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This blog is here to document my latest 2009 project, an extensive recreation of the Disney 1954 movie 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea through a series of detailed miniature dioramas, all contained under my model railroad table. This will be a "crawl-thru" type attraction (What is a crawl-thru? Read about it here).

Like Disney, I usually tend to keep everything under-wraps until I unveil the final product at the end. However, by keeping everything a secret, I end up not taking any photos of my projects and it is often disappointing to not have any documentation in the end showing how everything worked and was constructed. This time, however, I will document every step in the process of the creation of the project with photos and drawings (and maybe some video) illustrating each leg of the construction. Even though the posts here will be chock-full of spoilers, it will show the amount of work that goes into this and other projects--which is often under-appreciated.

This blog includes weekly updates that consisted of notes, ideas, photos, and maybe some video of what was worked on each week up until the estimated completion date of December 2009. (It was officially finished on December 10th, 2009).

December 10, 2009

12/10/09 Update--Still almost finished.

Well, it's December 10th, guess what still isn't finished? Luckily I have a few extra days to get it done before Saturday (that's when it needs to be done) so I'll get some major work in. I've been extremely busy working on other stuff besides the 20k project, but now that some school finals are done and out of the way, I can get back to the project.

Because I was so busy the last week or so, not much was done unfortunately. I did get the entrance door completely finished and the burial scene given it's water effect back. I've also started on the "caption books", which explain what's going on in the scene as well as give extra info to transition from the scene before or to the next. Here's an example, which will go below the Discovery scene.



I kind of did it like a book of the period. The illustrations are filtered screen shots from the movie, since I have no time to actually draw them out myself. Even then, they look pretty good. Although color probably wasn't used at the time in books, but it adds that much more in my situation. These caption books are going below every single scene. Here's another which goes below the Burial scene.




These work pretty well since I have no more room for what's being depicted in the caption books!

I'm working on the sign, which is going to be very similar to the Submarine Voyage sign I did a few years ago with the backlit letters. The overall shape is being lasercut at the moment, but here's a concept art I did of it to kind of show what it might look like:




As of Friday night, pretty much all of the caption books are installed. All the lights for the captions are lit by 12V lights along my new 12V line that I installed through-out the table. Now I can just tap into the line if I need power for a set (if it runs of 12V).

 Now it's a matter of doing touch-ups and cleaning everything up. Almost finished.

I'm also happy to say that the squid fight is finally done. The characters were added today and now the squid has something to battle now. The characters are very rough sculpts of crew members. I was able to get away with not sculpting any faces, by either turing the head away, or wrapping it with a tentacle.

Not the best shots, but here's what it looks like with the lightning going off.








Since I am working on the project the over the next two days, I will be constantly updating this post with more stuff, so check back often! 


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