Category Archives: Useful Sites

Useful Sites

Be My Prop Valentine

Whale, whale, whale, what do we have here? Stephen Kesler shares step-by-step photos of a life-sized humpback whale he carved out of foam. And you thought your prop was big? Even if you never have to sculpt something this large, it is still a great primer on sculpting foam in general.

Every time I watch Adam Savage organize his workshop, I think, “hey, that’s what I do.” And then I learn some new trick and realize my shop can be organized much better. In this video, he builds these mobile carts for glue and paint supplies. Now I need to build mobile carts for supplies.

Dj3r0m Cosplay Props has this awesome war hammer from the Skyrim video game.  From the process pictures, it looks like the whole thing was carved and assembled from MDF. Impressive. The paint job is pretty stunning, too.

Village Theatre put together this great infographic showing the amounts of consumables that go into a run of Crimes of the Heart.  Anyone who has done the show can attest to the large amount of shopping that needs to happen for that production. Of course, they missed the apples, sugar, bourbon and the paper that gets torn up.

Useful Sites

Fridays at the Props Shop

CinemaBlend checks out what’s actually in the fake cocaine actors snort in movies. Apparently it’s too tough on the budget to use real cocaine.

Jeremy Armstrong, the props master for Girl Meets World, has a Periscope where you can watch his daily prop adventures. If you don’t know what Periscope is, it’s like an Instagram with video.

Ever wonder how they make and pump Dalek goo on Doctor Who? I didn’t either, but this video from the BBC shows you how.

“She’s a hunter, a gatherer, a fixer, an artist, a craftsman and a wizard.” Find out what a prop master’s job entails. Hint: it involves a combination of skills.

Useful Sites

End of the Week Links

American Theatre has this week’s “must read” article on jobs in technical theatre. They look at where new technicians get their training and interview a number of people working in theatre to see how they got their start. The interviewees come from a range of different departments, like lighting, sound and costumes. No props people appear in the article; probably because we were all too busy to give an interview.

The Abbey Theatre has a video up where Eimer Murphy talks about the vintage working dentist’s chair that appears in their current production of You Never Can Tell.

Propnomicon found this great video on aging glass bottles. It’s a lot better than giving your actors actual antique bottles that they have to drink out of.

Take a tour through the prop warehouse of the Food Network. In the basement of NYC’s Chelsea Market, Wendy Waxman stores thousands of vintage items which appear on the various shows and specials of this TV station. I bet a lot of my readers wish they could spend every day finding and buying quirky kitchen items.

Finally, this is short but interesting. The actor who originally played Darth Vader (David Prowse, not James Earl Jones) posted a photo of the original Vader mask that burned at the end of Return of the Jedi and compared it to the prop that Kylo Ren holds in The Force Awakens. Since the original was made of fiberglass, it turned a little “hairy”, while the prop in the new film looks more “melty”.

Useful Sites

Snow Day Links

Did you see my AMA this week on Reddit? A lot of good questions were asked, and I hope I gave decent answers to all of them.

I’m not the only one starting to use fun foam for everything. Propnomicon has this great video from Evil Ted on heat forming foam for various effects. He shows you not only how to shape and bend it, but also how to add indented details.

This is from a year ago, but the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art has a video showing the inside of their prop department where Deryk Cropper teaches the next generation of UK prop builders.

How many Millennium Falcons have there been? Cinefex looks at the history of Star Wars and talks about all the various physical models of this iconic spaceship, from tiny coin-sized miniatures up to full-size set pieces. It’s a little sad to hear that the full-size version created for the original trilogy was burned at the end of filming.

Ed Lebetkin’s antique tool shop in Pittsboro supplied all the period-appropriate tools for the new film The Revenant. The shop is right above Roy Underhill’s Woodwright’s Shop and is just down the road from me. I got to visit the place a few years ago and wrote about it on this very blog. The last photograph and paragraph talk about Lebetkin’s shop.

Useful Sites

Props a’Plenty

Hi everyone. I am doing a Reddit AMA this Monday on the Tech Theatre subreddit. So head on over and ask me anything you want about working in props or writing books and such. You’ll be able to post questions all day, and then from 7-9pm (EST) I’ll actually be answering them.

The BBC shows us how the Old Vic used to make thunder back in the eighteenth century. It’s very good, isn’t it?

NY1 heads north of New York City to see how Hudson Scenic Studio builds sets for Broadway. I went up there a few years back, and it really is an impressive facility.

Everybody’s talking about that bread in Star Wars: The Force Awakens; it turns out, it wasn’t CGI. In a new video, Neal Scanlan reveals how they made the trick work. They don’t have any behind-the-scenes video of the setup, but he gives a good enough description that you may be able to make one yourself.