As I work on my fairy tale miniature LNK, I keep thinking how much fun it would be to make Howl’s bedroom from Howl’s Moving Castle. It’s a huge project, which is probably why MechanicalFiend and Miss Mini Life made it so small. It’s so complicated, I probably need to make a plan first.
This is not how I usually roll. Yes, I’m a spreadsheet girl and love tracking crazy things (puzzle-solving stats, I’m looking at you), but detailed planning for a creative project? Nope.
MechanicalFiend made a painting of the room and a blueprint before building Howl’s bedroom into a cookie tin. Though she doesn’t show it, I’m sure Miss Mini Life mapped out her build before making it.
One reason for planning ahead is to choose the scale. The accessories I’ve made so far are 1:12 (1 inch in the model = 12 inches in real life.) The Princess and The Pea has taught me that 1:12 miniatures can wind up really big. My tower of mattresses is two feet tall! But making miniatures really tiny, like MechanicalFiend’s and Miss Mini Life’s, is a trade off. The fiddliness incrases as the amount of detail you can include decreases.
Another reason to plan ahead is so I can include lights. Leaving room for wires and battery packs is important, as is knowing how you will hide them from the viewer.
But my truly crazy idea, which will make this colorful scene more even more complex, is to include the moving magical thingies. I’m not sure what they are, but there are several moving objects in the room. If I can, I’d like to make them hand-powered, like handmade automata I’ve seen. Of course that makes a plan even more necessary. There would need to be room under the floor to house the gears. And it would increase the amount of prep work, as I would have to experiment to figure out how to get the motions I want from turning a crank.
I usually avoid planning because it seems tangential to what needs doing. Is it really necessary? It seems more efficient to just dive in and get to work. Especially when there is so much work to do.
As I was debating with myself, I remembered the scene from the book From The Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler where two children have been given one hour to search through thousands of files for the information they want. Jamie is about to dive in when Claudia says, “Five minutes of planning are worth fifteen minutes of just looking.”
And I think that’s actually an underestimate. In this case at least, I will be saving myself lots of time and headaches down the road if put in just a little time now. I can make sure I’m building to a scale I am comfortable with and think about which details to include. I can mess around with automata and figure out if and how to use them.
So I am going to plan. Since I’ve never done this before, I’ll probably still make mistakes. But I’m pretty sure taking time to plan will save me time in the end.
How would you go about planning for a big project like this one?
