Production Designer + Art Director

Artist’s Statement for IU’s reimagining of Twilight Zone’s “Will the Real Martian Please Stand Up?”

Liminal spaces are throughways from one space to the next. It is the time between the ‘what was’ and the ‘next.’ An airport terminal is a liminal space: it is the in-between, a place of transition, waiting, and not knowing. It is a place where reality feels altered because it has no definitive existence without its relationship to the spaces you are coming from and going to. One often feels uncomfortable if they are in a liminal space for too long because the space is not intended for staying. As the production designer and art director, I wanted to create a space that emphasized this eerie otherworldliness. With the added suspicion of a Martian amongst the plane passengers and a forced stay-in at the terminal, the feeling of unfamiliarity, strangeness, and even fear, are amplified. The color palette is based around cool, blue-green tones, often found in waiting rooms, and red tones, often associated with danger and fear. I made red and green neon signs to hang in the windows to highlight the room with these complementary colors. When choosing set dec, I wanted to find objects that were not totally current, like phones with coiled cables, box TVs, and vintage travel posters, to give off the impression that, though people often come and go through the space, it is not a place that is often touched or updated. Whether it be the silver static of the old, box TV, the flickering of fluorescent lights, or the sickly yellow glow from the streetlights streaming through the blinds, I wanted the episode to evoke an eerie feeling that lends an alien quality to the space.