All posts by Eric Hart

Useful Sites

Friday Rehearsal Report

In case you missed it, Backstage Jobs has changed its name to OffStage Jobs. Same great site, new title and address.

Ray Harryhausen, special effects pioneer, passed this week. StarWars.com has a great tribute to him, talking about his influence on the movie industry. I posted a great video interview of Harryhausen a while back, too.

Over at Tested, Harrison Krix has a tutorial on some pretty advanced mold making for props. It’s actually part 8 of a series on prop making, all of which is heavily photographed and well documented.

I like this show, so I really liked this slide show of 10 odd items from the New Girl set. But even if you’re not a fan, the explanations of how they dress sets and locate props on a TV show are very insightful.

This next one is only marginally prop related, but it’s about Iron Man, a movie that has cool props and whose hero is kind of like a prop maker. Scientists look at the Iron Man suit and debate which aspects are possible with our technology.

Tools

Using a Big Boy Vacuum Former

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I have been working at the Santa Fe Opera for a few weeks now. While I haven’t completed anything enough to show on this blog yet, I did shoot the video below. I needed to vacuum form a giant champagne bottle which I turned in foam on the lathe (actually, half of the champagne).

The Opera has a large vacuum former capable of taking full 4′ by 8′ sheets of plastic; even cooler is that the whole thing was built by the technical director, Eric Moore. This video shows me pulling a sheet of thin styrene over my form.

How-to

Legend of Zelda Master Sword

A while back I wrote about some rupees I made for a Legend of Zelda musical. The group doing the musical is called The League of Extraordinary Thespians, and I made a few more props for them, such as Link’s Master Sword.

Making the pattern
Making the pattern

The musical is based off of The Ocarina of Time video game, so first I had to find some accurate reference images from the game. From those, I drew out a paper pattern for the blades.

Layout for bevel
Layout for bevel

After cutting the pattern out of plywood, I made another pattern to find the bevel on the blade. I was working on three swords (one for Link, one for Dark Link, and one for a lobby display) so taking the time to make these patterns saved a lot of time in the long run.

Shaping the blade
Shaping the blade

I used a rasp and block sander to shape the blade.

Pommel and Shoulder
Pommel and Shoulder

I turned some of the handle and guard parts on a lathe. The quillon block (otherwise known as the écusson) is just a slice of PVC pipe.

Adding the quillons
Adding the quillons

For the rest of the detail on the guard, I used pieces of MDF which I shaped with my belt sander and fine tuned with a Dremel.

Continue reading Legend of Zelda Master Sword →

Useful Sites

Happy May Links

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Happy May, everyone! It’s a busy month for many of us as seasons wind down and summer seasons wind up, and for those of you in the educational world, classes are ending and graduations approach. But at least it’s getting warmer outside! And I have some links for you!

CBS Denver has an article about Bill Slezak, the prop master on the touring production of Mary Poppins. The show has some 4,000 props, and Bill is in charge of repairing and placing all of them in whatever city they go to. Be sure to watch the video since the article itself is just a brief transcription of said video.

Kasterborous has an article about Nick Robatto, one of the chief prop makers on Dr. Who. Not only does he make the props for the show, but he also makes the licensed replicas of the props to sell to fans. How’s that for carving out a niche in the market?

Have you heard about the giant head found in the Hudson River? A New Orleans prop maker guesses it’s over 10 years old (he says the pink foam inside hasn’t been used since the eighties), while a Mardi Gras float maker says it’s a Mardi Gras float. What do you think?

Finally, a lot of film props are made by piecing together found objects. Cracked has put together five Sci-Fi gadgets that are really just everyday objects.

Showcases

Props for Hollywood Props

Here is a short piece from CBS about History for Hire, the famous North Hollywood prop rental house. It deals specifically with their work on the film The Artist. It’s a bit dumbed down for a non-props person audience, but it’s still a nice look into History for Hire’s stock.

Props to Hollywood Props

Update: Sorry, I didn’t realize the video wouldn’t appear in this post; you have to follow the link to watch it. The horror!