Has a real person ever created a crazy wall? Or does that only happen in films? In any case, if ever I saw a doll who might create a crazy wall, it’s Marcelo (Granado Udell). And, after the last episode, where he suddenly found himself and his daughter in mortal danger in another world, it’s really to be expected.

So, he needs a crazy wall – a nice big crazy wall, with lots of pictures and string going every which way. But, how *exactly* do you build one? Those are the questions I had to answer this week.

First, what to include in the crazy. I went a couple of different directions – one involved fairies, one involved parallel universes, and one involved just straight up crazy. In the most miraculous of miraculous discoveries, I found an honest-to-God article about fairies and the multiverse, here. I didn’t actually read it, because what could it say that would be better than the fact that there actually is an article about fairies and the multiverse. Let me know, though, if it says something interesting. The non-article items came out of google searches on public domain images, and I ended up with a bunch of really fantastic pictures. Here are a few of them:

To print them out, I resized them to 1/3 scale (about 2″ across for the photos and 3.5 inches long for the articles) and printed and cut them out.

Next, to layout and connect the images. I’d already decided that I was going to photoshop the wall onto another image, so I did my layout on a dark green foamboard that would be easy to replace in the final image. Then, I got the images roughly where i wanted them, and attached and connected them using map pins and embroidery thread. I’m not sure there are any official rules about how to organize a crazy wall, but mine was grouped into a few themes: fairies, parallel universes, and crazy. Lots and lots of crazy. I used different color thread to connect the images in each grouping. Here’s the entire wall on the green foamboard. That’s fairies in the upper left, parallel universes down the right side, and crazy all through the middle.

Finally, the image behind the crazy wall. I decided Marcelo wouldn’t work straight on the wall, mainly because I don’t have a wall that I want to put a bunch of tiny pins in. I’d gone pretty far in the bulletin board direction but, really, if you’re going crazy, do you actually put up a bulletin board first to contain all that crazy? I finally decided that I wanted a big image in the background, preferably a map. And, since it was parallel universes, I used a NASA picture of deep space, like this:

For the final, I shot the wall over Marcelo’s shoulder and brought the image into Photoshop. I removed all of the green by using the magic wand tool and selecting the foamboard, then deleting it. Finally, I copied the NASA deep space image behind it all.

I’m really happy with how it turned out, and I think the real images attached to the wall with push pins and strings look much better than what I could have photoshopped together.

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I’m moving very slowly on this episode because I’ve decided to actually try to realize my initial plans for an episode, instead of giving up and just throwing stuff together. That goes so much against my grain, apparently, that it’s taking me weeks to prepare each shot. Fortunately, my plans for the rest of epsiode aren’t so grand, so I should be able to get through it more quickly.