Tag Archives: video

Useful Sites

Friday Prop Roundup

The Most Ingeniously Cheapskate Props And Sets From Classic Movies – Io9 takes a look at some well-known movies and how they occasionally used very low-budget means to get the shot, like cardboard cutouts of castles.

4 Business Tips From One Of The World’s Best Cosplayers – Forbes talks with Bill Doran of Punished Props about the business end of building costumes and props for cosplay. I didn’t count four distinctive tips, but the overall knowledge in this video is pretty helpful.

How to Choose, Cut, and Bend Sheet Metal – I always want to do more sheet metal work, but rarely find the opportunity. But it’s always amazing what you can achieve with just a few hand tools and basic power tools.

Three Friends Battle to the Death With Even More Iconic Movie Weapons in ‘Prop Wars: Prop Harder’ – This video is a bit nonsensical, but it’s mostly fun to watch three guys use a whole bunch of iconic props to fight each other.

How-to

Wax Paper Transfer to Wood

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Triad Stage just closed a production of Fences which I prop mastered. One of the set dressing items was a wooden plaque with a prayer written on it. I tried out a technique I saw where you print onto wax paper and transfer that to wood. It worked well, so I experimented with it some more, making this video in the process.

I wanted a crate to haul around the props I bring to Maker Faires, so I designed an old-timey crate label for it.

Wax paper transfer
Wax paper transfer

As you can see in the video, the process is very simple. Cut a piece of wax paper. Attach it to regular printer paper. Get an image on your computer and mirror it so it prints out in reverse. Send your wax paper through your inkjet printer. Lay it on your piece of wood and burnish the back of the paper so you rub all the ink off. Be careful not to move the wax paper around once it is on the wood.

In the picture above, you can see a few spots along the edges where the ink sort of blotted up and didn’t transfer as well. The wax paper wants to curl as it goes through the printer, and the ink will not sit right if it is too far or too close from the print head. The first time I tried this, I sent just the wax paper through, and most of the image ended up blotted. Attaching the wax paper to a piece of regular paper helps keep that from happening. The next time I do this, I may try using spray adhesive to attach the wax paper to regular paper, or just use an image that does not go so far to the edges of the page (the edges are where you get the most curling).

News

Death of a Mask Maker

Last Saturday, we found out that Donato Sartori passed away. His father, Amleto Sartori, was responsible for reintroducing the art of leather mask making for Commedia dell’arte after World War II. Commedia was outlawed by Napoleon in 1797, and its craft traditions were lost until Amleto reverse-engineered them and shared them with the world. Donato continued his work; most of what we know about the use of masks in Commedia come from these two.

Here we have a video from 1955 showing Amleto at work. It is unfortunately in Italian and only a minute long, but it gives a good overview of his process for creating a mask out of leather.

Here we have a much longer video showing Donato and his workshop from just a few years ago. Again, it is in Italian, but you get to see many steps of the mask-making process, as well as a glimpse inside the studio that both Donato and Amleto worked from.

I got to visit that studio in 2012 when my wife was taking their mask-making workshop. It is difficult to convey just how influential the Sartoris were in the world of modern theatrical masks. We do not have much of a mask tradition here in the US, but it is very popular in Europe and Asia. My wife once bought a Balinese mask, and she told the mask-maker that it reminded her of Commedia masks. It turns out he had met Donato a few times and they shared techniques with each other.

RIP Donato Sartori (1939-2016)

Useful Sites

Some Good Links for Friday

Hey Foam Dome! Want to learn how to make a foam dome? Evil Ted shows some great tips for patterning and forming a dome shape out of flexible foam rubber sheets.

Make has rounded up five basic hand stitches you need to know and illustrated them with some great diagrams. As a bonus, they have a few other tips for working with textiles.

Batman V Superman comes out this weekend, and DC All Access has a look at the props. They visit prop master Douglas Harlocker, who shows us some of Batman’s weapons and talks about how their design came to be. You have to skip past about two and a half minutes of the ultra-bubbly hosts talking about upcoming comic books before you get to the props stuff.

Chris Schwartz shows how to make custom sanding sticks for smoothing the edges of really hard-to-reach places. I’ve also seen people buy those disposable nail files to achieve a similar goal.

Useful Sites

Everybody’s Propping for the Weekend

First up is my latest article in Stage Directions magazine. I talked with a number of props masters about creative ways to stretch your props budget. The result is “Creating Relationships to Create Props.”

If you can find twenty minutes today, I definitely recommend this video. TechBuilder, a 17-year old from the Philippines, builds a life-size working BB-8 droid from materials he found at the hardware store. It’s all paper-mache, Styrofoam and wood cut by hand. If he needs a tool but can’t afford it, he makes one. He uses roll-on deodorant for ball bearings. The results are absolutely stunning.

Dave Lowe has this fantastically easy but incredibly effective technique for painting faux chipped paint rusted metal. Apocalyptic props, here I come!

Ugh, another actor dead from props. This time, it’s a Japanese actor who was stabbed with a samurai sword during rehearsal. So far, they have not said whether the sword was real or a prop, and whether they think it was an accident or murder, so I don’t really have much to say about the incident. Depending on what we find out, my advice would either be A) Don’t give actors real swords without a fight choreographer present, or B) Don’t hire murderers.

Finally, take a look at some of the props Alton Brown has used over at the Food Network. Somewhere, there’s a prop maker having the time of their life.