Monthly Archives: November 2013

How-to

Gramophone Horn

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I did the props for Elon University’s Wild Party back in February, but I haven’t gotten around to posting pictures of a quick gramophone horn I made. The budget was tight and nothing was available to borrow or rent, so I decided to construct my own.

Pattern pieces
Pattern pieces

The style of gramophone horn we needed is made up of six “petal” pieces all connected together. Luckily, I found a drafting of the pattern piece needed online. I scaled it up and copied it six times onto some matboard (I used two different colors of matboard because that was all I had in the shop). I attached the bottoms of the pieces to a hexagon of plywood I had cut out.

Extending the back
Extending the back

The horn was attached to a length of PVC pipe which I heated up and bent. The back of the horn needed to be longer, so I cut some trapezoids of Masonite to extend the shape back.

Mounting to the table
Mounting to the table

The record player itself was totally not the kind that would have a gramophone horn, so there was nowhere to attach it (a big apology to all you fans of historical accuracy). It was also a rental piece, so it could not be modified. Since the upstage side would never be seen, I attached the horn itself to the table, and built this little plywood bracket to hold the horn so it would look like it was coming out of the record player.

Almost finished
Almost finished

I cut out some matboard “trim” to run along the circumference of the horn to strengthen it and give it a nice clean edge. It was almost ready for paint, but the back of the horn still looked pretty bad.

Tapering on a curve
Tapering on a curve

To finish off the shape, I needed a piece that could taper from the horn to the pipe, while curving around the bend in the pipe. The shape was also starting from a hexagon and ending up as a circle. Also, it was only a day or two before opening night. The quickest solution I could think of was to pattern a scrap piece of Wonderflex and wrap it on there. It needed some sanding and filling to make it smoother, but otherwise it worked like a charm.

Wild Party
Wild Party

So there you have it; a down-and-dirty gramophone horn made of paper and plastic.

 

Reprints

A Television Hero: The Property Man, 1949

The following article first appeared in The New York Times on April 3, 1949.

A Television Hero: The Property Man

by Arthur Altschul

The property department, always an essential element of the theatre, is becoming equally important in television production. During the years of radio, the responsibility for creating an illusion of reality rested with the sound effects department. Now the principal headaches of manufacturing veracity for video belong to the property man.

An indication of the expanding importance of the property department is seen in a few statistics. Last week, for example, NBC had to produce more than 3,000 props for forty-eight television shows. A year ago the same network found its demand for props approximately 5 per cent of what it is today.

Variety shows, dramatic shows, and children’s programs-in that order- take up most of the time of the station’s property man, who every day is in touch with an assortment of museums, antique stores, prop shops, furniture and department stores, factories and zoos, tracking down the more elusive objects required for a show.

Hours of exhausting search culminate in the effect which an audience takes as a matter of course. The type of work and problems that beset a station’s property department are evidenced in the following excerpts from the property sheet for one of Milton Berle’s recent “Texaco Star Theatre” shows: Continue reading A Television Hero: The Property Man, 1949 →

Useful Sites

All Props Day

So it’s the day after Halloween, but most of my links today are for Halloween-related props, because that’s what everyone has been writing about for the last couple of weeks. Luckily, us props people can use some good fake blood advice any day of the year.

First up is fellow SPAM member Deb Morgan, props master at the Lyric Opera in Kansas City, showing us how to make some fake edible blood and a blood bag. It’s a basic recipe that most of us know, but it’s great to watch how the different ingredients affect the final product.

Next is another SPAM member Seán McArdle giving his local Fox News channel a show-and-tell of fantastic props he has built. Besides his own take on the blood bag, he’s got a really cool non-pyrotechnic gunshot effect for a musket.

Ed Edmunds makes monsters and effects for haunted houses, and created the animatronic electric chair prop that essentially transformed these rides from cheesy diversions to high-tech affairs. Check out his interview in Esquire Magazine to learn more.

Finally, check out this super-cool video where artist DiResta makes a quick vacuum-formed mask, going from clay sculpt, to plaster mold, to vacuum-forming, to paint: