How-to

Mace from Deathtrap

Anyone who has done Deathtrap knows that the “wall of weapons” could be a challenge. I was able to source most of what we needed, but the mace was a bit tricky. I had a flail, but when we got to tech, we decided it really needed to be a mace. It is never used, but the characters reference it a few times, and they would know the difference between a flail and a mace. I was pretty much out of money, so I decided to build one with whatever I had laying around while they worked on lighting and sound cues.

Mace parts
Mace parts

I printed out some research of a flanged mace that had a cool look but was not too intricate. The shaft was a length of PVC pipe. I attached a bit of wooden dowel on either end; one for the handle and one for the head. I cut the flanges out of craft foam. I drilled out the center of a few wooden toy wheels to make the various ridges, and a lamp finial finished off the top.

Painted pieces
Painted pieces

I attached the flanges to the head with some hot glue and sealed it all with some fiberglass resin. I only used one coat, which did not really stiffen the foam, but since it was just a wall-hanger, I figured it was enough. Everything got sprayed with various metallic spray paints before I attached it all together.

For the handle, I wrapped tape around it to give it more of a bulging cigar shape. I wrapped the final layer of tape in a spiral to make it look like a leather-wrapped handle.

Mace
Mace

I finished the whole thing off with some weathering and aging using acrylic paints. The end result looked pretty a-mace-ing.

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.

How-to

Foam Firewood for Fighting

We just closed Deathtrap at Triad Stage. Anyone who has done or seen the show knows it has quite a few tricks, not to mention all the set dressing. One of the projects I made for the show was a piece of firewood that could safely be used to beat someone to death. I put together this video showing the process from start to finish.

I started off borrowing some techniques from LARPers; they build weapons out of foam intended for actual combat. I tried wrapping closed-cell foam around a piece of PVC, but that was too hard to hit someone with. I ended up using a core of polyurethane upholstery foam with three pieces of closed-cell foam around the outside.

The foam I used was a mix of anti-fatigue mats from Harbor Freight and Silly Winks foam from the craft store. Some people call this EVA foam. It’s more likely to be XLPE foam. I don’t think there’s enough of a difference to worry about, but it’s one of the things I’m investigating for the second edition of The Prop Building Guidebook.

Textured Foam
Textured Foam

To get the texture on the inside parts of the foam, I went over the whole surface with a wire wheel. Next, I scored the foam with a knife in the direction of the “grain” of the wood. One of the great tricks with this kind of foam is that when you score it, you can run a heat gun over the surface and the foam will open up, turning the scored lines into beveled grooves.

Bark
Bark

For the bark side of the log, I cut and tore apart chunks of thinner Silly Winks foam and hot glued them to the surface. I roughed them up with a surform and a knife; you can see that part of the process pretty well in the video.

Flexcoat
Flexcoat

Everything was coated with a layer of Rosco Flexcoat. This sealed everything in and gave a nice even layer to paint on. And as the name suggests, it remained flexible when dry.

When you watch the video, you will also see me adding some torn strips of paper towel with the Flexcoat on the bark side. This gave it a touch of texture and made it feel a bit more organic.

Finished Firewood
Finished Firewood

The whole thing was painted with a mix of scenic paint, acrylics, and Design Master, all of which remain pretty flexible when dry. We got the thing out on stage, and the lighting made it look very red, so I gave it another few coats of paint to make it look more realistic under the light.

Under natural lighting in the picture above, it looks very theatrical, but on stage it worked very well. The actor was able to beat the other actor without injuring him, and it produced a wonderful dull thud as he did so.

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.

Reprints

Belasco’s Property Room Part 4, 1920

The following is the fourth part of a 1920 article on David Belasco’s property collection. The first part, second part and third part were published earlier:

Mementoes of Napoleon

by Frank Vreeland

He knows every object in this store-room by heart, and when he discovers that one of them is missing not even the omniscient property man questions his memory. That singularly retentive memory is one quality which Mr. Belasco has in common with Napoleon and may perhaps account for some of his admiration for the great Corsican, for the manager might be said to have acquired the remnants of Bonaparte’s empire. Continue reading Belasco’s Property Room Part 4, 1920 →

Making and finding props for theatre, film, and hobbies