Tag Archives: blood

News

New Webinar: Bloody Hell!

Bloody Hell! It’s time for another S*P*A*Minar: our monthly webinar series on all things props.

Just in time for Halloween, Jen McClure, S*P*A*M member and Properties Supervisor for the Yale Repertory Theatre and Yale School of Drama, will talk about stage blood effects!

Stage blood recipes and pre-made gore make-up products abound, but once you have your fake blood liquid, then what? In this S*P*A*Minar, Jen will show you ways to store and dispense your stage blood to execute a wide variety of blood effects for live performance. Trigger warning: this class will contain simulated blood and injury effects.

Starting with this S*P*A*Minar we are requesting pay-what-you-can donations to support this programming. All money collected will be used to offset webinar operation costs with additional funds going to our annual grant program for early career prop people. Suggested donation amount is $3.

Donations can be made via PayPal Money Pool.

REGISTER for October’s webinar here.

Registration will remain open until 6PM EST on October 18th and a link to the Zoom S*P*A*Minar session will be sent out to all registered attendees 1 hour before the start of the webinar.

All S*P*A*Minars will be recorded and video will be shared on their YouTube channel the week following the event.

Useful Sites

Props Links for Friday

Just a reminder that you have until May 15th to apply for one of the $1000 grants being offered by S*P*A*M. If you have a props internship or apprenticeship either now or in the near future, you are eligible, and it is super easy to apply for!

Slammin’ Ham! – FFFriday Guest Post from Victoria Ross – For one of our shows at Triad, my apprentice cast and painted this very hefty ham out of silicone rubber. The final scene in Two Trains Running is punctuated by a character slamming the ham on the diner counter, and this ham made that slam very dramatic.

Someone Has To Clean Up After Broadway’s Creative Destruction - True West features the near-total destruction of everything on stage by the end of the performance, and the current Broadway production delivers that. Find out how the show’s prop team accomplished not only that, but the clean-up and reset before every show as well.

How Disney uses more than 7,000 props to make Galaxy’s Edge look and feel like a ‘Star Wars’ movie – The new Star Wars theme park requires a ton of very custom set dressing. Find out how Eric Baker and his team are salvaging airplane parts and other pieces of junk to build this “final frontier.”

Behind the Scenes at Shakespeare Theatre Company’s Props Warehouse – Chris Young, the props director at STC, explains how they accomplished all the blood effects in their recent production of The Oresteia.

How-to

Blood Cannon Video

For our production of Teresa Rae King last spring at Triad Stage, we ended the show with a murder-suicide. The director asked if we could have a blood cannon to create two gunshot exit wound splatters on the transparent walls. Of course I said yes, and then immediately went away to learn what a blood cannon was and how to build one.

Now that it is complete, I put together this video showing how it worked.

Blood Cannon

Useful Sites

A Relaxing Weekend of Props

Props from Hamilton and More Featured in New Exhibit Celebrating Design Elements Rarely Seen Up Close – I posted about this earlier in the week, and now it is getting more coverage. This March at Wheaton College in Massachusetts, props from Broadway, the Santa Fe Opera, as well as from films by Quentin Tarantino and Wes Anderson, will be on display. Oh yeah, and some of my props, too.

Watch the Met Opera Stage a Sea of Blood – Find out how J&M Special Effects managed to flood the whole deck of the Metropolitan Opera with fake blood. This article has some striking photographs and video of the effect, and it delves into the kinds of logistics it takes for dealing with such a large amount of fluid.

How to 3D Print on Fabric – This video has been circulating the internet for the last week or so, but it is still too cool not to share. Uncle Jesse shares his techniques for 3D printing directly onto fabric to make effects like dragon scales and the like.

You Gotta Have Heart – Emma Pickles shares how she sculpted, molded and cast a squishy human heart. And she does it (gasp!) without any Smooth-On products! It’s actually a good look at using cheaper, more traditional methods and materials for creating a convincing prop.

How-to

Video: Blood Knife

The companion videos for The Prop Effects Guidebook just keep on coming. This week I demonstrate how to build the most basic type of blood knife you can. A blood knife is a specially-prepared knife that administers blood as it “cuts” an actor.

Blood knife

I will be releasing more of these companion videos as we draw closer to the book’s release. You can watch all of them on YouTube.

The Prop Effects Guidebook is available for pre-order now at most major retailers.