Going into PK I knew one thing: I was going to have to make homemade vomit. This isn’t why I signed on but it may have been a factor. I was able to work with three lovely people in my department: Art Director Khushi Patel, Props Master Elizabeth Marshall, and Set Dresser Mark Carchidi. PK features two party scenes: one rooted in dream and one in reality. Director Nick Dionisio had a strong vision for these parties which made working with him very easy. He said that the dream party would have a color scheme of blue/purple and the real party would be green/red. This helped me set a tone for these parties right off the bat. To give the dream party an unrealistic feel we were always planning on dropping confetti from the ceilings. To add something extra, we had Mr. Carchidi blow up countless balloons with the air from his own lungs. Unfortunately, as it goes, the balloons ended up not making it to the final cut. (Your effort did not go unnoticed Mark thank you so much).
The realistic party was so much fun for me. I littered a suburban home’s kitchen with assorted fake drugs, crushed red solo cups, bottles full of an iced tea and water mixture, and emptied out chip bags onto the counters. During shooting times, my department and I were mixing out aforementioned vomit concoction. The recipe is as follows: Cinnamon applesauce for flavor, crushed up saltines for texture, a little water for realism, and raspberries for color. Once the product was to our liking, I poured the entirety onto the stunning actress Rachel Croom.
We were able to shoot the church scenes in an actual church, however the director envisioned an 8ft cross hanging above the altar and this church did not have that. I used insulation foam to cut an 8 by 5ft cross, hot glued it together and spray-painted it dark brown. Khushi Patel and I hung it with fishing line from a nail that happened to already be in the wall right where we needed it to be. Making that cross was such an honor since it ended up being the final shot of the movie.
