— Graphic Props For The Hunger Games: The Ballad Of Songbirds And Snakes.
(MADE AND DESIGNED BY SCHEIN BERLIN)
LUCY GRAY’S name lot, which was drawn during the reaping.
Experimented a lot with different types of folds and seals until the version with black paper and an embossed golden seal was finally chosen.
📖 BOOKCOVERS FOR THE ACADEMY.
Designed various textbook covers for the Academy. Some of them can be seen in the lecture hall scene.
While most books deal with scientific topics, "Panem History" will be a work with which the Capitol brainwashes its young citizens.
The story of Panem is certainly told in a propagandistic way.
📰 THE CAPITOL – "VOICE OF PANEM" NEWSPAPER.
Designed three covers: one for the Snow Apartment, one for Hoff’s Office and one for a café.
💵 "PANAR" & "CENTAR" - BANKNOTES AND COINS FROM PANEM.
The symbols of the districts are shown on the reverse of the coins in ascending order. District 12 on the 1 Centar piece, etc. The 5 Panar piece in turn shows the "Panema".
Portraits of the presidents of Panem are depicted on the banknotes.
The banknotes were printed on special paper and finished with gold and holographic foil.
🪖 PEACEKEEPER STATION ORDER WITH STAMP.
The district of the Peacekepper recruit is noted on the station order. The station order is issued when the recruit enters service.
Several blocks with tear-off sheets and stamps with the district logos were produced for the scene.
Redesigned the district logos for TBOSAS to show that this story takes place in the past of the other films.
📜 10TH HUNGERGAMES REQUEST FORM FOR APPROVAL OF AN OBJECT.
Mentors can request objects for their tributes that can help them during the games or in preparation for them.
Coriolanus requests a guitar for Lucy Gray.
♠️ CARD GAME FOR LUCKY FLICKERMAN. Enhances his performances as a presenter with various magic tricks to entertain the audience.
His tricks include the "magical" fanning of his playing cards.
Designed a deck of cards (without jokers) for him that was produced as single cards and also as a kind of fanfold.
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whumptober, day 2
There are many things Finnick Odair is good at. He's good at swimming, good at fighting, good at making knots. Good at baking decently tasty bread. He's also very good at pretending.
It's a skill he's honed throughout his whole life, ever since he was a little child. Pretending that he likes his mother's vegetable casserole. Pretending that he's completely fine when his father leads him to Mags’s house, his hand held in a forceful, painful grip, and proclaims in his booming voice that it would be the greatest honour for his son to train for the Games, right, boy? Pretending that he isn't scared to die and to kill.
Pretending that all the things that are done to his body on a regular basis aren't happening to him.
It’s somewhere past three at night and Finnick is sore and extremely dizzy and in the backseat of a car, coming back from his client. He’s in a car, because despite being just a District whore, he's an expensive one. President Snow doesn’t want anyone else to harm his investments. At least, not anyone not paying.
He’s just glad that it was the only appointment for today, because the guy, a flamboyant man in his thirties, a grandson or a nephew or a step-son of one of the influential Gamemakers, wanted to spice things up a bit in his sex life and made him swallow some colourful tablets before the act itself.
Well, it certainly spiced things up for Finnick, though probably not in a way the man intended to. He spent the whole time hearing the colours, and tasting the sounds, and seeing the images from his past and present all mixed up together.
The man was pounding into him and moaning and exclaiming something animated and probably over-the-top sexual in his shrill voice, but all Finnick could think about were the glistening in the sun tridents and spears and knives, and faces of the dead children, and his late father and ill mother and disappointed sister, and, for some reason, the Capitol's latest obnoxious vogue of inserting precious gemstones into their skin.
He desperately wanted to cry, so he laughed frantically, and he wanted to push the man away from him, too overstimulated, so he willed his muscles to relax.
The lights of the never-sleeping party area of Capitol fly by dizzyingly behind the window and Finnick has to lean onto it in an attempt not to puke. It's got a bit better in the past half hour, but the thoughts are still floating around his brain like dozens of little brightly-coloured butterflies. It’s hard to properly grasp any of them in a sticky daze of disorientation, though.
The car stops near the entrance to the Tribute Centre and he staggers out, swaying on his feet and almost ending up on the pavement. His limbs finally rearrange themselves in the correct order after a few moments and he musters a lazy salute with only some of his usual flourish to the back of the driving away car.
Still performing, even now. Gods, what a mess.
He doesn't know how exactly he reaches the elevator, but he does and the numbers swirl a bit in his eyes before settling down properly on the buttons.
He remembers well the first time he was here.
The thing is, he wasn’t even supposed to participate in the Hunger Games that year. That questionable honour was supposed to go to Jacob Maren, not yet eighteen, but the oldest among the trainees.
Instead, Dorothea, their escort, gracefully put her powdered hand with baby-blue nails, that matched her enormous wig, and pulled out his, Finnick's, name. There was a bit of a standstill after that - Jacob locking eyes with him across their separate pens. Should he volunteer, should he not. Finnick was too young yet but still a Career. In the end, Jacob stayed silent.
Just as well, thought Finnick, pushing through the crowds to the stage and already putting on a brilliant wide smile, I've trained for this, I can win, it'll be easy.
He knows now what his dumb, arrogant younger self didn’t understand back then - that even if you manage to become a victor, the only one who ever wins the Games is the Capitol.
Jacob did go the following year and died to a back-stabbing One girl. And Finnick has spent three years cursing that day and all that led to it.
Gods above, it has only been three years, hasn’t it? It feels much longer than that, so far away, so long ago. Almost like ancient history.
He did kind of make history with that one, didn’t he? The youngest Victor ever. A fat lot of good that did for him.
Fourth floor. He practically falls out of the elevator, only managing to catch onto the wall at the last moment.
Mags, curled up on the couch, perks up at the sound of sliding doors. In the dim lighting of the lounge her silver hair looks like a halo above her head. Ironic.
It makes him burst out in a fit of hysterical high-pitched laughter. One would have to completely lose their marbles to call the woman an angel. An angel of death, at best. Some forget it, but she also killed in her Games, the same as all of them. And she's led enough kids to their deaths in the following years. He loves Mags with his whole heart, but she's no saint.
Mags always waits for him on appointment nights. He wishes she didn't see him like this, wishes no-one saw him like this and often snaps at her, but she only tuts in disapproval and keeps doing it. Despite his temper tantrums, he's glad she does.
Mags looks him over and frowns and he's sent down the rabbit hole of memories again.
They approach him the next day after he turns sixteen. The two of them look grim and apologetic and he doesn't know what to make of it.
‘I’m sorry, Finnick, I’m so sorry about what's probably going to happen,’ Mags says and lets out a sigh, sorrowful and tired and world-weary, and he, in a rare moment, is reminded of how old Mags really is, ‘Just… Remember that you can always talk to me, no matter what.' She inclines her head a bit, gesturing at her companion, ‘Or to Delia, if you need someone who truly gets it.'
Delia, who is wringing her hands half a step behind Mags, and looks like she’d rather be anywhere else, glances at him and gives him a bleak, perfunctory nod. He doesn’t know why he would need to or want to talk to her, but anyway it’s quite unlikely that he will take her up on this offer.
Finnick knows Delia, of course he does. Delia, a constantly nervous, twitchy Victor in her forties, teaches knife-throwing, and knife-stabbing, and other knife-related skills to the trainees and has never seemed to be a particular fan of long conversations. She's communicated with them mostly with sharp nods and half-aborted, jittery gestures, always looking on edge and shaky.
Her hands have never ever shaken with a blade in them, though.
Then, he gets the summons to the annual post-Victory tour party and President Snow asks to speak with him in his office after. He's told in detail what he's expected to do, now that he's finally sixteen, and what will happen if he doesn't.
Oh.
Oh.
That's what that meant.
His first appointment with a client is the next day and it's the beginning of the end.
His sister screams at him a few months later, when he returns from one of his trips to the Capitol, ‘They don’t care about you, you stupid boy! Why won’t you understand that! Why the Hell do you keep going there?’
But it’s her who doesn’t understand, who could never understand. He can’t tell Carolyn, he can’t, not just because he doesn’t want her to know what he does, but because he’s not allowed to.
President Snow was quite straightforward about what would happen to his ill mother and his sister with her husband and their baby twins, if he were to tell anyone, even them, anything. So he keeps quiet and let them think the worst of him. The same thing that everyone else does.
(Other than his fellow victors, who are all aware of the work he and the ones like him are made to do, the only person who doesn’t look at him with badly concealed disgust, or jealousy, or fake friendliness, or lust in Four is Annie Cresta. Her eyes (also sea-green, though a few tones lighter than his own) only ever look at him with sympathy and pity these days. He would have absolutely hated being looked at like that not long ago, but now it’s just so goddamn refreshing. He used to find her annoying with her righteousness and softness when they trained to be careers together, thought her weak and kind of cowardly, but maybe there is actually nothing wrong with gentleness and timidity, he ponders.
Of course, it’s hopeless, getting used to even such a small thing. Annie Cresta is a Career. She will go into the Games soon. In a couple of years she will likely be dead.)
Mags approaches him slowly, telegraphing all her movements clearly, trying not to spook him. He must look bad, because she checks his temperature with a hand on his forehead. From her pursed lips and scrunched eyebrows he gathers that it’s not very good.
'What, doctor, am i dying yet?' he ironizes.
'Well, you certainly don't look too lively, boy,' she snaps back,'Sit down, I'll be right back.'
She lets him settle on the couch and leaves to fetch her first-aid kit. They’re not allowed to bring any pills to the Tribute centre, so as to not let tributes get anywhere near them, but she has some other basic supplies. Luckily, today they are no flesh wounds to patch up.
She comes back with a thermometer in her hand. And that’s what sends him over the edge and into hysterical tears, the goddamn thermometer. It’s an old-fashioned but trusty mercury thermometer, very common back in Four, but considered obsolete by Capitol standards.
Finnick, having been many times in the local medical over the past year and a half to get patched up after rough encounters with clients, is intimately familiar by now with Capitol’s high-tech, reliably produced in Three.
She waits a bit before his sobs and shaking subside, finally takes his temperature and asks,'You're burning up. What on earth happened to you?'
'He gave me something, I don't know what,' Finnick replies reluctantly and watches her face twist and her arms cross on her chest. She's staring at him pointedly.
'Do we really have to?' he groans,'I'm almost fine by now. You're only wobbling a bit in my eyes.'
'Come on, up you go,' she pulls him up, surprisingly strong for a seventy-year-old, and leads him to his room, to the bathroom. She walks out again and returns with a glass and a closed water bottle.
She fills the glass with tap water and makes him drink it again and again and then throw up, repeating and repeating it until there's nothing left in his stomach at all.
Then she hands him the water bottle, lightly shoves him in the direction of the needlessly overcomplicated shower and exits.
When he finally emerges into his room he's almost feeling like himself again. Mags is still there, leaning on the frame of his bed. He finds some clothes to sleep in and drops next to her. She hums softly and smooths his hair out, running her fingers through his wet curly locks.
She's been much gentler with him since his Games, but she's taken a fancy to him a long time ago.
He was a bit of a troublemaker as a child, like little boys so often are, always sneaking away to the creek to play on the wet rocky shores, or trying to catch fry with his bare hands, or diving from the pier to see how long he could hold his breath, generally making his mother exasperated. He showed up at home in the late afternoon tired but joyful after a day of exploring with a wide toothless grin, seaweed in his hair and damp dirty patches on his knees.
His father didn’t like that much. So at a ripe old age of seven he’s dumped on Mags’s doorstep, who looks at his father weirdly over Finnick’s head and then takes a look at him, slowly lowers down to his eye-level and grasps his tiny hand with her veiny, old-woman one.
‘Well, well, well, what are we going to do with you, little one?’
She's never been cruel to any of the trainees, definitely not, but she wasn't particularly warm-hearted either. She was kind, but also stern and strict, like a proper trainer. He knows that it's because, despite all the preparations, most of them would die in their Games. She didn't really believe that he would win his Games either.
But he survived and she became more willing to show her affection for him after that. And to him, she, the person who practically raised him, instead of his distant mother and constantly angry father, has always felt the most like a real family, even when she acted all grumpy.
He drifts to sleep, relaxing under the silent watch of the only person in the world he fully trusts.
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