Tag Archives: blog

Showcases

Humana Festival

Actors Theatre of Louisville
Actors Theatre of Louisville

I had the pleasure of working at the Actors Theatre of Louisville back in 2006-7. This time of year, they begin working on the Humana Festival, a festival of new plays. It’s a hectic time for the props shop, with six new plays, three short plays, and apprentice scenes all being fully produced within two or three months. That’s a lot of props.

This year, Mark Walston, the props supervisor at ATL, is writing a blog during this process. It looks pretty interesting so far, and really gives a good inside look at life in the props shop at one of America’s great regional theatres.

I’ve linked to Mark’s Flickr stream of photos from the production studio a while back, which gives another great look behind the scenes at ATL.

Resources

Making indie film props

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Lost in Schlock is a blog by Tim Shrum, who creates  props, monsters, and costumes for super low-budget films. The site has been around for awhile, and is chock full of tutorials and guides for all manner of objects. It is geared to the DIY crowd, so almost any prop shop can pull off the projects. I found some great tutorials on how to make Monster Mud, low budget fake heads, and molded gelatin prosthetics. I also found this old video with Leonard Nimoy about making spaceship models out of junk, which I swear I saw as a kid.

Useful Sites

Technical Direction Tidbits

I found a new blog on technical direction for the blogroll. Technical Direction Tidbits is written by L. Jean Burch, a project manager at Chicago Scenic Studios. She has been working on this blog for over a year and a half now, so there’s a ton of information to be found. She has a category dedicated to props, but since there’s a lot of overlap between props and scene shops, the other categories are worth exploring too. And last Tuesday’s post was about this blog.

Another post of note is on custom printed fabric. My fiance just ran across this same company, Spoonflower, which will custom print fabric for $18 a yard. She’s been trying to find the perfect tablecloth fabric for our wedding, but has had no luck even after perusing numerous stores in NYC’s Fabric District. If we test this company, I’ll be sure to post the results, as it seems it could be very useful in the right situation.

Useful Sites

Life of a Prop Builder

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A chair I built for the opera, "Tea"
A chair I built for the opera, "Tea"

Two posts I wanted to mention from this weekend. First off:

The great Toolmonger blog has featured one of my props. I’ve been following Toolmonger for awhile; it’s updated daily with posts about tools: new tools, cheap tools, how to use tools. Pretty much anything you would want to know about tools. I’ve been meaning to add it to my blogroll on this site, so this is as good a time as any.

Second, the Houston Ballet has a blog. On Friday, they wrote about making props for Marie. It has some good photographs showing the techniques they used to make a lot of the fake food.

Uncategorized

The First Post

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I started this blog for several reasons. The first is simply that there are no other real prop blogs. At least, none that I can find. And I’ve looked. I like reading blogs. I wish I could read a blog about props a few times a week. Since I can’t, I figured I’d start my own.

The second reason is that I’m working on a book about props. This blog is a way to gather my thoughts, practice my writing, and discuss things that won’t make it into the book.

Finally, I’m presenting a paper at the next SETC Theatre Symposium on props. I thought that would be a great thing to cover on a blog, and I’d like to have this well underway by that point.

Feel free to send in anything you think is of interest for this blog. Prop stories, pictures, and how-tos… if you have a portfolio you wish to share, or pictures of your prop shop or storage… if there are any books, magazines, or articles you’ve read online that you wish to share… whatever it is, send it on in to eric@props.eric-hart.com.