Author Archives: Eric Hart

It’s Props Month at Stage Directions

This month’s issue of Stage Directions has a special section on props. One of the articles, “Prop Shop Confidential” by Lisa Mulcahy, is about maintaining a props stock. This is a good companion to my own post on which props to keep and which to trash; it features a lot more thoughts on how to [...]
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Props in Movies, 1922

The Property Man Who Is Qualified to Become One? By Ray Chrysler, Matter of Properties, Metro Pictures Corporation, 1922. Picture a curiosity shop and you can visualize clearly the property room of a large studio. In it, one will find everything from a suit of armor to a canary bird’s nest. From it, several well-furnished homes or hotels [...]
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Giant Prop Octopus

Youtuber bluworm has a great process video showing how he made a latex octopus for a stop-motion film. I found this via the Craft Magazine blog, which reposted it from Sean Michael Ragan at the Make Magazine blog. He found it via Propnomicon, which finally led me to the website and blog of Tom Banwell, [...]
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Faking a Beer Can

For our upcoming production of The Book of Grace by Suzan-Lori Parks at the Public Theater, we need beer. Technically, we need about ten beers per night. Unfortunately, in most legitimate theatres, you cannot have the actors drinking beer during a performance. You need to figure out a way to have a beer can filled with [...]
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Faux Oil Paintings

Our upcoming production of Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson has a gallery in the audience of 19 portraits. These were described as oil paintings of “dead white guys”. We decided to begin experimenting with printing these portraits out and seeing how we can make them look more like a painted canvas. I decided to try some of [...]
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