Band of Brothers - Nuenen House #3

For my Band of Brothers Nuenen project, I now have made a decent start on drawing each building. I've completed an elevation view and an "architectural" drawing (with measurements) for each side of three buildings so far. 

Building #1 was the first on the map, so I started with that, but in retrospect, I should have probably started with an easier building first. The challenge with building #1 is that it adjoins building #2 and several aspects of it were not particularly clear, or even visible from watching the episode, even watching it frame-by frame. Building #1 (and #2) is in the background when the British tanks move into the village and stop prior to being shot up by the Tiger. Another reason for perhaps not choosing to start with buildings #1 and 2 was the complexity of some of the features. Anyway, it is done now and I learnt some lessons along the way, which meant that I managed to complete all the drawings for house #3 in about 2 hours. Building #1 and #2 probably took about 12 hours of work!

Here is what the eastern facing elevation (aspect J) of building #1 and the northern-facing side of building #2 (aspect H) looks like. Aspect H was a complete fabrication on my part because it does not feature in any of the shots in Band of Brothers. I think that aspect J is a reasonable representation of what is in BoB; more surface detailing will be added when I make the actual model though.

And here is the more accurately proportioned architectural drawing, which shows the major features.

The process I followed for getting to that point above was to watch the battle scene from episode 4 in slow motion, even going so far as to slow it down and viewing a frame at a time, so that I could capture some screen shots. I then created a "mood board" of all the various views of each building, like these two for building #3.

Putting all these screen shots together next to each other also allowed me to piece together the route of each squad through the town and thus create the map. That process was probably 8-10 hours work of watching, noting down, re-watching, correcting etc!

Here are the four graphical representation and architectural drawings for House #3.

The next thing I will do, probably before I have finished drawing all the buildings, is to start making some of them. I've started researching whether it will be worth it to buy a laser cutting machine and creating my own MDF buildings. 

There are three companies which already manufacture some excellent buildings in MDF: 4Ground, Sarissa and Warbases, all of which look good. The problem is that none of their buildings are similar enough to the BoB Nuenen set to be useful. I'm sure that I will end up buying several of their buildings though to flesh out the town; the BoB set only contains nine buildings, which isn't much of a town, so it might look better with a few more in the periphery of my "film set" buildings.

My other option is to scratch build each one, but I quite like the idea, now that I have gone to the effort of visualising and drafting plans for each building, to be able to make several of each. I quite enjoy scratch building (check out my cereal packet Mediterranean shepherd's hut or my Cretan church, for example), but making the buildings using a laser cutter would be a new challenge. The model I have been looking at is the Atomstack A5 Pro. There are some other challenges which come with using a laser cutter, such as getting the design software, building a fume extraction hood and learning how to design the buildings.  Sounds like it's going to be lots of fun!