Category Archives: Useful Sites

Useful Sites

Good Links for a Good Friday

Tested has another great episode of their talk show where Adam Savage, Will Smith and Norm Chan discuss building an inexpensive toolkit for beginner makers. By “maker”, they mean someone doing small-scale fabrication of wood, various metals and plastics, some fabric and leather, model-making, and a bit of electronics, so really, it’s great advice for beginning prop makers as well. You can either watch a video or listen to a podcast of the show, which runs about 41 minutes long. They have also written down the list of tools they suggest, though it’s a good idea to listen to the show because they talk about how to buy tools and why you should get certain tools as well.

In case you missed it, I came across The Painters Journal, a publication about scenic art that ran from 2003-2010. All 22 issues are available online to read. Scenic art deals with paints, coatings, texture and sometimes even sculpting, so many of the articles are invaluable to props people as well.

Make Magazine has posted ten tips for using a circular saw. They’re all pretty good, though I would add that hearing protection should be worn too, as circ saws are almost always loud little beasts. A dust mask is usually a good idea as well.

I liked this recent article about Nick Ruiz, a theatre carpenter in the San Jose area. It’s simple and probably familiar to a lot of us in the industry, but stories like this are so rarely written.

And just a reminder that you have less than a month to enter the Prop Building Guidebook Contest! Surely you have a photograph of a prop you’ve built, and who doesn’t want a grab-bag of prop making supplies? The entries I’ve received so far look fantastic, so thanks to everyone who has already submitted.

Useful Sites

Some Weekend Links

Just a reminder to enter the Prop Building Guidebook contest if you haven’t already. You have until April 30th to send in a photo or video of a prop you’ve made; there are already dozens of really great entries.

NYC Past has gigantic black and white photographs of New York City throughout history, from the early twentieth century through the 1990s.

When you have the time, take a listen to this interview of Christina Haberkern, a film prop maker. She mainly does graphics and illustration for ISS, and has made props for films such as Forgetting Sarah Marshall, Argo, Inception, and J. Edgar. It’s a much more in-depth, down-to-earth and personal glimpse into the life of a working prop maker than most of those behind-the-scenes “aren’t props fun and crazy” fluff pieces that are often produced.

Here’s a fun idea: ray gun parts you can mix and match to make your own ray gun. The Propnomicon website has pictures and details.

Finally, as a nice break before the weekend, check out this video where famed prop maker Dragon Dronet (Star Trek shows and films, Babylon 5, Eraser, and many more) is challenged to recreate a prop gun from District 9 in only 3 days. It’s a fairly quirky film that ventures into the surreal, but it does a great job showing Dragon’s process, and the result is a really cool prop.

Useful Sites

Beware the Sites of March

This post is a few years old, but interesting nonetheless. Art Direction, Props and Authenticity talks about the importance of realism in prop making, specifically the realism of a prop’s weight. A prop that appears too light can take the audience out of the moment.

Game of Thrones has a new video out showing some of the work that goes into their props. It features prop master Gordon Fitzgerald, some drawings of props, and a look at how the smallest details are taken care of.

The Make Magazine blog featured a cool tip for using polycaprolactone plastic to make sanding blocks (they use Shapelock, though Friendly Plastic is another familiar brand name). If you need your sanding block to have a different shape for fitting around a curve or other odd surface, just heat it up in boiling water and reshape it to what you need.

Finally, if you have the time (about a half an hour), here is a good video featuring Adam Savage as he weathers and ages a prop. He articulates his process rather well, even though a lot of the process is carried out by instinct and intuition:

Useful Sites

March Goes in Like a Link

It’s the end of the week, but the beginning of a new month. This is conference month for those of us in technical theatre. First is SETC, happening next week (March 5-9) in Louisville, KY. Shortly after is USITT, taking place March 19-23 in Milwaukee, WI. I will be at both if you wanted a chance to catch up or introduce yourself. At USITT, Stage Directions will be hosting a book signing for my book at their booth on Friday, March 22nd, at 12:30 PM. More info to come. For now, enjoy these links:

My latest magazine article in Stage Directions is now online; I profile the Milwaukee Rep props shop, home of props master Jim Guy. Milwaukee also happens to be the location of this year’s USITT conference. Coincidence?… actually, no, we chose to write about Milwaukee Rep for this issue precisely because of USITT.

The designer of the Dalek from Doctor Who, Ray Cusick, died this past week. The Verge has some videos and a story about him and how the Daleks came to be.

When the Vancouver Playhouse Theatre shut its doors in March 2012, its production facilities and prop storage were abandoned and surrendered to the landlords who owned the building. Jim Buckshon was subleasing part of that building at the time for his company, Renegade Productions, and decided to lease the entire building and save the props. Read the whole story to see how Buckshon took on one of Vancouver’s largest prop collections and kept it intact for future productions.

Weta Workshop — the design/production/creature/FX shop behind films such as The Lord of the Rings, King Kong and Avatar — recently solicited questions for their Mold Shop Supervisor, Michael Wallace.  Mike answers those questions about working in a mold shop, materials and techniques he uses, and his own background.

AJ Catalano is a sci-fi prop maker who has built items for films ranging from The Avengers and The Amazing Spiderman, to The Muppets. Check out this video where he talks about his background and the work he does:

Useful Sites

A Friday of Links

1 Comment

This photograph of a country store from 1939 has all sorts of amazing things going on in it. I could look at it for hours. The whole website it comes from, Shorpy Historical Photo Archive, is a treasure trove of imagery like this one, and all of them can be viewed at incredibly large sizes so you can spot every little detail.

At the other end of history are Trevor Traynor’s photographs of contemporary New York City newsstands.

This short blog post up at Popular Woodworking taught me some interesting things about how British table saws are different from American ones, particularly in the safety features. I think the fence that stops at the blade is an interesting concept, and would love to try it out.

Have you heard about this? A team of people out in Tennessee are building a full-scale replica of the Millennium Falcon from Star Wars. That’s a 114 foot long spaceship for those who don’t know. What’s great is that if you look back through the blog, you can see that work began on this over six years ago, and now there is some hard-core construction going on nearly every single day. It looks fairly certain that they can pull this whole thing off.

I tweeted this earlier in the week, but if you missed it, NPR had a great story about faux food artisan Sandy Levins, who recreates historical dishes for display at George Washington’s Mount Vernon estate, New York’s Lower East Side Tenement Museum, and many other museums and historical sites.