Tag Archives: fake food

Food in Timon

March 7, 2011 Eric Hart 5 Comments

Our production of Timon of Athens just closed yesterday here at the Public Theater. It was my first prop master credit at the Public. I’ll probably post some more about this show once I get back from USITT and can go through my photographs, but for today, I thought I’d highlight some of the food, both real and fake.

They needed a lot of toast, so I decided to make some fake toast to augment the real toast. I started off with a sheet of white floral foam the same thickness as toast. I cut it into triangles, rounded some of the edges and shaped them a bit to match the pieces of real toast I was using as reference. I needed to coat it in something to make a paintable surface, and I realized that wood glue would not only do the job, it would also serve as a good base color.

Raphael, one of our interns from last summer, was back on this show as an artisan. He finished most of the toast pieces. He arranged them in the pyramid seen above. Each night, BK, our props runner for the show, made several pieces of toast for the top of this pyramid and for another tray which held the caviar.

The director wanted an “obscene amount” of caviar during the banquet scene to showcase the ostentatious display of wealth which Timon indulges in. To cut down costs, we decided to fill a bowl with a mound of fake caviar and top it off each night with a real caviar substitute which the actors could eat. I found that pearl couscous and black food coloring made a convincing fake caviar, and it was cheap and easy to prepare as well. Alex, another one of our artisans, set to sculpting a mound of caviar out of white bead foam and painted it. During tech, it turned out that the fake caviar and real caviar did not match closely enough, and the difference was too obvious between the two. I mixed some of the dry caviar with the food coloring and added it to a mixture of glue and water. I spread this over the top of the mound, and when it was dry, coated the whole thing in shellac to seal it and make it food-safe. It was still not quite the same as the real caviar. For the third attempt, Raphael reshaped the mound a bit and repainted it to match the color of the couscous more closely. It finally matched the real caviar enough to make them indistinguishable.

In addition to the toast and caviar, the show also had a scene where a waiter carried around appetizers. Some of these appetizers were picked up by actors and eaten. Neil Patel, our designer, was interested in the really fancy amuse-bouche kind of appetizers you find at so many New York events. From the research he gave me, I came up with the following:

I made the edible appetizers by placing a toothpick through a grape and adding a piece of dried apricot on one end and a mint leaf on the other. They were, in fact, surprisingly delicious.

We wanted to have a lot of appetizers on the tray and decided to make some fake ones so BK would not have to make dozens of real appetizers each night. We also decided to make the fake ones different so the actors would not accidentally eat a piece of fake food.

I cut a scrap of yellow upholstery foam into tiny squares. I put a scoop of joint compound in a sandwich bag, cut a corner off of it, and used it like an icing bag to make the swirl of white. The green was some fake grass I clipped and set in while the joint compound was still wet. We had some tiny red beads in stock, so I added one to each to give it a bit more color. I figured it might be a piece of cod roe, in keeping with the caviar theme.

Regular readers already know this, but my friend Anna has far more tips and tricks dealing with fake food on her blog dedicated to that very subject; check out Fake ‘n Bake if you haven’t already.

How-to

Making Fake French Fries

April 7, 2010 Eric Hart 1 Comment

The Book of Grace had a moment where Grace, a diner waitress, carried a tray of food across the stage. She started out with a hamburger we had in stock. The director wanted us to add some french fries. To the French Fry Machine!

Natalie Taylor Hart took on this project. She began with an old scrap piece of upholstery foam. She set the fence on the bandsaw and cut thin strips out of the foam. She then ran these strips through the bandsaw again to get long bars of foam. Finally, she cut the bars to a variety of lengths, leaving the edges at a variety of slight angles to keep them from looking artificial.

Since the piece of foam was fairly old, it was turning yellow in areas. Natalie used a can of yellow spray paint to add color in the rest of the areas. She did not completely coat the fries with a single color; the variety of tones on a single fry help give it more realism. You can see the fries in this state in the photograph below.

She next used a shade of brown acrylic paint to add the “cooked” (and burned) parts of the fries. This is the part where subtlety and artistry (and a good reference photograph) help make the fries seem real. None of the fries should look the same. Fries tend to turn browner on the edges, or toward one side. She also made some of the fries browner than others.

For her final step, she dabbed some artist’s gloss medium onto the lighter parts to give the fries a greasy highlight.

I arranged the fries on the plate, and then secured them into place with several dots of hot glue. Order up!

Useful Sites

Fake ‘n Bake

March 3, 2010 Eric Hart 1 Comment

I would like to introduce you to the newest blog about props: Fake ‘n Bake. My friend, Anna Warren, details the projects she crafts and constructs at the Milwaukee Repertory Theater. She specializes in fake food craftsmanship and casting and molding. Her articles so far are well-documented and chock full of photographs.

The peas in that picture above? Mardi Gras beads. Check out the Fake ‘n Bake kitchen for how she made the rest. If you leave a comment there, tell her I sent you!

Reprints

Shakespeare for Community Players: Tableware

October 26, 2009 Eric Hart 1 Comment

This is the second excerpt from a chapter concerning prop-making in â€œShakespeare for Community Playersâ€, by Roy Mitchell. Be sure to check out the first part, concerning furniture.

Tableware

Tableware, such as trenchers, bowls, flagons, goblets, jars, mugs and vases, may be made out of heavy crockery stoneware, and glass utensils painted or gilded. A jaunt through a crockery store will reveal a host of fine decorative pieces at a very low price which can be treated by the maker of accessories to give fine results. If it is desired to use liquid in a glass vessel, any gilding, silvering or painting should be put on the outside. If the glass is not intended for use with liquid, paint on the inside is best, because the glass gives a burnished surface. For gilding, do not buy the prepared leaf. It is too expensive. Buy the metallic powder, mix it with banana oil and apply with a soft brush. These metal powders may be had in several tones of gold, silver, copper, rose and green. With so ample a palette of colours the propertymaker need not stop at solid tones, but may secure bold inlaid and modelled effects in his metal table-ware.

Under the heading of table utensils should come foods. The best material for soup is sawdust or birdseed, which should be served with a ladle. Chops, steaks and roast meat may be made of brown bread cut to the desired shape. A fowl may be sculptured from a stale loaf of brown bread with a sharp knife, and made to steam by pouring boiling water over it. An appetizing looking dish is made by heaping a trencher high with white bread and brown crusts, and drenching it with boiling water just before it is carried on. Cold tea in various degrees of dilution will serve for most liquors, but if red wine is required, water may be safely coloured with the red colouring matter used by confectioners. Soda waters are not advisable for wines. They cause “frog in the throat.”

Cheap wooden kitchen-ware, bread-boxes, salt-boxes, knife and fork trays, hinged together and so on, may be painted or gilded, or both, to make caskets, table-boxes, despatch-boxes, and jewel-cases.

Reprinted from Shakespeare for Community Players, by Roy Mitchell, J.M. Dent & Sons ltd., 1919 (pp 62-63)

How-to

Fake Food – Making inedible replicas

May 6, 2009 Eric Hart 5 Comments

How do I make fake food props? The props department is frequently called upon to make all manner of food and food replicas for the stage. When food needs to be eaten by the actors, the props director is in charge of making the food every night, either for real, or by figuring out a subsitute. If the food is not eaten, the props director has more latitude in choosing what to do, usually making the food out of a material that will last the run of the show. This article is about the latter type, where we make inedible but realistic fake food.

Research is very important here; a good reference, either a photograph or the real thing, will go a long way to help you capture the essence of the food. Notice in the photograph above how the tomato, orange, and potato are all distinctive and recognizable, even though their shapes are fairly similar.

Sometimes you need to do research just to decide which food to use. Jay Duckworth pointed me to a website with a food timeline. If your production of Twelfth Night is set in 1810, can you have Macadamia Nuts at the picnic (no, they weren’t around until 1828).

Ron DeMarco pointed me to an older article with photographs about the Milwaukee Repertory Theatre (boy, they get a lot of press!).Â Julia Powell, the principal craftswoman, describes her process for replicating food. Ron linked to another article about food on stage. Though it’s mainly about the preparation and adaptation of real food, there are some tidbits on constructing completely artifical food.

There are a number of other articles floating around the internet giving tutorials for specific types of food. “Shortone” has a cool Instructable on how to make fake cupcakes. Amy Sedaris (yes, that Amy Sedaris) has instructions for making a cake out of styrofoam and spackle. Between these two, you can get a good idea of how to replicate any number of pastries and desserts.

Michael Koslovsky has an article in Proptology describing how he made lettuce for a fake sandwich. Kyle May has a pictorial showing an interesting method for making fake ice cubes. The PropPeople forum has a few good food-related posts. Dead animals can be a particularly tricky kind of prop; here is one way to make a dead goat. Here are a few tips and ideas for making raw hamburger meat. The last one references an Instructable on making Playdough, which might be useful, though it uses flour.

There are, of course, countless places you can simply purchase fake food replicas.Â DMOZ Open Directory has a number of listings under “Fake Food Props“. Or just search for “fake food” or “food props”. One of the top New York City food replica shops is Trengove Studios, which is actually geared more toward photography and film. Though probably too expensive for theatrical work, the pictures of their products are great just to drool over.

Prop Agenda