Tuesday 5 November 2013

1980s bedroom (part 5) Decor completed

I'm nearly at the end of the 1980s bedroom project, with the main room decor now completed.  All that remains is to add details (such as records, cassettes, etc. on shelves) and plant the main nostalgia trigger items.

One item which caused me some inconvenience is the anglepoise lamp, based on an Arne Jacobsen design for Habitat.  I wavered over whether to rig the lamp with a bone structure & inverse kinematics, to allow it to be manipulated like a real lamp in order to make it easier to position.  In the end I decided to rig it and I'm glad I did -- it took a few tries to find the optimum pose which looked good and also cast a suitable light cone.

"[Michael] Standing produced what became known within the BBC as the ‘Green Book’, whose purpose was to eradicate smut, innuendo and vulgarity from all BBC programmes. [...] In June 1949 he issued a memo to all staff in which he forbade BBC employees to illuminate any room with an anglepoise lamp unless the main ceiling or wall light was also illuminated: Standing held a firm belief that a man working at a desk in a confined space with only the light from a low-wattage lamp would nurture furtive ideas and produce degenerate programme material."
— fascinating trivia courtesy of Wikipedia
I also decided to switch the table map to a coloured lampshade to balance the over-emphasis on white in the room, experimenting with different hues and incandescence settings.  The lighting makes an enormous difference to the tone of the room.


The windows and blinds were fairly quick to produce, with a night sky backdrop to match the original game exterior (which fits nicely with the whole '80s "dark" feel).


However, the blinds weren't quite right so I angled them slightly and discoloured them slightly to sell the moonlight tone.  The final touch was a "drawstrings" plane texture, which made them look a lot more realistic.


So there you have it.  The main decoration is complete; now I need to populate the room with objects.