I’m familiar with, I’ve actually never attended a Chinese Buddhist funeral before and the script mentioned grandma was interacting with incense.

We did our research and tried our best to collect the right things, but on the day of the shoot the actress who plays Grandma (Lori Tan Chin) and her stand-in Patricia called me over and told me what things they think should be added to the altar to be perfectly authentic.

I totally appreciated that and went out to get the bowl of rice they instructed me to get and at that moment was marveling at what a special experience it was to work on a cast and crew filled with Asian Americans in front and behind the camera and how much it adds to the production on so many layers.

the fun animated version of this set dressing moment drawn by Casi Moss:

Wally and his workplace bullies

Awkwafina, who directed this episode, had very specific ideas of how she wanted Wally’s two workplace bullies cubicles to look like. She told me “joyful geekdom mancave” with “lots of figurines like Marvel.”

It is very difficult to get copyright clearance for Marvel branded figurines, so Kevin, our art department coordinator and product placement genius and I put our thinking caps on and brainstormed how we could get lots of figurines that communicated “joyful geekdom mancave”that we could get cleared.

Kevin came up with the brilliant idea of Kaiju Big Battel who gave us all the great posters hanging in the cubicles, Kiran and I visited Toy Tokyo the legendary store in the East Village of NYC and they helped me narrow down items we could get cleared, and lastly I thought of Eric Nakamura and Giant Robot.

Giant Robot is a legend in Asian American culture starting out as a bi-monthly magazine of Asian and Asian American culture started by Eric in 1994. The Giant Robot store in CA opened in 2000 and I knew they made their own robot figurines and thought it would be a great fit for the show and the characters.

Luckily Eric agreed and was happy to be part of a show that celebrates Asian American culture like Nora from Queens and sent over some of his iconic robot figurines and gave us permission to show them which you can catch on screen in the set.

That wraps up the season premiere for this week. Stay tuned as the season progresses and I’ll keep on sharing some behind-the-scenes stories and photos of what it took to decorate Season 3 of Awkwafina is Nora from Queens.

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