All posts by Eric Hart

Useful Sites

All the Props Links

I have a new article up in this month’s issue of Stage Directions. I break down how we pulled off a fake knife-throwing trick for Triad Stage’s production of Wait Until Dark. Old pros know this trick, but it is always helpful to see a working model in action.

Fake ‘n Bake is back! Anna brings us a guest post by Ariel Lauryn on how to make a roast beef sandwich. There’s lots of pieces and parts that come together into a great prop which she built at one of my favorite puppet companies, The Puppet Kitchen.

Stagebitz has a great interview up with Gary of Twin FX. This UK-based effects and animatronics company has built everything from fire-breathing dragons to fifteen-foot-tall moving gorillas. What’s even more amazing is they build all of this for the stage, where it has to perform smoothly night after night, for years on end.

First Stage, a dynamite children’s theatre company in Milwaukee, is doing Shrek: The Musical. They show off how they make the ogre face, starting from taking a life-cast of the actor’s head, to sculpting and casting the prosthetic pieces he will wear.

Reprints

Prop Man’s Predicament, 1937

The following amusing anecdote was found in a 1937 issue of The Christian Science Monitor.

An ingenious piece of fiction from one of the studios tells of the literary adventures of one Arthur Camp, a property man. It seems (according to this press release) that Camp needed a manuscript rejection slip for use in a picture to which he had been assigned.

Prop men pride themselves on being able to produce anything, so Camp sat down and penned an article on movie-making and sent it to a national magazine.

He thought, of course, that he would get it back with a rejection slip. However (surprise! surprise!), the magazine bought the article.

Of course, Camp could have had the studio printshop make up some of the slips. Or he could have borrowed one from any of a thousand unsuccessful Hollywood authors. But that wouldn’t have made a good story. —Milwaukee Journal.

This article was found in the Christian Science Monitor, December 27, 1937.

Reprints

Same Chicken in Chicago

The following is an anecdote from a 1916 book titled “Recollections of a Scene Painter”.

Another story of [John E.] Owens that Harry Phillips, the old Health Officer, will confirm. One night, at the old National, Owens was playing “Caleb Plummer” in “Cricket on the Hearth.” It is the scene of the toymaker’s cottage in the snow. The miniature is set in the middle of the stage and the characters are having a dinner party. It is just before Gruff Tackleton makes John Perrybingle jealous of Dot about the stranger. Caleb is carving the chicken, or trying to, for on this occasion he was not making any impression upon it. Of course, the property man, who is expected to be caterer as well as everything else, gets the blame, and Owens, boiling with rage, walked out of the cottage and across the stage to the little side door leading to that “L” in the alley back of Third Street, fired the chicken as far as he could up the alley, saying: “That is the same d—d chicken I had in Chicago.”

Originally published in “Recollections of a Scene Painter”, E.T. Harvey, W.A. Sorin Co., Cincinnati, 1916, pp 37-38.

Useful Sites

Friday Rehearsal Reports

First up is a video with Laura Wilhelm, the prop master at Chanhassen Dinner Theatre in Minnesota. In this relatively short video, she gets a chance to show off some props from previous productions, talk about what her job as a prop master entails, and highlight some props from their upcoming production of Fiddler on the Roof.

In this video, Billy D’Ambra, the prop master for NBC’s Chicago Fire, talks about some of his challenges providing props for a show that strives for the utmost realism in medical and trauma-related details.

Tested has spent the last several weeks chronicling the build of a Needler Gun from the Halo video game series by Volpin Props. Now that the project is complete, they have a great post condensing the entire project into one fantastic read. They even have a video at the end showing Harrison Krix in action.

Jesse Gaffney has a neat trick showing how to make slice-able cheese and sausage that can be reused from performance to performance.

I know this trick, but I figured since Popular Woodworking is printing it, other people may want to know about it: how to drill straight and square holes when your material won’t fit on the drill press.

Showcases

History for Hire’s Prop Making Workshop

Here is a look at History for Hire, a large prop rental and fabrication shop in LA. The video below takes us through part of their fabrication shop, with the added bonus of showing some of the pieces they were working on for Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter.

They have a number of other episodes showing more of History for Hire’s warehouse; I’ve arranged them into a playlist so you can watch them all in order if you like.