The Sentinel Loft Kitchen

[olivermoss]

Apparently my thing right now is taking major projects and bashing at them until I have a stripped down version that I can post, and can then leave the more complicated versions for later if I want.

If my last project was a year past when people would be interested, wow, this is decades past...



If I tried to explain how hard it was to reconstruct this from the terrible, WA lens close interior shots I'd sound slightly unhinged. I do still intend to do the entire loft in 4 layers and make a gif of the layers, but for now... it's something. I cleaned it up and am calling it a finished, postable piece.

Comments

[princessofgeeks]

This is great! Thank you!

[olivermoss]

Thank you!

[badfalcon]

*draws sparkly orange hearts*

[olivermoss]

Thank you!

[delphi]

That's amazing! Man, I loved the loft so much watching that show back in the day. (Then I grew up and lived in a PNW loft for several years and learned why it's not a good fit for a short person, but that's neither here nor there.) It's so cool to see the space laid out like this.

[olivermoss]

Thank you! Figuring out the proportions from screenshoots was more of a project than I thought it would be. Lots of tight wide angle shots right in that entryway and kitchen :)

[mistressofmuses]

I like it! (Though I have not seen The Sentinel, so am lacking any knowledgeable insight.)

I remember talking about this one at some point before, and how impossible it was to really reconstruct (because the shots in the show don't actually make sense with each other in all cases, and they certainly aren't terribly clear!)

Getting long-term projects to a minimal viability is a good strategy! You can always share an updated, more complicated version later if you want to, but even if you don't, you have it done and shared!

[olivermoss]

Thanks!

A lot of the big emotional scenes take place in the kitchen, but most of the time they are like:



That is one of the better screengrabs I got, and the episodes got pulled off of youtube while I was working through them for screen shots. I do own the DVDs, but the encoding is bad so I get an error trying to pause and they barely work at all with the one DVD player I still have... had? I may have given up on the one I had.

Details varied, but I also feel like so much happened there that fans have a sense of the space even if seeing even that much of it was rare.

[mistressofmuses]

I'm bummed they got yanked from yt! I kept meaning to find the time to watch it, for the fandom history of it all (and because I'm pretty sure I'd genuinely like it), but I never did.

But yeah, while that's not the *worst* view in the world, it certainly isn't a *great* way to figure out how everything fits together.

[olivermoss]

That screen grab and the other useful ones I have are also the result of 20 hours of rewatches specifically to get screengrabs. I don't know if I've got enough of Blair's room to actually do that bit... buuuut I could skip it and go to the living room view which would hide it anyway.

If there is a good floorplan fans did, I can't find it and don't remember ever seeing it.

The show was uneven. Honestly, some eps hold up and some are hot messes. It's too bad it's not available, though

[mistressofmuses]

It seems inconceivable to me that fans *wouldn't* have put together some sort of floorplan... But yeah, no, definitely not something I've encountered if so. The weird impact Sentinel had on fandom really took me by surprise, seeing the extant popularity of Sentinel/Guide AUs, among people who've likely never even heard of the show, and how those AUs have morphed very much into their own thing with their own tropes distinct from the show!
Then there was me, with vague awareness of the show, though never having had a chance to see it, since it was a bit before my fannish time... yet I'd *somehow* never heard of the AU type until a few years ago, haha.

Yeah. That seems typical enough for shows of that era. Some really strong parts, some that are less so. But it sucks whenever something like that basically disappears in terms of being accessible. So much stuff unavailable! Either truly lost media, or just very-hard-to-access media.

[olivermoss]

I did my best to look for one or other reference materials before I started, trust me. If it existed, it was probably on some long dead fansite... you know what I didn't check? Ao3! How to search for art not fic, tho? I am going to poke at it a bit.

Yeah, Sentinel is this weird fandom ghost. It was massive and had a searchable archive back in the 90s? That's nuts, yo.

[mistressofmuses]

The Sentinel was one of those that I think did have a lot of fandom-specific sites and archives, from what I recall. Much more organized archives than usual, too! Sadly it's very possible that a lot of the copious fanworks for it are just... gone, when the sites shut down. Which sucks!
Though I wonder if AO3 has had any stuff imported to it! I don't recall any major Open Doors archives, though maybe there was one in the last couple years? Now I'm not sure... but if any old fans are still around, they would likely have been the type to find AO3 appealing, and might very well have brought their stuff over early on.
Let me know if you found anything on a search! Unfortunately, while AO3's tagging is one of its main upsides, a lot of older fic doesn't seem to be tagged as well as one would hope, and it's questionable if there was a standard fanart tag.

It's so strange that it was SUCH a huge fandom and had such a huge impact on fandom as a whole... yet the lack of syndication for the series meant I don't think it ever really drew many new people in, so if you weren't there at the time, it was unlikely that you ever had any experience of the canon. (The episodes going up on youtube felt like a great opportunity, but then I failed utterly at taking advantage!)

But yeah, wild how "advanced" it sounds like a lot of the fandom's organization was, compared to what a mess I remember a lot of smaller fansites being!

[olivermoss]

852 Prospect was massive and searchable! It was ages ahead of it's time. It was all imported into AO3 through a massive Open Doors project that took a long time due to volume of fic and needed to fic lots of errors. I'd always kinda wish I'd gotten involved in that specific project. Sentinel used to be the fandom where any trope, any kink, any set up, any... anything, we had it. Of course, SPN then became the bigger fandom for more fic and even more... variety. But people used to read TS fandom blind because we were the 'we had it all' fandom, and you didn't even need to ask on a ficfinder comm. You could just go to 852 and nab what you wanted yourself, without having to publicly ask.

Yeah, I didn't find anything on AO3 so far.

[mistressofmuses]

I thought there HAD to be an Open Doors project to get Sentinel stuff onto the archive. I can only imagine what an undertaking it was. (Though bummer that it hasn't yielded a good layout for you!)
I wish that I'd been in fandom as a whole just a TOUCH earlier than I was, because it feels like I came to it just a little too late for things like Sentinel. (Though tbh, I'm surprised my mom didn't watch it, lol. Or maybe she did, and I just don't recall. I did watch X-Files and Star Trek with her sometimes.)
Then again, even if I had gotten into fandom spaces a bit earlier, my entry point was more anime fandom stuff, so no guarantee I would have found the popular western fandom stuff even if I'd been there at the right time. Like... despite having watched and liked X-Files, it was years before I discovered what a fandom juggernaut it was!

[olivermoss]

The Sentinel was weird because it was on those small broadcast channels that later consolidated into CW. UPN and those other channels had big gaps in broadcast coverage and I got into the fandom with no access to the show. It was part of the Due South / Highlander / Sentinel late 90s urban fantasy TV on weird channels blob. Some DS writers moved to TS and that a draaama back in the day. Also TS could cross over easily with other canons. Due South, Highlander the TV show and Sentinel were sort of the SuperWhoLock of 1998. My entry point into slash fandom was Highlander and that deposited me into Sentinel because every HL writer I liked jumped on TS.

I loved X Files but was pretty unaware of the fic part of the fandom. I was aware that there was a massive following and people could track down locations and stuff.

[mistressofmuses]

Oh, UPN20, I remember your channel identifier from my early childhood! (Then it became WB20, and I was always annoyed at both, because 20 was our local identifier, but it was actually channel 02. Then sometime when I was a teen I think it became the CW.)

I think my parents were pretty into Highlander for a while, but I never watched it. Due South was another one I feel like I narrowly missed, and later kept encountering people who had it as a former fandom. But oh, I can definitely imagine lots of 90s fandom wank about people jumping fandoms!

TS very clearly had a ton of crossover potential! I'm impressed that so much of fandom is still pollinated by its AUs, even as far removed from the canon as they now are.

I wonder a bit how different my fandom life would have been if I'd discovered X Files fandom when it was current, and if that had been where I started out. As it was, I came to fandom in the early-00s via anime/manga fandom instead and didn't really branch out much for a while, and by the time I was looking around at anything else, the heyday had mostly passed. (The Jackson LOTR trilogy was the big live-action fandom at that time, ha.)

[olivermoss]

Due South has a LOT of die hards. It's a forever fandom for a lot of people. I wish I could get into it, but I just can't. I bounced off it hard a few times. They still have events and are excited to meet new fans at cons.

Sentinel fandom was bigger. We were the 900 pound gorilla in fandom for a bit. We could have been like that!

[mistressofmuses]

I feel like I tried once to watch it, when it was rerun on some unlikely channel and I had weird teenage insomnia... I want to say it was an overnight block on a teen-nick spinoff channel? But I could be misremembering. I may have watched a couple episodes, but I can't say they really stuck with me or anything.

As with so many things... I wonder how it would have impacted fandom as a whole if Sentinel had retained more prominence? The prevalence of its AU type is certainly still a visible impact, but if the canon had stayed as well known... it would be interesting to know!

[olivermoss]

What if The Sentinel hadn't gone into rights hell? I know I've said this a million times, but it's got such a weird place in fandom history. It's a forgotten influential mega-fandom.

[mistressofmuses]

It's sucky how things like "rights hell" can impact things so completely and in such a long-ranging way. Even decades on, things would quite possibly look really different if that hadn't happened!

It really IS a completely bizarre place in fandom history. It's like if Supernatural never made it to streaming and stopped being rerun, and it suddenly just vanished from mainstream consciousness, leaving nothing but fic and memes behind.