By far the most time-consuming part of building Saudade was the crankie which forms the bulk of the show. Additional images appear on the side screens, but most of the action happens on this very long roll of Tyvek in front of an LED light. It took nearly two months to design and cut out all the scenes on the crankie, and a week to put it all together. Here are photos from the process.

Spacing the images is important and takes time.

Amy and Genna work together to glue down an image.

Each image gets sprayed with glue carefully. Sometimes it’s hard to keep different parts from sticking to each other before it’s glued down.

The roll of Tyvek is longer than our box so we had to carefully measure and cut about six inches off the bottom of the entire roll.

One of the many intricate images on the crankie.

Delicate images wait on newspaper so they don’t get crushed before being added to the crankie. We took over most of the living room eventually.

Most of the crankie images are cut from black Tyvek, but these included some silver tissue paper as well.

Amy makes an adjustment before gluing down the final image.

This is the final roll–nearly 3 inches thick!

Our first rehearsal with the finished roll, testing the light and the box.

Here’s what an image looks like from the reverse side…

And here it is in light! Hope you enjoyed this tour of the building process!