Turkish Bowls

For "Night Over Erzinga" the director was hoping that we could have a set of Turkish bowls on a tray for a short scene. 

After doing some research I discovered that Turkish pottery is not only intricate and beautiful, but VERY expensive, and totally out of our budget.

I decided instead to make the bowls myself. Unfortunately I missed taking pictures of them before I started, when they were all solid colored plastic and ceramic bowls I purchased at thrift stores for less than $1 each.

The next few images show the bowls close up after the first coat of paint.

 Next I used a white paint pen to outline all of the designs and to add details. 

 I slowly added details by rotating each color through each bowl, so that by the time I switched colors the first bowl is dry and ready for a new one. 

 In the end they turned out very well.
The director had been imagining that the bowls would be empty,and the food would be imagined/implied as this was a memory scene. Once we got into  we discovered that the idea wasn't working and we needed to fill te bowls.

With very little budget remaining I was able to fill the tray with food at the last minute for almost no cost.

with ripped up upholstery foam

 a bag of cheap beans (less than $1 at the grocery store)

 small apples I already had in stock

 my fake raspberries and blueberries from "The Crowd You're In With" (these have appeared in at least 4 shows now)

And some puffed wheat cereal so that the actress had something to physically eat in the short scene. 

Finally filling the whole thing out with some stock plastic grapes so that the bowls didn't looks so tiny on the tray. 

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.