Tea Sandwiches

For The Importance of Being Earnest at Oak Park Festival Theatre, I was lucky that these bread and butter sandwiches didn't need to be consumed, so I could save time and money by making fake ones. 

I started with a scrap piece of upholstery foam I had left from a previous project. 

 I cut it into small rectangles, around 1 1/4" wide and 4" long

 I then cut them in half width-wise by carefully wedging each piece between my scissors before cutting down.

 I used some leftover liquid latex in between the two halves

The put the pieces back together for a nice little bread and butter tea sandwich. 

Unfortunately I forgot to get a photo of all the tea sandwiches stacked daintily on the tray with the tea service, but trust me, it was lovely, and very convincing. 

Bundt Cake

I made this cake last summer for Miracle on South Division Street at Peninsula Players. I just noticed the photos still on my phone and realized it never made it onto the blog.

I puchased an nice bundt pan for the show to use as set dressing. As a bonus I was able to use the cheap plastic liner for this project. We filled the liner with great-stuff and let it expand overnight. It expanded to overfill the liner, but the foam at the very bottom of the mold (the top of the cake) hadn't cured because no air could get to it.

We removed the cake from the liner, cut off the over-expanded bottom of the cake so it would sit flat, and allowed the top to finish curing. Since it was no longer curing inside a mold the top became a bit more uneven and bubbly, which didn't particularly matter for this project, but is good to remember for next time.

I sprayed the cake with some glossy wood tone for color.

After the paint was dry, I mixed some plaster of paris with brown paint to make an icing. Once the plaster had hit the right consistancy, I carefully poured it over the cake, allowing it to drip down the sides. 

 It looked great initially, but after the plaster cured, the plaster looked dull and dry. 

 I added a final coat of clear gloss sealer to the icing to get the final look. 

"Dream Candles"

I just bought one of these candles for Appropriate, at Victory Gardens and I'm blown away. Chicago has particularly strict regulations about open flame onstage, so strict that in most theatres the regulations boil down to "no open flame of any kind ever."

I've tried lots of fake flame candles and always been disappointed and usually need to find ways to obscure the audience's view of the effect in order to make the ugly fake flame less obvious. Once I opened the Dream Candle I ordered, I was tempted to ask the actors to turn it so that the flame was more present for the audience, it was just so believable and so cool.

The candles are made by a company called Luminara and are sold through a number of dealers. I bought mine online at frontgate.com.

The candles can be turned off and on using a switch on the bottom, or using a small wireless remote. Be aware the remote has very little range, and isn't terribly reliable from more than a few feet away.

My candle cost me just over $50, but for the amount of use that I am sure it will get in future productions, and the size of the problem it solved, it believe it was worth the investment.

Green Tea Frappuccino

For Broken Fences at 16th Street, we needed three Starbucks Green Tea Frappuccinos. The director would have loved to have something real, but we agreed that the cost of something real, and the labor involved in prepping something for each performance would be too much.
We decided on a compromise. The drink itself would be fake, but we would add whipped cream on top that would be real, that way the cream could stick naturally to the straw, the actors could take the straws out and lick the whipped cream off them, and could make a very convincing slurping noise by sucking on the straw.

 To start this project, again I went with model magic. It air dries, so that it could be formed to fit the cup and dry in place, and it comes in nice pastel colors that would be perfect for the tea. 

 I pressed the model magic into the cup, trying to fill as much space as possible, leaving a hole through the middle for the straw. 

 The finished dried product looked fantastic, and looked even better with the whipped cream on top. 

In all of my experience with model magic I had always found that it stayed strong with a firm skin. that seemed easy to wipe clean. I had the assistant stage manager rinse the cups out nightly in order to keep them from getting sticky or disgusting. Unfortunately it turns out that either the cream or washing was slowly eating at the Model Magic, the stage manager emailed me concerned that the actors were drinking dissolved clay. She wondering what the clay was, if it was toxic and if something could be done to fix the situation.

To fix the situation, I ended up using wax. I melted down a small amount on my stove, poured the wax into the cup and then slowly poured it back out, letting it coat and seal all the model magic. 

 The wax is far less porous, should not absorb the cream and water in the same way, and should rinse clean very easily after each performance. 

Blood Jam

I'd like to take a moment to recommend a relatively new company producing fake blood for stage and film, using a unique recipe. The company is called Gravity and Momentum and their product is called Blood Jam. They are a local Chicago company, headed up by Greg Poljacik and Chris Yurwitz.

On a recent production, I decided to take a chance on something new, I'd been hearing a bit of a buzz around about a new blood that people wanted to try, but hadn't specifically talked to anyone who had tried it. I read a few testimonials online, was impressed by the ease with which people claimed the blood washed out, and decided that a show with a white painted set, where the actress in the white cotton dress gets coated in blood was a good place to test that.

I ordered a gallon of the blood jam. The costume designer and I tested the blood on some scraps of fabric and were very impressed. On the first preview, when the actress walked out onto the stage, we were disappointed, the yellow light was reacting all wrong with the colors in the blood. As the director told me in notes, "I wasn't sure if she'd just murdered someone, or if a cat had peed on her." Not the reaction you want.

I called up Greg and asked him what I could do. The blood needed to be darker and more opaque. He immediately offered to make me a whole new gallon in a darker color to suit my needs, and offered some advice on adding a few drops of green food coloring to the batch we had, in order to adjust the color until a new batch could be created. The adjustments worked fantastically, and the new batch I received two days later looked even better.

Also to the delight of the costume and set designers, we have yet to see a stain on either the costume or the set after a full week of previews.

After working with the blood, and hearing from many others who knew Chris and Greg about how awesome they are, I wrote Greg to ask a few more questions. Here are the questions and his answers.

I heard from someone at Oak Park Festival that you taught yourself chemistry in order to figure out a way to make an edible, non staining blood. Can you tell me a little be more about how this came about? Where you went to for information? 

I still remembered the chemistry basics from high school and I looked up information needed to fill in gaps as I experimented. I had worked on a show where I claimed I could make a blood that was edible and washed out (before I created Blood Jam) and was extremely embarrassed/humbled when I realized how truly tough that is! I went through and played with every known recipe out there. It didn't make sense, however, that it couldn't be done. So I put together some ideas and would chase each one down to see what happened. It took a full year of non-stop failure till I finally, accidentally, created the recipe for Blood Jam. It was a process that built on the successes and failures of each previous experiment to capitalize on what worked/didn't work and why. The best way to learn the practical side of chemistry!!

I went all over for info. I asked people, searched the web, read blogs and interviews of other blood makers, looked at other blood products, and tracked down product info from companies to figure out the chemical pieces I needed. Some stuff was hard or impossible to find so I had to infer many pieces and extrapolate info from one area and trust it would hold true for what I was doing. Much of the chemistry came from trying to understand what I had created after the fact! The original hypothesis would work (or not) and I had I figure out why the result was doing or not doing certain things before moving on. Fun and frustrating at the same time!

How do you two know each other, and what gave you the idea to partner on this venture? 

We have been close friends for eight years. My wife met Chris first through theater friends. Our close circle is considered family, when I told them what I was working on, none were surprised id be tinkering with this sort of thing, and everyone wanted to help in some way (and everyone definitely has!) Chris was able to financially get the company started and his business sense is what keeps the company grounded. He likes to say he is the Gravity and I am the Momentum (our company is Gravity and Momentum LLC). Without his grounding I would have flown in too many directions after the next project interest and ran the company bankrupt real fast!

What's next? Any new products in the works?

The immediate goals for the blood is to continue to tweak the color so that its the perfect blend for thickness and for when it gets thinned out. We nailed the washing/edible obstacle but the color obstacle is still quite difficult to get. Small adjustments one way or the other can make the blood look too brown, purple or orange when thinned out. Ideally we get it to the sweet spot where it looks like a nice, real red when first deployed and settled to a realistic dried bloodbrown over time.

We are also continuing to tweak the powder so its able to be applied to the skin more easily and discreetly. The powder works wonderfully for caplets, and would be crazy cool as a water activated effect on skin!

I am also playing with Fire Gels and starting data research on the effect of performance on the actor and audience. (See why Chris is vital! All over the place!). This is on top of still teaching, doing stunts and choreo! Soo, it may be a while till we finish but we planning on being around for a bit.

Quick appetizers

For Broken Fences at 16th Street Theatre, I needed a small tray of appetizers. They didn't need to be anything specific, no one ever interacted with them (aside from one character bringing them out and setting them on the table) and the audience never got a close look at them. 

I needed something quick, easy and most importantly, cheap. 

At the craft store I purchased one bag of beige Model Magic, and several small bags of pom-pom balls, for a total price of $7.

 I molded the model magic into log flat strips

 placed the pom-poms along the strips, 

 and then rolled them up. 

from a distance on the tray they worked perfectly. I think next time I will try with strips of felt for a slightly more uniform look. 

Fake Chicken Carcass

This prop was for a production of Miracle on South Division Street, at Peninsula Players Theatre in Door County, Wisconsin.
For the epilogue of the show, the characters are in the kitchen, and the script indicates that there are bits of cooking mess around to indicate the main character is in the middle of making soup. The director wanted a chicken carcass, draining in a colander, over the stock pot; as if she had just finished boiling the carcass for a homemade chicken stock.

Here is the carcass I made

And here is how I made it:

I started with a basic skeleton made from a couple pieces of lauan and dowel rods. I looked up some basic images of chicken skeletons to give me a basic guide. 

 Next I added a layer of Crayola model magic clay to give the chicken some meat and muscle. 

 Third, I soaked strips of muslin in elmers glue and wrapped them around parts of the chicken. The idea was that this would provide some different surfaces for the next, liquid latex step, to stick to. I am a little unsure of whether this step made any difference to the end product, or whether it could have skipped. 

Finally the chicken was coated with 6 coats of liquid latex (full disclosure, my intern, Ross, did this step while I was out shopping one day). 

 The latexed chicken was dusted with some Design Master, glossy wood tone spray, which, if you've read many posts on this blog, you know is the best way to give something that oven-baked look.

 Finally, I took a knife, and began to cut into the chicken, using my fingers to tear away at several of the cuts.

 Each cut exposed the layers underneath the latex skin,

 and slowly began to give them impression of a baked chicken, that had been picked clean of most of it's meat, and then boiled.

Nipples of Venus

For Amadeus, at Oak Park Festival Theatre, I created this tray of sweets for almost no cost. 

The script described nipples of Venus, as brandied chestnuts, dipped in sugar. 

A google image search gave me a lot of good information too (and surprisingly few pornographic pics considering the word nipple was part of my search)

They look something like this

I used my go-to salt dough recipe (one part salt, one part flour, add water VERY slowly until you reach the right consistency to mold what you need, bake on your ovens lowest temp until hard)

 a small dab of brown paint to each ball, and some extra ribbon and a silver sugar bowl made the tray look full and impressive. 

The grapes sitting on top of the tray were for the few pieces that were supposed to be consumable. From the distance of the audience, they were unnoticable, and they were easy for the actor to eat quickly and easily without gumming up her throat or being forced to chew something sticky before her next line. 

Stage Hairspray

I am not sure of how many uses I will actually find for this, but I have just discovered a new product. 

 Fantasy FX canned fog.
This product has apparently been used extensively in recent years for productions of Hairspray.

I imagine this canned fog effect would have many uses, though I used it for a hairspray effect as well.

The fog inside has very little scent and hangs nicely in the air

A quick bit of spray adhesive on a recreated AquaNet Label

And we have a wonderful can of hairspray that doesn't leave any sort of sticky film on actresses, props, or the floor

Light-up Cake

This is one of the two birthday cakes created for "Night over Erzinga" at Silk Road Rising. This was the easier of the two, but was still tricky in that it needed to have candles that were blown out onstage. Chicago has very strict rules forbidding almost all instances of live flame onstage, so real candles weren't an option. 

My solution started with a very simple circular form made of two layered circles of foam. 

In individually wired seven small yellow LED bulbs , wrapped them in tape and placed them vertically around the cake, 

then ran all the wires back to a battery and switch positioned on the back of the plate. For this part I had to be very careful to be consistent about which sides of the LED I wired to which color wire. LEDs are directional, which means that, unlike incandescent bulbs, they only work if the positive and negative sides of the battery are connected in the correct way, switch the polarity and the light will not light. When wiring one LED individually this can be an easy mistake to fix, by simply flipping the battery, when wiring many bulbs together, a mistake on one bulb would be significantly trickier to track down and correct. 

Once everything was wired I made sure everything was securely taped down to the base, and then iced over the entire thing with light weight joint compound to hide my work. 

I left the battery and the switch exposed , on the back of the cake. I later covered all but the actual button on the switch with white gaff tape so that both were accessible to troubleshooting, but less visible from a distance. 

Here it is all lit up.

To hide my ugly black tape candles I purchased a box of cheap drinking straws. I slit each straw down the side, and then wrapped it around the base of the candles.

 Each straw was cut to be a bit longer than the tape segment so that the bulb was hidden a bit inside the plastic. This helped to hide the hardware of the bulbs a bit, so that the audience saw a more believable glow instead of a bare exposed bulb.