Lost on a Mountain in Maine: Search Party Camp
One of our big outdoor sets was the volunteer search party camp that pops-up as the local community comes together to search for Don as he is lost wandering Mt. Katahdin alone.
Finding a quantity of period tents was challenging, but after much work Ashley found a prop house in LA that had the number we needed and could ship them across the country in time.
always looks best once it is filled with people in period costume.
Putting together a camp site of 11x tents, of course starts with putting together just one.
And it isn’t as simple as the modern pop-up tent. These are old fashioned tie down tents that required us to get wooden stakes to assemble.
Us figuring out how to assemble the tent. Fortunately one of our set dressers was a set dresser on Dickinson (one of my fav shows of all time with GORGEOUS sets and costumes) and remembered putting together similar tents for their Civil War battle camp sets.
And to make matters worse, it started raining and it had been raining overnight at the camp location so the ground was all muddy…
The set dressers being champs assembling the tents in the rain. And in the far right, us trying our best to protect all the rented set dressing under the tree cover and with tarps as it rained.
The plans we were working from to transform an open field into something like a bustling pop-up search party camp.
As you can see it got quite swampy and muddy in some areas. …And the crew would be arriving in a few hours so we had our greens guy Tony try and dig an irrigation system of sorts to literally “drain the swamp.”
But eventually the sun came out and we were able to assemble the set before the crew arrived!
The director Andrew talking to some background actors at the camp.
I like this view on the set