Here is the third companion video for my upcoming book, The Prop Effects Guidebook, coming this February. The book has a few photographs demonstrating the old “shoot an arrow into the wall” trick, but this video goes into more detail and shows the trick in action.
This is a great trick for Deathtrap depending on how you stage it. I have also used this trick in Wait Until Dark, though that is a knife-throwing gag.
These companion videos will continue to be released as we draw closer to the book’s release. You can watch all of them on YouTube.
I have a new book, The Prop Effects Guidebook, being published this February. It will show you how to do all sorts of magical effects, like the fire effect in the video below.
I first saw this effect in a video from another theater (I forget which one, I’m dreadfully sorry). Our technical director at the time, Chris Simpson, recreated it and we’ve used it in several productions since then. It works best inside of a fireplace or another semi-enclosed area where you can hide all the equipment.
I will be releasing more companion videos to the book as we draw closer to the book’s release. You can watch all of them on YouTube.
My next book, The Prop Effects Guidebook, is due out this coming February. Where The Prop Building Guidebook taught you how to construct the physical props, this new book will teach you how to do all the magic effects that a prop person is called on to provide.
I filmed a series of companion videos to the book which demonstrate the techniques and effects presented within its pages. I will be posting these videos to my blog over the next three months as we approach the book’s release date.
The first video is on blood bags, one of the essential tools for any play with a blood effect. I demonstrate how to make one using an impulse sealer.
When you are estimating the cost to build a prop, you often add a “contingency.” Take 15-25% of the anticipated cost and tack it on to the estimate. So if you predict that a prop will cost $100, a 15% contingency is $15, making your new estimate $115. I recently heard a student ask whether a contingency should be applied to every item in your estimate, or to the estimate as a whole.
To help me think this through, I looked up the definition of contingency. It is a “provision for an unforeseen event or circumstance.”
When you are purchasing your materials, you probably want to buy a little extra. You may mess up a cut, you might measure something wrong, a section might be damaged, or you may have underestimated how much you will need in your original plan. Often, the cost of getting just a little bit more material later is greater than the cost of buying a little extra material at the beginning. Materials are often cheaper in bulk. If you buy them online, it is cheaper to pay shipping once rather than twice, and many material suppliers have minimum order requirements. Even if you can get things locally, the cost of multiple purchases can add up; sure, a single screw may only be 13 cents, but the half hour trip to the hardware store adds several dollars worth of time to its price.
So pad your material needs. When I buy hardware, I buy by the box to make sure I have enough. Sometimes you use more than you originally thought, sometimes you just drop a few screws and can’t find them. When I buy fabric, I round up to the nearest yard (or add a few yards if it is cheap enough). Especially when it is materials I know I can use for future projects, any extra will go onto my shelves and save money down the line.
Not every material or line item will be padded, of course. If your project requires a motor that costs $200, you’re not going to buy two of them, right? I mean, not unless you’re planning for a lengthy open-ended run and your company has the money.
I do not really think of material padding as part of your contingency, because it is not an “unforeseen event”. The contingency is added on top of everything at the end. It is for costs you could not have planned for or for costs that come up because of changing circumstances. “Oh, I need to buy degreaser to clean this steel.” “Oops, I need to buy rags to apply this stain.” “I’ve just been told I need to buy a drop cloth before painting this.” “This prop is heavier than I anticipated and will need handles.” “Now they want to put a light inside this magic wand.”
So pad the amount of materials as needed, than add a contingency to the top of everything. That’s what I find works for me.
If you’ve ever seen the play Buyer and Cellar, you know that a key scene revolves around the description of “Fifi”, an antique bubble blowing automaton. An automaton is a mechanical device that repeats a series of predetermined motions; think of a wind-up toy, or a cuckoo clock. They were really in vogue in the 16th through 18th centuries, when clock makers made all sorts of intricate moving automata in the shape of humans and animals playing out various whimsical scenes.
Most productions of Buyer and Cellar imply the existence of Fifi. The whole set is usually quite minimal, and the props are limited to a chaise and a book. For Triad Stage’s production, the director wanted to know if we could actually have a doll that dipped a wand into soap and blew bubbles out of it. She felt the audience, like herself, may not know what an automaton was, and this pivotal scene would be confusing without some visual reference.
I told the team it would be no problem to make an automated doll that moved by itself, and then I feverishly racked my brain as to how I was going to pull this off. I have been reading The Automata Blog for years, so I had a good mental catalog of potential solutions (anyone interested in automata should definitely dig through the archives on that site).
I put together a video that describes how the final mechanisms work and that show the doll in motion.
My apprentice, Shay, started off by sculpting the head and arms. The head was foam, while the arms were made of wire wrapped in tape. Everything was coated in Apoxie Sculpt. She mounted them to a “birdhouse” which would contain the mechanism.
Sculpting the doll parts
As explained in the video, all the movement was driven by a single crank shaft run by a motor. We prototyped the crank shaft with some bent wire, then transferred the measurements to a full scale drawing which I used to fabricate a more robust shaft from steel.
Laying out the crank shaft
I used nylon spacers which were free to spin around the pieces of quarter-inch rod on the crankshaft. I cut a small groove around the center of the spacers to keep the string from slipping side to side. Everything was welded together to make a single piece.
Crank shaft near completion
I began by using string to connect the crank shaft to the arms and head. It would frequently get caught by the spinning crank shaft, causing Fifi to stop working. I tried a number of ways to prevent the string from wandering far enough to the side to get caught, but nothing worked one hundred percent of the time. I wanted to use stiff wire, but the distance between the shaft and the doll’s arm changed as it spun, so I needed the string’s ability to go slack. Eventually, I realized I could use a piece of wire that was long enough to clear the crank shaft, and then attach it to a piece of string for the rest of the distance to the arm.
Motor and crank shaft
The motor was a basic hobby motor with an attached gear box that slowed it down to 12 revolutions per minute. The crank shaft was not perfectly straight, so the motor was mounted loosely, allowing it to “float” a little bit. The pneumatic portion of the prop is explained in the video; Fifi was attached to an air compressor backstage, with tubing running up her arm and aimed at the bubble wand. A solenoid valve was triggered by the crank shaft whenever her arm was raised, causing air to rush out for a brief moment.
Fifi, the bubble blowing automaton
Though Fifi had a lot of challenges, once we got her working, she worked pretty flawlessly throughout the entire run.
Making and finding props for theatre, film, and hobbies
