Category Archives: Useful Sites

Useful Sites

Black Friday Prop Deals

Hopefully none of you need to shop for your shows today, which kicks off the official “worst time to do prop shopping” season. If you are safe in your shop or in tech, here are a few interesting prop-related sites to read and visit:

Check out these hotel menus from the 1850s and 1860s. The Hilton College of the University of Houston’s Hospitality Industry Archives has dozens of scans of menus from throughout the Eastern seaboard and Midwest of the US. It’s a great resource if you need to make period-correct food for fancy gentleman.

Genevieve Bee built this great animatronic Wheatley puppet from Portal 2. She has a video showing it talk and move its giant blinking eye. Be sure to check out all the process shots of the construction over at her blog as well.

It’s that time of year again for the New York City holiday window displays. These windows give jobs to dozens of props people for several months throughout the year, and the results are always spectacular. Gothamist has a great rundown of all the major displays, including photographs and videos showing them in action.

Make Magazine delivers some useful tips for props people again, this time giving us 10 great painting tips. These aren’t tips for creating the perfect faux marble, but rather helpful hints on masking and keeping your paintbrushes and cans neat and clean.

Useful Sites

Four Fun Friday Links

The Force Awakens Blog has posted photographs of 50 weapons and helmets from Star Wars: The Force Awakens in stunning high-resolution. It would be fun to make some of these in anticipation of the movie’s release (though most theatre chains have banned replica guns from their screenings).

I wrote a review of The Theatrical Firearms Handbook for the latest issue of Theatre Design and Technology. It’s an invaluable book for everything gun-related in theatre and film. If you are ever involved with a firearm on stage, you should own this book.

The New York Times has restored designer’s names to reviews of shows in their paper. This is very good news to anyone who has been following this story. Meanwhile, props people consider it a victory to be listed in the back of the program next to the brand of carpeting used in the lobby.

Eyeballs Studio makes a pretty stunning Dwarven Axe using mostly closed-cell foam and PVC pipe. It is amazing what you can accomplish with such cheap and readily-available materials.

Useful Sites

Lucky Links for a Lucky Day

Happy Friday the 13th, everybody. Here are some great prop-related stories from around the internet.

The production team at the Clarice in Maryland recently recreated Bernini’s Apollo and Daphne statue using a mix of CNC routing, 3D printing, and theatre ingenuity. Watch this video to see how they did it.

Caleb Kraft and Platinumfungi decided they needed to recreate the flaming sword from the new Fallout 4 video game. Check out videos and photos showing their day-to-day process.

Duo Fiberworks has a nice tutorial on creating a rustic leather sketchbook from scratch. It’s a must for every Shakespeare play (h/t to Propnomicon for the link).

For your third video of the day, you can learn about Shawn Thorsson, the superhero of cosplay. You’ve seen some of his work before on this blog; now you can watch him at work in his shop and check out more of the pieces he has constructed.

Mythbusters is ending its fourteen-season run this January. This week was the final day of filming for them, and Adam Savage live-tweeted the entire day. It’s a sad day for television, since it was one of the few shows that got close to showing what we do in props. Thankfully, Adam is still busy as ever building props over at Tested.

Useful Sites

Proper Reading for Today

George Barris, creator of the 1966 TV version of the Batmobile, passed away this past week. He also built The Munster’s car and worked on the cars of many other shows and films. The LA Times had a great profile on his career a few years back that is worth revisiting today.

Roger Christian talks with Cinefex about his work on Star Wars and Alien. Christian created a lot of the props for Star Wars, such as the first R2-D2 prototype, Han Solo’s blaster, and Luke Skywalker’s lightsaber. On Alien, he built most of the interior of the Nostromo space ship.

Eimer Murphy, prop maker at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, has an article at the Victoria and Albert Museum’s blog on Dublin Protest Graphics. It’s not so much prop-related, but it is about objects used in a performance-type aspect. Plus, I’ve seen so much theatre/film/TV where the protest signs are just way off the mark, so this is good research too.

The League of Professional Theatre Women recently released their newest study of gender breakdown in theatre roles at Off and Off-off Broadway shows over the past five years. The New York Times has a great summary of that study. Men still dominate set, light and sound design positions, as well as directing and writing. They don’t look at props; props (in theatre) have always seemed to have a bit more gender equality than other departments, but it’s hard to say without actually coming up with some numbers.

Useful Sites

Weekend Prop Reading

What a cool job! Artslandia Kids has this fun infographic with John Ellingson, props master for Northwest Children’s Theater.

Oh no, only one week until Halloween. Quick, make some demon horns out of upholstery foam and paper towels!

Popular Woodworking Magazine has a short tutorial on creating a 3D Sketchup model from a photograph. In this case, it’s a photograph taken at an angle, which is less than ideal for getting measurements.

Make Magazine has a tutorial on making giant inflatable plastic tentacles. They use plastic welding, which is a technique I’ve always wanted to try but have never gotten around to.

Finally, take a look at these twenty or so weird and awesome helmets from throughout history. Look at them!