The first Burlington Mini Maker Faire took place this past Saturday here in Burlington, NC. Ben Harris, the organizer, pulled together a great and varied group of local artists, tinkerers and hobbyists who spent the day showing off their homemade projects and skills to the community. In between watching the main booth and fielding questions, I took a few photographs of the various exhibitions. I also posted a video at the end of this post which does a good job summing up the Faire.
Well, March is almost over, but there is still time to fill in your bracket for March Musical Theatre Madness! You can also enjoy the links I’ve come up with below:
I’ve linked to some repositories of old maps before, which are always good for making paper props. But the Propnomicon website pointed me to Old Maps Online, which gives you an interactive interface to find historical maps within whatever date range you specify. It’s kind of like using Google Maps while traveling through time.
Speaking of vintage ephemera (and musical theatre), Gaytwogether is a blog which occasionally posts vintage photographs of gay couples, which you can browse through all at once at that link.
La Bricoleuse has just posted the final projects from her class on complex masks. Though little is written, the photographs give a lot of information about how the various masks were made, and it is very interesting to see the various methods of construction and the materials used.
Most of us know the Project Triangle: “fast, cheap and good—you can have any two”. For those who don’t, Jesse Gaffney has just posted a good description of it, along with examples.
If you study the technical side of some of the materials used in making props, you may know that “polymerization” is what happens when a resin changes from a liquid to a hard plastic (among other things). If you read MSDS sheets (which you should), you may also have come across the phrase “explosive polymerization”. If, like me, you are wondering what that means, you may be interested in this video; it has a long build-up, but the payoff is worth it.
Happy March 3rd everybody! Wait, it’s March 2nd? Did an extra day sneak in there somewhere? Anyway, I hope you enjoy the following websites as much as I did.
This brief article is about Adrienne Call, the only (undergrad) theatre tech major in props at SUNY New Paltz.
Here is a collection of the 50 most powerful images from the Civil War. There are a lot of illustrations and some photographs too.
The Wood Database, as would be expected, contains pictures of over 300 species of wood and ways to identify them. Many of the woods have multiple photographs showing their grain patterns as well as items constructed from them, and information on working with them and safety considerations (some wood is poisonous or toxic).
Basketry: this lengthy article talks about the history of basket-weaving and basketry, the materials used, the different methods of manufacture, and where basket-weaving techniques are used. There are a lot of pictures, but (unfortunately) no step-by-step instructions on making your own baskets. Still, it’s very informative for anyone having to deal with baskets and wicker work.
“There are No Accidents” is a series of public service videos by Prevent-It, a Canadian occupational safety organization. Most of the videos show a worker getting in a horrible (and often gory) accident, than recovering and explaining how workplace “accidents” are often the combination of employers pushing the limits, supervisors not maintaining machines and following policies, and workers doing something they know is dangerous.
Finally, not to get political, but the title alone of this next article is so apt for prop people: You Actually Can Put A Gun Rack In A Chevy Volt, Newt Gingrich.
We are now only one year away from the release of my book, The Prop Building Guidebook: for Theatre, Film and Television. Today, I am submitting the next batch of chapters to my publisher, Focal Press. I now have half of my manuscript submitted, though with editing and rewriting, I feel like I am just getting started. The good news is that pretty much the whole book is outlined at this point. That means I have to focus on every little point, refining the sentences and researching every claim I make. The amount of time it takes me to write a clear and accurate paragraph is the same as it takes to outline a whole chapter, so it feels like progress is slower. But it’s still very exciting to see it starting to come together. Just last week, my publisher sent me a mock-up of the interior design that they’ve been working on. It is very exciting to see a book on prop making finally getting the professional treatment it deserves; it is hard to believe that this will be the first book on props that actually has color photographs! Even if I wasn’t writing this book, I would still be looking forward to it.
Until then, you can check out a few more photographs which will be making their way into the book.
Okay, so it’s still a few days until winter, but the sudden temperature drop makes it feel like it’s already here. I am driving down to North Carolina today; enjoy these links and websites in the meantime.
Stage Directions magazine shows how props artisan Jay Tollefsen improved the “baby-in-a-bag” trick for the Actors Theatre of Louisville’s annual production of Dracula in this article titled, “Baby’s Got a Brand New Bag.”
Hirst Arts Fantasy Architecture has compiled a nice tutorial with lots of helpful hints on casting small resin pieces in silicone molds.
This fascinating post looks at the history of imagined books as props in theatre. One example is the first use of a prop book in Shakespeare’s The Tempest, in which the script mentions Prospero’s book; what would they have used as a prop in those earliest of performances. The article talks about far more; like I said, it’s pretty fascinating.
The Educational Theatre Association has a nice how-to on adding texture to hard scenery; it’s great for using on props as well.
By 1974, the EPA had produced over 80,000 photographs showing how America interacted with the environment. The National Archives has begun making them online, and the Atlantic has posted a fine selection of some of these slice-of-life images of America in the 1970s.
Future Fossils is a collection of technological items from the near-past, such as 8mm cameras and Atari joysticks, which have been molded and cast in concrete so they look like archaeological relics from bygone days. You can buy them as well, but really, I just thought they looked cool.
