Willy Wonka Chocolate Room Set & Prop Design

By Kyle Riner

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2I chose Charlie and the Chocolate Factory because it allowed for greater creativity and challenge in both prop design and set design. Colorful props and strange scenes both provided that added flair.

Prop DesignThe prop I chose to design is an ensemble of plant-like candy in a mound of edible grass. The Candy canes sprout like trees, jawbreakers seem like some alien plant, and the StrawberryShrooms are a fun, sweet alternative to their real life counterpart. I used styrofoam for flower arrangements as the base, and it also has a fitting color.

My rendition adds more color and more edible looking “plants” than are present in the movie, and I also think that as a prop on a stage, it would be more fun to children. Also, it might teach them NOT to try to eat anything they see.

3One of the most iconic scenes in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is the Chocolate Room, an edible landscape of sweets complete with a Chocolate waterfall and river. Such a landscape presents a challenge to create on a low-budget set, but with a little enginuity, it can be done.

Set Design

Rendering SoftwareTo render the set, I came up with the idea of using a computer game to build it. Tabletop Simulator is mainly used for people to play tabletop games online on a virtual...Tabletop. Because of the nature of some of the games played on tabletop, it has a good engine for building scenes. I can take any image from outside the game and import it, then manipulate it’s position and size in a 3D space. So with a mix of Photoshop, Illustrator, and Tabletop Simulator, I developed my set.

4 Final Set Design

The result of utilizing these programs is a simple yet useful rendition of the set. It utilizes lighting, viewing angles, and space to show how I would set up the scene of Augustus Gloop falling into the river of chocolate. Much of the scene is actually flat, with only a few elements such as the candy pumpkins, the candy cane tree, and the prop I designed up in the left hand corner being in three dimensions.

There are hidden scaffolds for the actors to stand on the green parts of the chocolate terrain and look down upon Augustus, who is inbetween two sets of chocolate waves. These waves may be pushed back and forth by hidden crew as Augustus has room to thrash around between them. The waterfall and river are both static, as are the limitations of a stage. This set provides enough room for the large amount of actors, both on the floor and on the scaffolds.

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