Stage Directions has a round-up of some of the top theatrical special effects companies out there. They talk about the most challenging effects they have pulled off in a live performance, and how they work with a theater to plan it out and make it happen.
The Wire has a short history of ventriloquism which is quite fascinating, if a little bit creepy. I especially enjoyed the video of Ray Alan performing with his “Lord Charles” dummy, who was performing a ventriloquist act with his own, even smaller, dummy.
Pop Chart Lab has a great poster giving a stylistic survey of graphic design. It looks like a handy reference for when you want to check if your period piece has correct-looking paper props and ephemera.
Marvel Entertainment has started their own web video series on cosplay, and the first installment shows them planning and designing the costume they will build. And hey, looks like they are borrowing a costumer from the world of theatre to help them out. Go, theatre!
Happy Friday the 13th, everyone! Today is opening night for the final show of our 13th season here at Triad Stage (the “Lucky Season”, someone decided to call it). So while I am resting up, check out these links below:
John Barton has been a props master for over 50 years, on films such as Cool Hand Luke (he cooked all those eggs).  Coeur d’Alene Press has a nice article about his life and career.
Jurassic Park turned 21 this week, and Wired has a look back on how it revolutionized special effects. The film famously used a mix of CGI and large-scale puppets for the dinosaurs. For a look at what-might-have-been, check out this pre-visualization test of stop-motion puppets, which is what they were originally going to use. I remember seeing the film on opening day with my dad and brother; hard to believe that was 21 years ago.
Dug North has started a series on working with brass, and in the first installment, he shows several ways to cut brass. Whether it’s brass rod, tube or sheets, he knows the tools to use.
This is pretty great: the “Women in Leadership” column at the Guardian has highlighted Hayley Gibbs, a prop maker in the UK. It’s heartening to see a news outlet acknowledge that people who work with their hands and make things can be leaders too.
My major project for the past few months involved engineering and constructing a number of animal puppets for Triad Stage’s production of “Snow Queen”. I wrote about the white-tailed stag last week. One of the most complicated puppets in terms of motion and movement was the crow. He also had the most stage time out of all the puppets, appearing on his own in several scenes. I began work on him shortly after beginning the stag, so that I could have plenty of time to develop the means to have a single puppeteer perform all the actions he needed to perform.
You can see a bit of the “evolution” of the puppet’s mechanisms in this video.
The major difference between the prototype puppet in the video and the final puppet was that I switched the pole to connect on the side rather than from behind. It gave the puppeteer much more control over the puppet by letting him manipulate the orientation of the crow’s body by twisting the main control pole, rather than having to stoop and squat.
Head and neck mechanism
As you saw in the video, the head and neck were controlled by an inner pole which was free to rotate on its own. Strings ran inside which could turn a bar that held the head.
Hand controls
At the other end of the control bar was a similar bar that held the other ends of these strings. The puppeteer could both swing the bar back and forth and rotate the inner pole with just one hand. The other hand was free to flap the wings.
Wing mechanism
If you look closely, you will see the wings were actually attached to mousetraps. Pulling a string moved the wings down, and the springs in the mousetrap moved the wings back up when the string was released.
Bird pattern
The pattern for the crow’s body was developed in a small prototype by the puppet designer, Bill Brewer. I enlarged this pattern and cut it out of black EVA foam sheets. I came up with a pattern for the head and beak to match the look; like the other puppets in the show, the appearance was not meant to be realistic, but was stylized to make the crow look like he was cut and folded out of sheets of paper.
Crow puppet
The solid black crow tended to disappear when on stage, so he was given a final paint job by the scene designer, Howard Jones. He accentuated the flat planes and folds on the crow with white and silver paint, helping make the crow “pop” against the background.
The majority of my time this past autumn was spent working on puppets for Triad Stage’s production of “Snow Queen”. The play is an original retelling of the Hans Christian Anderson tale, set in the Appalachian Mountains with bluegrass music.
The animals (other than the two birds) were designed to look like they were constructed from cut and folded paper. Bill Brewer, the puppet designer, came up with the range of motions he wanted the puppets to have. Each puppet only had one puppeteer to operate it, which is tricky when the puppets are this large and manipulated by actors rather than trained puppeteers. We worked together to distill their movements down to the simplest motions so their moments on stage would be evocative and magical.
Puppets from Snow Queen
The stag had the most logistical challenges, so I began work on him first. The main challenge was that the lead actress rides him around on stage, so it needed to support her weight and remain comfortable for the operator to carry her while still working the puppet. I used a marching band snare drum harness to attach the puppet to the operator. We used these out at the Santa Fe Opera this past summer for a similar purpose, so I already knew it was the best option for comfortably distributing the weight over the operator’s body while keeping a strong and stiff connection to the puppet.Â
You can watch the evolution of the skeleton and mechanisms in the video below:
It took me about a month and a half to get the movement right (I was working on the other puppets at this time as well, and we produced a whole other show within that time frame as well). My goal was to have this skeleton ready for the first week of rehearsal so the actors could begin working with it and discovering what it could do.
Skeleton and mechanisms
When the puppets were not being used in rehearsal, I took them back to start adding the three-dimensional bodies. It was vital that the actors used the puppets in rehearsal; the evolution of the puppet scenes was shaped dramatically by the discoveries of how the puppets moved and reacted.
Adding the foam
For the solid parts, I attached chunks of EPS foam and carved them into shape.
To get the “folded paper” appearance, I laid some pieces of Wonderflex over top of the foam. Wonderflex is a plastic sheet which becomes formable at a very low temperature; you can let it drape or fold it like fabric, and when it cools, it retains that shape.
Fabric and Wonderflex
For the neck, I needed a much more flexible material, and after some experimentation, found a type of fabric which matched the appearance of the rest of the stag, but would allow the puppet to retain its full range of motion.
Head and antlers
The head itself was carved by Brewer. We played around with a few designs for antlers, and ended up making them out of several interlocking segments. The ears were cut and shaped from more Wonderflex.
Painting and filling
By that point, we were already loading into the theater, so the long task of filling, sanding and priming was done there. After  base-coating the puppets to a uniform white color, they were shaded with grey and silver paint to accentuate the flat plains and folds. Most of this was done by Howard Jones, the scenic designer on the show.
White-tailed stag
Making and finding props for theatre, film, and hobbies
