I have my next big deadline for my book this coming Wednesday, so I haven’t had much time to write my blog. But I did just finish watching Season 2 of White Collar. They have a pretty cool behind the scenes video with Duke Scoppa, the prop master. What is especially interesting is he visits Weapons Specialists, one of the weapons places we used at the Public Theater. They have an incredible workshop and storage facility inside, and all the guys there are pretty cool to work with. So enjoy the video!
Tag Archives: video
First links of 2012
I’ve been checking out the site Make it and Mend it lately. It does have a lot of “I turned this coffee can into a piggy bank”–type projects, but if you dig around, you can find some great and useful ideas for repurposed materials and doing things on the cheap. Even if you don’t find anything that will help you in work, it can help you in your life too, since props people don’t get paid nearly enough for what we do.
So, episodes of the Woodwright’s Shop are online. In fact, PBS has a lot of their shows available for viewing online, like Craft in America. You won’t find these on Netflix or Hulu.
Wide Angle/Closeup is a site featuring interviews with filmmakers. Of particular interest are the production design and special effects categories (like talking about the blood effects in the Godfather movies).
The Textile Blog has been around for some time now. It talks all about the design, history and art of textiles from around the world.
New York City 2011 Christmas Windows
New York City retail stores are known for the grand and highly imaginative window displays they unveil every Christmas season. I spent my first two autumns in New York City working on some of them. I did not work on them this year, though some colleagues of mine did. One of my former coworkers shot the following videos. You can find more videos searching on YouTube, but what makes these great is that they start off in the workshop showing the constructing phase, and moves to the inside of the windows showing the assembly before showing the final result.
First up is perhaps the lynchpin of NYC Christmas windows: Macy’s.
Macy’s is certainly the most well-known of the annual Christmas windows in New York City, but Saks Fifth Avenue does a good show as well.
Finally, we have the Lord & Taylor windows.
Elevenses Links
Happy October 29th! Or for those of you on the Gregorian calendar, happy 11/11/11!
From Ryan Voss comes this fantastic-looking blood recipe based off of Crayola washable markers. They said they used it in a production where a character in a white wedding dress was covered in blood every night. (h/t to Propnomicon)
So Field & Stream, of all places, has a behind-the-scenes look at the props of AMC’s upcoming western show, Hell on Wheels. They focus a lot on the guns used and how they achieved the many gun effects in the show, but be sure to make it to the bottom of the article, where they have a video on building an entire train. That’s right, an historically-accurate steam locomotive made of styrofoam, wood and a fog machine. I thought my cannon was cool, but this is simply amazing.
You’ve seen some of this before on my blog, but Rosco shared a more in-depth look at how we made the portraits for Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson.
This looks strange and promising. Autodesk has a free preview of their 123D Make software, which will turn a 3D computer file into something you can print out, cut apart, and assemble into a three-dimensional object. They have a video which does a better job explaining it. The software is only available for Mac, and it is only free until February, so if anyone with a Mac tries it out, let me know how it goes.
Mantle Studios has a very well-made tutorial on sculpting with wax. I’ve done a bit of wax sculpting, but nothing approaching the level of detail in this tutorial.
Video: Props in “True Grit”
Here’s a behind-the-scenes look at the props in the 2010 version of True Grit. Property Master Keith Walters gives us a much more in-depth look at the research and process which goes on in developing the props than is normally found in these kinds of videos.