Tag Archives: research

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Stuck in the Middle

The beginning of your process in building a prop can take awhile with no apparent progress. First, you have a lot of research to get the look and design figured out. You may need to make construction drawings, sketches, or even full-scale layouts. Choosing your materials, deciding on techniques and planning the order of tasks can also take some time. Depending on the type of prop you are building you may need to generate cut lists, construct jigs and templates or draw up patterns. Even just gathering or ordering your materials and parts can take up time. In other words, you can spend hours or even days upon starting a project before the prop itself begins to take shape.

In a similar vein, the end of the process can be a slow ordeal. Filling and sanding, coating and painting, or whatever your finishing touches are usually take a lot more time than you anticipate. I’ve found for projects which require a smooth or pristine finish, the sanding and smoothing part can take longer than the construction of the prop itself. Anyone who has painted can also attest that the preparation of the surface and masking out of areas is the longest part of the process; the actual application of paint is but a blip in the overall time frame of the process. Like the beginning of the process, the end can take a significantly longer amount of time than the construction of the prop.

It is usually the middle which takes the fastest. You spend a few days planning the prop out, than in one afternoon, all the pieces go together like magic. Then it takes another few days to get it to a finished state. It is this middle phase where progress on the prop is the most visual, that is, when it seems you are working the fastest. But a quick construction period can only happen with thorough planning, and a well-made prop can only result from thorough finishing.

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Period Props

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When you are researching a time period or dressing a set, remember that people do not buy all new things every single year. A real house or apartment is filled with the clutter of the entire life of the people who live there. My parents, for instance, do not have a house decorated completely from items taken out of this year’s catalogs. Their furniture ranges in period from contemporary all the way back to Victorian. So a play about a similar English couple living in the Victorian period could have furniture ranging from Victorian back to Regency, or even Georgian.

When you study different period styles, you often run across lists and descriptions of what was “popular” or “in style” during certain time periods. Another idea to keep in mind is that most people are very varied in their stylishness. Some people always seem to be up with the latest trends; others have excruciatingly bad taste. During the Art Deco period, Ancient Egyptian motifs and styles came into vogue. That does not mean that someone would have thrown out all their furniture and decorated their place entirely in Egyptian-inspired furniture. Depending on how important style is to your character, there may be a few such pieces scattered throughout; there may also be none. Many of the characters in plays cannot afford to buy new furniture whenever tastes change.

An old box label. Photo by Eric Hart.
An old box label. Photo by Eric Hart.

Finally, I wanted to point out something which is obvious to many prop masters but not often to beginners. If your play is set in the 1920s, and you find a number of antiques from the 1920s, they will have a natural aura of age. Metal will have rust and patina, paper will be yellow and brittle, paint will be faded and peeled. This is not what the items will look like in the world of the play though. If a play is set a hundred years ago, that does not mean the items will look a hundred years old. Quite the contrary, the items will look new and well taken care of. A book will have bright white pages, metal will gleam and paint will be fresh. Obviously, the play itself can have antiques or old items; my point is that the contemporary props in a period play need to appear contemporary. For many props, you cannot use any but the most well-preserved antiques; you will have to find modern substitutes or construct your own.

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Building a prop from a photograph

When you are building a prop, you are often working off of some kind of reference material. In many cases, a photograph is the only reference you have. I’ve learned a couple of tricks over the years to help me construct a prop from a photograph.

Hot Dog Vendor Standing Beside Cart
Hot Dog Vendor Standing Beside Cart

The first thing you want to do is take note of all the details in the photograph to learn as much as you can about the context in which it was taken. Do you have a time, place, name of photographer or name of subjects to go along with your photograph? If you do, you can use it to search for additional photographs of the same object. For a production of La Boheme, I was given a poorly-photocopied image of a street cart vendor as research for a cart I needed to build. Using that image, I found the above picture online, which is a crisper and cleaner reproduction of the exact same photograph. If you’re lucky, your research will lead you to multiple pictures of the same object, showing different angles or details. Otherwise, do your best with the single image you have.

Next, you want to figure out the scale of the items in your photograph so you can begin assigning measurements and dimensions to the different elements. The above photograph offers one of the best items to scale against: the human body. By measuring against our own body, we can determine the heights of the various elements. The photograph of the crepe cart gives us a great advantage by showing the cart straight on. We can essentially lay a grid over the whole image using the man as the basis for the measurements. We know that the man uses the handles to push the cart, so we can use our own hands to decide the optimal thickness of the handles rather than trying to guess it from the picture.

Crepe cart from La Boheme
Crepe cart from La Boheme

(You’ll notice the cart in the photo above does not match the research exactly; the designer made some changes and alterations of his own based on the needs of the production.)

Sometimes the photograph has nothing in it to scale against, and we need another method. I had to build a park bench once based off of the research below. Though we do not know the size of that park bench, we do know the sizes of other park benches.

A cast iron park bench
A cast iron park bench

Most seats have a sitting height of eighteen inches. Even if the specific bench in the photograph above has a different height, the actors on stage will be most comfortable in an eighteen-inch high seat, so we can decide that this bench will have a sitting height of eighteen inches. Now that we have that measurement, we can again determine the rest of the measurements and draw out a full-scale version of what we are making. The length of the bench is a little harder to determine. For that, we can defer to the needs of the production (by asking how many actors need to sit in it at one time, and what the maximum length the set will allow is) as well as the length of typical park benches to come up with our length.

A faux cast iron prop bench
A faux cast iron prop bench
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Midweek Link Roundup

Still recovering from my trip out west. Enjoy other people’s webpages for the day: