Category Archives: Useful Sites

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

More Prop Links for Your Friday

The folks over at Center Theatre Group had to make a whole lot of fake salad for their production of Women Laughing Alone With Salad. Find out how Jon Ward and his props team honed in on the perfect recipe for a pretend salad.

Here we have 9 Real Job Skills You Lean From Being a Cosplayer, which is remarkably similar to the job skills you learn from being a prop maker. Of course, that assumes that they ever let you out of the props shop to look for another job. Back to work!

Whatever happened to Tony Montana’s “Little Friend”? Not that I was wondering, but this Hollywood Reporter article is a fascinating look at an iconic movie prop. Watch as it meanders its way around LA over the next few decades, popping up in other films here and there.

If you’ve never seen Adam Savage’s One Day Builds, you’re missing out! In his latest, he builds a sword from Hellboy. What makes these great is that they do not really skip over anything; it’s just a cameraman in the shop, showing every step he takes, and every mistake he makes. I also like how he doesn’t really use anything that’s out of the realm of the average props shop. His materials come from typical hardware stores and auto body shops, and his tools are pretty standard issue (well, that disc sander is kind of a beast).

You wouldn’t be a props person if you didn’t use hot glue. Make Magazine has 7 cool tips for working with hot glue.

Useful Sites

March Forth With Props

Over at HowlRound, Seth Tyler Black talks about career transitions from theatre to film. He interviews a few art directors and props people to see what skills are shared between the two fields, and what makes them different.

I loved this article and photographs about Syrian refugees building scale models of historical landmarks. As their homeland is destroyed by war, and ancient artifacts are being destroyed, these artists are coming together in their cramped camps to create a record of what is lost. They construct the models with whatever materials they can find, from rock, to MDF, to wooden kebab skewers.

Brendan Bernhardt Gaffney has been researching ancient methods of measurement, and has come up with the Rulers of the Ancient World. These wooden measuring devices come in several flavors: Ancient Egyptian, Japanese “Kanejaku”, and Ancient Roman. So if you’re sick of inches, but millimeters leave you cold, why not measure your next project in Pes and Uncia?

Bill Doran shows us how to make shiny metal prop finishes. The real trick he shares? Make your prop glossy before adding the metal spray paint.

Finally, Make Magazine has 11 tips for creating a good weld. Here’s a twelfth tip: welding is awesome.

Useful Sites

A Prop-er End to the Week

First a quick announcement. For anyone going to SETC next week, the conference is in Greensboro, just a few blocks from where I work. We will be opening up our shop for an open house on Saturday, March 5th, from 2-5pm, if you wanted to see where I make things. And if you’re looking for a job, I’m looking for an intern next season. It’s August through May with a weekly stipend and shared housing. Check out the Triad Stage booth for more information.

Buzzfeed takes us to the scene shop where Arcadia is being built for the Sydney Opera House. There are some great photographs here.

Harvard University is recreating an Ancient Egyptian throne using Ancient Egyptian craftsmanship. They have also used an impressive array of digital scanning and fabrication tools to design and mock-up the throne, but for the actual construction, they are trying to learn how the Egyptians may have actually built a piece as exquisite and intricate as this.

Propnomicon reminds us to NOT burn the edges of paper when ageing it. Instead, there are a few more realistic and accurate methods for giving paper that antique look you desire.

The Unicorn Theatre over in the UK catches up with Alexandria Kerr, the prop maker for their production of Minotaur. She has a fantastic mask made out of Plastazote, which some of us recognize as EVA foam (more accurately, XLPE foam).

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.