Tag Archives: trick

Useful Sites

Wednesday Link-O-Rama

Here are some quick links for the day.

  • Lonesome West Prop Tricks – Here are some quick tips for Martin McDonagh’s Loneseome West; most specifically, the stove that gets hit by a shotgun.
  • Costume Properties Construction Handbook – Costume properties has a lot of overlap with props; depending on the show, an object may have equal merit as a costume or a prop depending on the logistics of your production. Regardless, the materials and techniques are very similar for each field.
  • Top Ten Colbert Report Prop Malfunctions – If you watch the Cobert Report, you’ll love these prop malfunctions from the show’s history.
  • Stagehand Primer – Local 470 out of Wisconsin has their primer online. It includes a section on properties.  If you want to join the stagehand union anywhere in the country, this section will give you a good introduction as to what is expected of a props person in the union.
How-to

Funerary Urn Trick

For Twelfth Night, the director wanted a funerary urn trick. When the actor knocks it over, he wanted the lid to fall off and a puff of ashes to fly out. I decided on a pneumatic solution.

The Funerary Urn in Action
The Funerary Urn in Action

Early on, we decided the urn should be on a base which was hinged to the floor, which would keep the urn from rolling down the hill into the audience, and also have it fall in a consistent manner during every show.

Air Tank and Valve
Air Tank and Valve

This trick is actually extremely simple in concept, and pulling it off only requires a minimum amount of research to find the right parts.

The idea behind it is the same as filling a straw with corn starch and blowing it out. Instead of a person blowing it out, I have a tank of air which is filled before hand. And instead of a person deciding when to blow, I have an electric valve which is triggered when the urn hits the ground.

The tank of air is just a soda bottle. I fitted a tire valve onto the cap; I got it from an old tire, though you can buy them new if you wanted. A hose runs out the back of the bottle into the valve, which then runs to a hole in the stage which holds the corn starch. The valve runs off of eight AA batteries, though it can be changed to be plugged into the wall. Finally, I wired in a button between the valve and the batteries, which is on the stage floor where it can be pressed by the urn when it hits the ground.

Here is a video of it in action:

How-to

Trick Props and Illusions

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This summer, we’re doing Twelfth Night at the New York Shakespeare Festival. There’s a number of trick and gag props in the show. Trick props are easy to do; you just need to remember every single mechanical gizmo, electrical doodad, and moving part you have ever run across in every object that exists, and pick the one that will work the best.

Actually, that’s not a bad way to think about trick props. If you can find some object, machine, or toy that already carries out the trick you wish to achieve, your job becomes that much easier. You can figure out a way to recreate it, or even just take all the relevant parts out and use those directly in your prop.

In order to start thinking about what type of mechanism, trick, or illusion would work for your prop, it helps to narrow the field a bit. If you haven’t tried Google Book Search yet, let me just say, it’s awesome. You can search through books, just like you search through websites. Best of all, if the book is in the public domain, you can read and download the entire thing – text and images.

So, when checking out resources for trick props and stage illusions, I’ve come across the following books.

Five Hundred and Seven Mechanical Movements – This is very similar to a book I own in print, and I think a lot of the illustrations are even from the same sources. It’s a great guide to all sorts of methods of transforming motion through gears, pulleys, cams, and levers.

Endless Amusement; a Collection of Nearly 400 Entertaining Experiments – This book is short on illustrations and long on old-timey language. Still, it seems chock full of all sorts of experiments that could find use on the stage. The ones dealing with pneumatics and hydraulics are perhaps more useful than the ones dealing with saltpetre and slaked lime.

Twentieth century magic and the construction of modern magical apparatus – Stage magic and illusions are a great resource for prop tricks, if you can find the information. Luckily, magicians are not too worried about protecting one hundred year old tricks.

Magic: stage illusions and scientific diversions, including trick photography – Another fun book on magic, filled with lots of illustrations to show all manner of stage trickery.