Tag Archives: making

Features

Cut!

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The fake dead lamb I made for The Little Foxes was cut.

Fake Dead Lamb
Fake Dead Lamb

It wasn’t because they didn’t like it. In fact, they never even looked at it. They had decided the scene would play better without the actors eating a lamb. So they cut it.

As a props artisan, you cannot take it personally. When a prop is cut, it is cut because the play works better without it. If a director (or writer or producer) tries to keep everything in a play just because they spent a lot of money on it or someone spent a lot of time it would quickly bog the production down. Theatre history is filled with the stories of monumental failures like these, where so much money has been spent and so many famous names are attached, but the production seems to crumble under its own weight. They fail because no one was willing to make the cuts or edit away the extraneous elements.

The lamb is amongst the more spectacular of my props to be cut, but there are certainly plenty of others. Remember this guy?

wooden ratchet noise-maker
wooden ratchet noise-maker

I first made him for the 2009 production of Twelfth Night. Director Dan Sullivan wanted some period noise-makers, and we did not have much in stock. We sent this to rehearsal, but they rejected it. Again, it wasn’t because they disliked it or did not appreciate it; rather the entire “bit” where they would use period noise-makers was re-staged to be something else.

The following year, Dan Sullivan was back to direct our production of The Merchant of Venice. In one of the rehearsal reports, they requested “period noise-makers”. Not to be outdone, I dug this wooden ratchet out of our props stock and sent it up to rehearsal. It again failed to make it into the show. So despite my pride in the construction of this prop, it was cut from two separate productions.

chair from tea
Chair from Tea

I made this chair for the 2007 production of Tea: A Mirror of Soul at the Santa Fe Opera. There were actually going to be nine of these chairs; I prototyped the construction process on the first three, and then I was going to teach our two apprentices how to build them so they could make the remaining six between them both. I solved a lot of structural and design challenges in my prototype. Besides making the splat appear to be both floating and structural, you will notice that the back uprights are offset from the back legs. Usually, they are one long piece running from top to bottom, which gives chairs most of their strength. So I solved these problems and actually had the first three of these chairs built, when I found out they were cut. They hadn’t even made it into rehearsal. The reason? Most scenic designers design past their budget. They know that some elements or pieces will be cut from their design to bring the budget down. The more crafty (or sneaky, depending on your point of view) designers will actually design things that are extraneous just to have pieces to cut later on. It makes them appear like they’re willing to compromise without actually compromising the design they want. It turns out these chairs were one such element, and the designer did not realize I would build them before they were cut. I guess I’m just too fast and efficient in my work.

Please remember: it is inevitable, if you work in props for long enough, that a prop you adore will be cut from the show. Keep in mind that you are working to make the show better.

Safety

Choosing the right disposable glove

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First, I wish to offer a caveat; I don’t write much about safety, because it’s a highly complex area, especially once you start talking about safety around chemicals. I’m not an expert, and if you are in a workplace situation, there are actual regulations, standards and laws that need to be followed. The last thing I want is someone’s sum total of knowledge about safety coming from “Eric Hart’s Props Blog.” Still, the home hobbyist may not know where to look for information, and the prop shop employee may not know what questions to ask their employer, or what their employer is responsible for providing. Thus, what follows is not a guide for choosing the right disposable glove; rather, it is a guide to what questions to ask and what information to look up to learn which disposable gloves are best for each situation. All the safety data in the world is useless if we don’t know what information we are trying to find, or even that we need to find certain kinds of information. Often, we don’t know what we don’t know.

Dozens of companies make disposable gloves, offering hundreds of combinations of materials, thicknesses and liners. You need to find the permeation data for the specific gloves you are using. This will tell you how long it takes for specific chemicals to work their way through the glove and onto your skin.

No single glove will protect you against every chemical. There were approximately 50,000,000 chemicals registered by the CAS on September 7, 2009, with more being added at the rate of twenty-five per minute. Luckily in theatre, we only use a small percentage of those chemicals. If you work at a theatre or shop in the USA that employs ten or more people (that’s counting the whole theatre, not just the prop shop), then it is subject to OSHA regulations, and your employer is required to inform you of any toxic chemicals you may be using.

As a general rule of thumb, you should be wary of rules of thumb when it comes to safety. But a good rule of thumb to follow in safety is “don’t get stuff on you, and don’t breathe anything that isn’t air.” Choosing the right glove falls under the “don’t get stuff on you” part of the rule. Gloves are necessary because many chemicals can be absorbed through the skin. Chemicals commonly used in prop shops that can be absorbed through the skin include solvents and epoxies. Solvents don’t just include pure solvents like acetone, xylol and mineral spirits, but also any product that includes solvents: spray paints, cleaners, adhesives, etc.

Another good rule of thumb is that latex gloves don’t stop any chemicals. They can keep your hands dry, and they’re great for keeping blood and other bodily fluids from getting on your hands. They’re also useful for the reverse: keeping your own sweat and oils from getting onto your work surface. But as far as working with any sort of industrial or household chemicals, they may as well be invisible.

Notice how I mentioned household chemicals above. Just because you can buy something in a grocery or drug store doesn’t make it safe to work with without proper protection. For example, many cleaners like Windex, 409 and Simple Green use a chemical called 2-Butoxyethanol. The toxic exposure level of 2-Butoxyethanol is less than that of acetone and hexane, placing it in the category of “highly toxic” chemicals. When you start looking at permeation charts for popular glove brands, you see a trend; latex gives you no protection, while neoprene and vinyl will offer only several minutes before exposure begins. If you are using anything other than nitrile, you are exposing yourself to a highly toxic chemical.

If you are using a glove and the substance is splashing or spilling onto your bare arm, it defeats the purpose. Make sure you are wearing sleeves that offer similar chemical protection, or use longer gloves.

Many chemicals we use for prop making are toxic through skin absorption. An example is any of the two-part epoxies we use: sticks of epoxy putty, five-minute epoxy glue, epoxy coatings for fiberglass and carbon fiber, epoxy resin for casting. Epoxy is a sensitizer, which means our bodies do not react to it on the first exposure. Rather, it is on the second or subsequent exposures where we develop what is essentially an allergic reaction. It can even be after decades of using a product before one reacts to it. But reaction can be severe. Here is a chilling but not uncommon description of a reaction:

Open, oozing, and itching insanity hives virtually all over my body and my eyes literally were swollen shut for a week on two separate occasions. Recovery, each time, took better than a month.

Once developed, it is not reversible, and occupational physicians may advise you to not only never use epoxy again, but none of the “two-part” chemicals in that category. No more Smooth-On products, Great Stuff, A-B foam, etc. If you make your living as a props artisan, you pretty much have to do all your molding and casting out of plaster.

It is important to note that permeation data charts tell how long it takes for a chemical to permeate through a glove. This implies that no glove will offer permanent protection; they are called “disposable” for a reason. In fact, the most a glove gets tested is for 6 hours. If you use a pair of gloves all day, don’t set them aside for the next day. In fact, you should throw the gloves away. Trying to stretch the use of a pair of gloves to save money may seem thrifty, but it is actually counter-intuitive. The same is true of any safety measures and products you use. If you use or reuse them improperly, you get the worst of both worlds; you are spending money but not keeping yourself safe. If you feel you are spending to much money on safety equipment to make props, the best solution is to stop making props. You don’t go scuba diving without an air tank. We often get in situations where the easiest solution seems to be to continue on and finish a prop; it’s late and you’ve run out of gloves, and all the hardware stores are closed, and all you need to do is get one more coat of epoxy on so it can cure by the morning and they can use the prop in rehearsal. When you get to those situations, remember this: Your goal in life is not to finish that single prop. Your goal in life is to build props for the rest of your life. Taking shortcuts now will affect your health later on. No prop in the existence of humankind has ever been more important than your health.

A good shop foreman will be consistent in his or her purchasing of disposable gloves, so you don’t have to hunt down the permeation data every time he or she buys a new brand.

In conclusion, don’t get stuff on yourself. You should know what is present in any material or substance you are working with. If it includes chemicals that can be absorbed through your skin, you need to find out what glove will offer protection from that chemical, and how long it will offer that protection. Remember that gloves from different companies may differ in their permeation data, even if all the stats on the box seem the same.

Features

What Material Chooseth You?

Often, choosing the material for your prop can be the most difficult part of the process; it will in fact determine the process. Choosing the wrong material can lead to added expense, additional labor and a whole lot of headaches. It can even result in a prop that does not look or perform as it should, with the only way to fix it being to rebuild it from scratch.
How do you know which materials to build your prop out of?

Features

Getting the Shape you Want

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Last year, I presented a paper called Devising a Mental Process for Approaching a Prop. In it, I theorized about a method to discover which properties a prop required in order to better determine how to construct it. In this article, I will delve into how to get the shape you need.

When thinking about the construction of a prop, you can consider two things: the shape and the surface treatment. These are not mutually exclusive. Certain materials influence certain surface treatments, through physical or even chemical reactions, or through varying levels of translucency which reveal some of the material beneath. For now, let us focus solely on the shape.

Making a three-dimensional object can be done in a number of ways. You can add material together to create your shape. You can subtract material to reveal your shape. You can also bend (or twist or stretch or somehow manipulate) your material into a new shape. Carpentry can be considered an additive process. You glue or nail or screw pieces of wood together to create a piece of furniture. Carving comes to mind when you think of a subtractive process. You remove smaller pieces from a larger chunk of foam or another material until it becomes the shape you want. Many processes are actually a combination of these two processes. Returning to our carpentry example, before you can add your various pieces together, you need to subtract material from the individual pieces to make them the correct width and length and give them the grooves and tenons and dovetails necessary for joinery.

A third process is what I call manipulation, where you take a material and reshape it. The traditional way to do this in the theatre prop world is with papier-mâché. The flat sheets of newspaper are soaked in a glue and water mixture and draped over a form. When it dries, it retains its new shape rather than return to a flat sheet. The same is true of other materials and processes, such as buckram, fiberglass, carbon fiber, Wonderflex and Varaform. Vacuforming can also be placed in this category. The bending, stretching, twisting and hammering of metal into new shapes would be considered manipulation as well. Again, some materials lend themselves to more than one category. If you are making a shape with plastiline clay, you can build the shape up by adding material, you can subtract material by carving away, or you can manipulate it by squishing or stretching or rolling it around.

A fourth way to create shapes is through the hardening of liquids (or semi-liquids or pastes) into a solid. This can be through drying, such as joint compound, Sculpt or Coat, or clay et al; through a chemical reaction, such as resin or other mold-making and casting compounds; or by heating and cooling, such as metal, wax or Friendly plastic.

The prop-maker can use these four meta-techniques to replicate nearly anything. Besides choosing the technique, one must choose the material. There are several categories of raw materials one can choose from. Wood (lumber, plywood, MDF, chip-board), metal (steel, aluminum, brass, tin), plastic (styrene, PVC, ABS, acrylic, Plexiglas, Stryrofoam, beaded foam), textiles (fabric, buckram, carbon fiber), ceramic (clay, plastiline). There are of course, several other categories and far too many materials to name, but you’ll find yourself returning to many of the same ones for prop-making. As I mentioned above, many materials can be shaped by more than one of the four categories I’ve described.

In addition to raw materials, you can use any number of found objects and parts. Model-makers use the term “kit-bashing”, which means taking pieces from commercially-available models, such as the tires from a car or the fuel yank from a jet, to use in a scratch-built model as a way to save time in creating complex shapes. For the prop-maker, the world is their kit to bash.

This is not meant to be an exhaustive list, nor is it meant to be a series to be memorized. As I hinted above, the boundaries between the meta-techniques become nebulous when you get into specifics. Rather, it is intended as a guide to consider when you are figuring out what materials and techniques to build your prop out of. For example, building a table with a straight and flat top and straight legs is far easier to make by adding together straight and flat pieces of wood. Making a hard shell, like armor, is easier by bending a sheet of a material like Wonderflex, which can hold its new shape when cooled.

Reprints

Stage-hands’ Union, 1923

The following article was published over 85 years ago. It’s an interesting look into not only what the stagehands union (now known as IATSE) did back then, but how it was viewed by some people. It’s also an interesting look at how the union was viewed back then. It’s important to note that the union – in fact, no union – is as strong as it was back in the 1920s. It would also be fascinating to look at how this article thought the union was destroying theatre, and compare it to what the state of theatre – and the union – is today. So please don’t think this article reflects any of my personal views or agenda, other than historical curiosity.

The Stage-hands’ Union

originally written by Lincoln J. Carter, Jr., 1923.

If you have ever chanced to wander down one of the alleys just off the Rialto of New York, known to all the world as Broadway, you have undoubtedly been impressed by the number of theaters which converge at various points and have noted that three or four stage doors will often be only a few feet apart. When it is considered that in this somewhat limited area lies the Mecca of all the playwrighters, producers, and site of some fifty houses, the reason for the propinquity of the stage doors is bared. On nights when the weather is mild and the shows are going on, little groups of heavy-set men, dressed in a promiscuous assortment of old clothes, congregate near these rear entrances, smoking and chatting about a wide variety of matters. At a certain moment those near one of the theatres will disappear into its depths for some minutes, then they will reappear and hustle into the house across the way. When they again return to the alley perhaps a few may rest only temporarily before the stage door of a third playhouse closes behind them. Who are they? Why, the stage hands, members of the oldest union in the theatrical business; and they have arranged a schedule permitting their drawing pay from two or three places for striking or making a set merely because they have found that the acts of each play end at different times. New York is their paradise. By this system some of them are drawing bigger salaries than many of those who perform before the footlights.

Their union began in the early years of the present century and has now grown to be one of the strongest influences in stageland. Even the clearers have an organization and the work is divided into branches. Each theatre has a crew consisting of a Head Carpenter and his two to sixteen assistants called “grips,” a Property Man with from one to four aids, a Flyman who may have one or eight men working under his orders, and an Electrician with from one to fifteen assistants. A traveling show has a much smaller staff, depending on the house to furnish most of the necessary help, and these are merely a Head Carpenter, Property Man, Flyman, and Electrician. If the production is a heavy scenic one several aids to each of these may be carried and they may call on the theatre for more.

A big Winter Garden show may have as many as thirty or forty men of this latter class and then employ a number of clearers, possibly twenty, whose duties consist only in taking off and placing furniture, rugs, decorations, or properties. One of the most comical sights to be seen behind the curtain is one of these big husky fellows calmly and leisurely walking off the stage carrying a prop, telephone, or a small chair—anything so long as it is the lightest he can get hold of—because the union rules prohibit them from moving more than one thing at a time. Apparently the regulations are thus merely to give more men a chance to work and to make an already easy effort still easier.

The stage carpenters direct the work of the hands behind the curtain. The “grips” handle the frame scenery and any painted scenery on frames or on the floor of the stage. They will touch nothing else, for if they should they would be ejected from the union.

The flymen are in the rigging loft and take care of all the drops, or scenes painted on cloth, or hanging scenery.

The property men and clearers handle all the furniture, carpets, pictures, curtains, bric-a-brac, and all else that is not painted scenery.

The house and company electricians are responsible for the lighting effects, directing them and having a number of assistants, one to each lamp, either in front or in back of the curtain.

No one is allowed by the union to touch anything outside of his own line. A carpenter or a “grip” may not handle a chair or a curtain and vice-versa. Actors are not allowed to participate.

In the larger cities the unions are very strong and they limit the membership in order that a carpenter or stage hand, who is so old that he can hardly stand, may still belong to the union. As a result, they are never overcrowded and there is no chance of the ancient members being crowded out. The natural outcome of such a combination is that pay has risen higher and higher. About fifteen years ago thirty dollars a week was considered good salary for a carpenter who now gets from fifty to fifty-five. Even the “grips” receive about forty.

Outside of the head carpenter and electrician there is absolutely no skilled labor of any kind and all that is necessary is strength and a little practice. The hours are very easy. A “grip,” for instance, goes to work at seven-thirty and is off at eleven; he only works then if a set is being made or struck. In other words, he labors about a half hour of that time and spends the other three hours in waiting to do something. The hauling crew has the hardest work, especially if their show makes many jumps.

While the actors draw no pay for rehearsals, that of the stage crews goes right on.

This is quite different from the old days before the union became so strong. It is also a reason, for the decline of one of the most spectacular things on the stage—scenic effects. In the early years of the century there were no restrictions as to what work each branch should do and as a result the entire company from the cast to the electrician lent a hand in working the mechanical devices which produced the necessary illusion. The heavy man and the ingenue of the show might operate one thing while the carpenter and the property man were doing another, and so on. With all this assistance prohibited in the present day by union rules and a heavy salary demanded for the additional aid required, it is no wonder that producers have been fighting shy of one of the devices that often used to make a play a great success solely on the merits of its scenic effects.

The union is also responsible for the ever increasing price of admission, another fact of which the general public remains ignorant. The expenses of the average show behind the curtains ranges from one thousand to fifteen hundred dollars a week. The audience never sees the men to whom this money is paid and generally remains in a blissful state of vacuity about their existence. But with such a heavy expense is it any wonder that some steps were necessary to cover it?

There have been several methods tried out in an effort to cut down this expense. One has been to bring in nonunion men. But the membership has then promptly placed “stink bombs” in the theatre, picketed it, and used other measures which have immediately caused the show to fail. The amusement public is very unstable and will let nothing interfere with the enjoyment of its pleasures. Such methods have done away with their patronage.

Still another means of getting away from the heavy burden of the stage hands has been to eliminate scenery. But in this case the public has been educated to such lavish sets that it promptly puts its foot down and the play wastes away unless some scenery is forthcoming.

So, the problem of the stage hands union is a big and a growing one. It means that admission prices will still soar much higher or else scenery must be done away with. So far no one knows the answer to the problem.

originally published in The Michigan Chimes, Vol. IV, Num. 6, March 1923 (pp. 22. 35-36)