Category Archives: Inspiration

The Avocado 70s

As I’ve mentioned before, one of the sets for my film is a 70s kitchen.  I grew up in the 70s, and have fond memories of those colourful appliances, the wall phones, and oddly combined colours.  Avocado, orange, “gold,” deep brown, and turquoise were popular choices for interior decoration.

I try to go with a sense of realism for my sets.  This means doing some research:  finding references, carefully measuring things and following a formula for miniaturizing them, as well as researching and choosing the colour palettes.   For the kitchen I went with a very typical avocado fridge and stove set, along with orange cabinets and “gold” formica countertops.  The little cannisters on the countertops are covered with a fake wood grain, as they would have been at full scale.

Luckily I happened to have a couple of Eaton’s catalogues from the 70s to rely on for research.  These catalogues not only provided colour and style reference, but they had specific measurements for everything they sold.  Super handy!

They were also fun to browse through.  Here’s a sample:

I had a lot of help building the props for the set.  One of the wonderful prop modelling helpers is an OCAD stopmo animation student, Miriam, who is in her last year of university, and about 13 years younger than I. When I asked her if she could make a 70s avocado wall phone, she had absolutely no idea what I was talking about.  Oh well, sometimes you just have to laugh about such things!

Here is a tiny glimpse of the set, with the avocado stove peeking out in the corner: