Category Archives: Useful Sites

Useful Sites

Monday Morning Minutia

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Traveling and unpacking have kept me from delving deep into my own writing, but the internet still has plenty of interesting things for the props person.

  • “Sheepless” Magazine has a nice feature on Paper Mâché Monkey, the theatre design studio run by Grady Barker and Meghan Buchanan. They did some work on our Measure for Measure this summer. Before officially starting their company, they also took over the prop fabrication on Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson and Merchant of Venice when they moved from the Public to Broadway. It’s a well–put together article, and great to see them starting to get some attention.
  • I almost missed this the first time around, but Erich Friend highlighted some new fake candles on this Theatre Safety Blog. These were designed and patented by Disney Imagineers to go in the newly renovated Haunted Mansion. They look much more like real candles than previous versions, especially up close (at least, they do in the videos). I hope the price is right when they finally become available in the US.
  • Finally, About.com has a brief article about “Hero Props”, the company run by Seán McArdle.
Useful Sites

The Most August Links

I am in North Carolina for a few more days, but return to New York City next week, so I will have more time (and a real computer) to spend on writing. Until then, here are some useful sites to satisfy your prop-reading needs:

PDN’s Photo of the Day has some wonderful photographs of Pamplona’s San Fermin festival, where giant puppets run around beating children.

Speaking of puppets, Project Puppet has a great tutorial on adding facial features to your puppet characters. It covers everything from cutting the shapes out of soft foam, to patterning and covering them with fleece.

Rich Dionne continues his series on budget estimates in theatre with one of the hardest variables to estimate: the cost of labor to complete a project.

Some brief, but interesting, prop facts about the upcoming Fright Night remake. I also found another article which has some additional fun facts.

Useful Sites

The Right Proper Links

These are so cool: US bread wrappers of the 40s and 50s. Besides being tons of fun, the pictures are good enough to print out if you need to make period wrapped bread. Incidentally, the site this is from, How to be a Retronaut, is chock-full of the most wonderful vintage and historical pictures. You can waste hours of time on this site while rationalizing that you are “doing research.”

I’ve pointed to the Early Office Museum site before, but I just found this gallery of Really Big Stuff. It’s photographs of early office equipment, like typewriters and rubber stamps, constructed at large scales (think “parade float” size). It’s also a good opportunity to check out the site if you haven’t heard of it before.

The NIOSH Pocket Guide to Chemical Hazards is an extremely useful source of information for the hundreds of chemicals listed as “hazardous” by OSHA and found in the stuff we build props out of. Rather than serve as an exhaustive guide to all information, it lists key information about each chemical relevant to work. You can view it online or download the whole thing as a PDF; I’m also throwing the link up in the sidebar of this site so you can find it every time you visit.

The Historic Naval Ships Association has a 1949 training manual titled Engine Room Tools presented in full on their website. It illustrates and describes the tools one would find on a ship at the time, namely metal-working hand tools. They are surprisingly similar to the metal-working tools you would find in a props shop, and the illustrations demonstrating their use are very cool.

Useful Sites

I did not Desert you

I am currently in the desert of Arizona. It’s time for another S*P*A*M conference, and this year, our hosts are Childsplay Theatre. I will report on all things of interest sometime later next week. For now, enjoy these sites of interest from the comfort of your own home.

Rich Dionne tackles the many methods for making a budget estimate in theatre. I discovered I use a mix of these methods when I deal with the fuzzy world of estimating the costs of props for a show.

In an earlier issue of their magazine, Make published a primer on working with carbon fiber (aka graphite fiber). They have now posted the entire article for free on their website.

This is interesting: why are there no guns in MoMA? It’s a podcast looking at the role of design in guns. What I found fascinating is how the manufacturing of guns is what really began the standardization of parts and machines in the industrial age. Despite their role and importance in modern life, museums of design like MoMA do not display any guns.

The Monster Mummies of Japan is a strange diversion into the history of imaginary taxidermy in Japanese temples.

Finally, who can resist color photographs of Manhattan in the 1940s?

 

Useful Sites

The First Links of the Rest of Your Life

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Happy July, everyone. And to my US readers, happy Fourth of July weekend. I’ll keep this brief as most of you are off work and school, or drifting away to vacation. Unless you’re in summer stock, in which case, you should be building props rather than reading my blog!

Here is an interesting story for those of you who make replica props: DC Comics Sues Gotham Garage Over Replica Batmobiles. Prop replicas live in a murky area of copyright and trademark law, and this lawsuit has a lot of specific factors (and it hasn’t been settled yet). It will be interesting to see how this plays out.

This past June, Dave Lowe celebrated the 30th anniversary of Raiders of the Lost Ark with thirty days of posts about the movie. In a post titled “The Temple of Dagobah“, we learn how the vines from Yoda’s planet in Star Wars ended up being reused for the temple Indiana Jones steals the golden idol from in the opening of Raiders.

Dream Now Reality: A filmmaker from Victoria wins a contest to make a movie from his script. His script is about a ten-year-old girl who builds a robot friend from old VCR parts. The filmmaker suddenly realizes he needs to build a robot. Luckily, he has Paxton Downard on his team, who built props for Stargate and Fringe. Man, I wish this article had photographs; still, it’s a cute story.

Finally, Make Magazine has an interesting editorial by Saul Griffith called “DIT: Raising Our Collective Barn“. He writes about the importance and benefits of collaboration when making things, and describes it as DIT—do it together—rather than DIY.