I felt the forest set for Winnie the Pooh had to have a hyper realistic feel to it. I didn't want a cartoon storybook I wanted a real looking forest with everything was just a little cleaner, a little larger and a little more colorful then a true forest. We were presenting this show as a hybrid human and puppet show but because we weren't hiding the puppeteers we designed the set like a traditional theatre production. We started by laying down a wooden floor, painted it brown. then covered sections of it with green grass carpeting. Kate Pinner stepped in to paint some canvas drops for us, she created three tree framed proscenium that surrounded the stage front, center and back. We then added some three dimensional elements like the honey tree, Rabbits house and Kangas rock. The honey tree was a stationary element but Rabbits house and Kanga's rock were on wagons and could move on and off when needed. The one main thing about this set is that it had to be green, it had to have plants and shrubs. We got very lucky when searching for plant decoration. A local garden shop had gone out of business and had tossed out several boxes of green garland. We raided their dumpster and came away with 5 large boxes of greenery. We used all of it and still raided the Kelsey theatres prop room for all the flowers, plants and trees we could find. Our lighting designer Kitty Getlik did a fantastic job of adding even more color and texture to the set with gobos representing the light filtering through the canopy of leaves in the trees. We even ran a mister unit through the whole show so that the beams of light could be seen better. In the end the set turned out very well and was even nominated for a Perry Award for outstanding set design and lighting design in a musical.