Tag Archives: effects

Useful Sites

Last Links before the End of the World

Happy Winter Solstice, everybody! I will be taking off the next week or so for the holidays. Once the new year rolls around though, I’ll be having some pretty exciting stuff to post in the lead-up to my new book (coming February 26th). Until then, enjoy these links:

Here’s a great story and video about how a prop maker and a woodworker are collaborating on affordable prosthetic hands. Richard Van As, a South African woodworker, lost his fingers in a woodworking accident. He couldn’t afford commercial prosthetics, so he worked with Washington-state prop maker Ivan Owen to build his own prosthetic.

This is a nice little article about the Fulton Theatre scene shop (including the props shop), located in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.

I recently came across a forum called The Effects Lab. It is meant for special makeup effects, mask making and creature design, and has a fairly active community of people discussing sculpture, animatronics, casting and other skills useful to many types of prop makers.

Wired has an article and first in a series of videos on DIY mold-making; making molds with silicon rubber and casting in plastic resin is commonly used in props shops, and these videos are a pretty straight-forward guide to getting started. Of course, the whole “doing it in your house where you and your kids eat and sleep” is questionable in safety terms.

Here’s a fun and whimsical tale of the tools in a toolbox having an argument. Warning: do not read if you cannot stand puns.

 

Useful Sites

May the Fourth be With You

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This came through the prop managers group this past week (which got it from the stagecraft mailing list). Canadian mail-order catalogs from 1880 to 1975; like historical Sears catalogs, these are useful to see what the average Jane and Joe were buying throughout the last century and a half, making it great for period research.

The Design Observer Group has a semi-regular feature called “Accidental Mysteries”. The most recent installment features photographs and scans of antique measuring and marking tools. Other Accidental Mysteries have interesting things, such as these weekly rail passes from St Louis in the 1940s, and these punk and metal flyers from the 1980s-90s.

Chris Schwartz (of Popular Woodworking and Lost Art Press) is working on an interesting-sounding book on the “furniture of necessity”. Where the furniture of the rich and powerful is well-documented and archived, the furniture of everyday life is difficult to date and keep track of, particularly before the age of photography and mail-order catalogs. He is delving deep into research to come up with the forms of furniture that have remained unchanged for 200 years or more. It sounds like it could be potentially interesting for those prop masters and set designers who need to make period furniture for characters who couldn’t afford Chippendale chairs.

Here are a few interesting snapshots taken behind-the-scenes from the original Batman TV show (1966-68). Not much information on their provenance, but still pretty fascinating.

This site has a large number of videos, such as several different “documentaries” on various matte and miniature artists who have worked on films like Superman, Dark Crystal, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, The Thief of Baghdad, La Fin du Monde, The Third Man, Clash of the Titans, and The Da Vinci Code. It also has video featuring interviews of people who have worked on the FX crews of the Alien movies, and a video talking about restoring the Nostromo (the giant spaceship model) from the original Alien films. The videos are rather long and kind of all over the place; some of them have original 3D animation interspersed within the interviews. I’m not sure where the videos came from, but if you are willing to fight through the odd parts, you can pick up some interesting tidbits from the creators of some of cinema’s best visual effects.

Tools

Pure Smoke

This was making the rounds on email yesterday: The Pure Smoke system by Jason Brumbalow. Say you need a clothes iron or a tea kettle to make steam on stage, but generating that kind of heat is too dangerous for the actors. You can probably hide one of these somewhere and let it make some room-temperature theatrical fog for you.

It essentially works like an e-cigarette with a nicotine-free cartridge. The major difference is you cue the vapor with a squeezable trigger rather than an airflow sensor which is activated when you inhale on the end. The vapor is generated from propylene glycol, which is among the safer kinds of chemicals used in theatrical foggers and electronic cigarettes.[ref]The amount of vapor produced by the Pure Smoke in the video looks to be extremely small, but if you are interested in the possible health risks of inhaling propylene glycol, especially in the quantities produced by full-stage theatrical foggers, I urge you to check this fact sheet about propylene glycol from Monona Rossol, the leading expert on chemical hazards in the entertainment industry.[/ref]

The website lists the system at $147, with refill smoke packs starting at around $25. It says each cartridge gives you over 80 large “puffs”, with a refill pack giving you 10 cartridges, so that’s about 3 cents per puff. The cost is a great deal cheaper than palm-sized theatrical foggers ($1850), though I’d imagine the vapor is considerably less dense and long-lasting.

It has a battery pack which takes 4 AA batteries (not included) which is connected through a long wire to a squeezable trigger mechanism. The mechanism is rigged to be strapped to a performer’s chest, though I imagine you can alter it to fit any prop you need the smoke in. A hose runs from the mechanism to the dispenser tip, which also holds the smoke cartridge. The dispenser is about 3 1/2″ long; the diameter of the base is about half an inch, and the tip is a quarter of an inch.

Useful Sites

First links of 2012

I’ve been checking out the site Make it and Mend it lately. It does have a lot of “I turned this coffee can into a piggy bank”–type projects, but if you dig around, you can find some great and useful ideas for repurposed materials and doing things on the cheap. Even if you don’t find anything that will help you in work, it can help you in your life too, since props people don’t get paid nearly enough for what we do.

So, episodes of the Woodwright’s Shop are online. In fact, PBS has a lot of their shows available for viewing online, like Craft in America. You won’t find these on Netflix or Hulu.

Wide Angle/Closeup is a site featuring interviews with filmmakers. Of particular interest are the production design and special effects categories (like talking about the blood effects in the Godfather movies).

The Textile Blog has been around for some time now. It talks all about the design, history and art of textiles from around the world.

Reprints

Moons, Ripples, and Fire, 1885

The following article originally appeared in “The New York Times” in 1885.

How nature is imitated on the stage.

An old stage manager imparts some instruction—how to counterfeit the change from day to night.

“Nothing,” said an old stage manager, “is more easy to produce on the stage than a moonlight scene, and nothing is ore effective after it is produced. The work begins, of course, with the painting of the scene. The artist has to take into consideration the fact that moonlight must be represented with a different light from the brilliant yellow glare of gaslight which is used for day effects. The great mass of color in a moonlight scene is laid in by the artist in cold grays and greens. The grays must have no warmth in them, nothing of a purplish tinge, for moonlight is cold and hard. The greens are low-toned combinations, chiefly of burnt umber and Prussian blue. The half lights in the painting are put in with the lighter tones of this green, while the high lights are toned up with white tinted with emerald green. Sometimes when a metallic glitter is needed on some point a bit of green foil paper is stuck on. Now such a scene as this, as you can easily see, would look very sombre and unpleasant in strong gaslight.”

“What do they do with it?”

“They put artificial moonlight on it.”

“How?”

“Well, suppose the scene to be a woody glade with a large opening in the trees showing a distant landscape. The drop scene at the rear of all is painted to represent the sky and landscape. In front of the drop, about three feet away, a low piece of what is known as profile work runs across the stage. This is painted to represent rocks, grass, &c., and is called a ground piece. Behind it and hidden from the audience runs across the stage a row of green ‘mediums.’ These are argand burners with green chimneys. Of course, they throw a soft greenish light upon the lower part of the scene. Another row runs across in front of the upper part of the drop, and is ‘masked in’ from the audience by a sky border. To this light is added that of a calcium thrown through a green glass upon the stage from the flies. And there you have your moonlight effects.”

“How do they get the moonlight on the water?” Continue reading Moons, Ripples, and Fire, 1885 →