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-Rig Drapes

The beginning of Invasion at Silk Road Rising is supposed to look like an Arabian Nights Arab cliche. We're talking draped colorful fabric, palm trees, and maybe lush fringed cushions. We also needed everything to disappear quickly as the illusion is shattered. For palm trees and cushions that is easy. For draped fabric that needs to be re-rigged by the run crew each night before the show, and torn down during the show by "angry" actors, it was a bit of a puzzle. 

Our awesome and easy solution was this,

That picture, if you can't tell, is a standard wooden clothespin, pressed onto a sticky Command Strip. 

In case you somehow have never used these, they're amazing. I use the hooks all the time to add places backstage for actors to hang a prop or costume quickly. And they work exactly as advertised, pull down on the strip to stretch and remove and it leaves no residue. Be sure to check the label when you buy. Different strips are rated for different weights

The clothespins easily clip onto the ends of the fabric and hold them in place, but the hold is loose enough, that a slight tug down releases the fabric from the clothespins and allows it to be quickly removed and dragged offstage. 

We have had problems with some of the clothespins twisting and breaking (because the pins were cheaply made) but the rig is so easy to take down and redo, the best solution was just to give the run crew plenty of spare pins and command strips. If one breaks our ASM is easily able to replace it while rigging the fabric up the next night. 

As a side note, this beautiful fabric is actually Indian sari fabric, purchased at an Indian fabric store in the Devon neighborhood in Chicago. The woman at the store was incredibly helpful, but the pricing can be confusing. The sari fabrics are on rolls mostly, but the pricing is by sari. Each sari is roughly 6 yards long. The more you know...

Never Be Afraid to Ask...Coke Cooler

For The Lake Effect at Silk Road Rising, the set designer wanted a standing Coke cooler in the corner of our set (a small family-owned Indian restaurant).
I was a bit worried about the idea, because our budget was fairly limited and I knew that purchasing one would be cost prohibitive. Also, a quick search on ebay and craigslist turned up only antique or vintage models.
Pretty quickly I realized that the only way we were going to get what we needed would be to go straight to the source. I called Coca-Cola.
I happened to have learned many years ago, when my grandfather was closing his old family pharmacy, that the big drink coolers found in restaurants and convenience stores do not belong to the stores themselves, but to the drink companies. Pepsi, Coke and other brands set up an account with the store owners, provide the coolers and then deliver the stock to fill it.
I found a service number on the Coca-Cola website, called and explained to the person who answered what I needed. I was sent to three or four different people, explaining our needs to each representative and then being forwarded on to the person who they believed could best help me. Eventually I spoke to Jose, who was able to figure out how to code the delivery for company records and arrange a time to deliver our machine. It arrived on schedule without any problems and immediately made the set look so much more like a real restaurant. All of this has been COMPLETELY FREE!
One of the most important parts of making something like this happen is good phone communication skills. With every person I spoke to I acknowledged that this was of course a strange request, and mentioned over and over again how much the help was appreciated. I stayed open and flexible in terms of what arrangements could work for us. I mentioned that we are a non-for-profit, and offered to provide any documentation that would be needed for tax records (they have not indicated that they needed anything at this point). I also made a point to tell them that the machine, and the logo would be clearly displayed to our audience every night. I had numbers on hand of audience sizes and numbers performances to back up my claim that this would be useful advertising for Coca-Cola.

 A couple side notes. After the rest of the set had been dulled down and dirtied to make it look more real and used, the bright clean colors of the coke cooler were overly distracting. The director asked if I could dull it down in any way. The solution I found to darken the color, without damaging the piece, was to gaff tape a layer of dark brown tulle over the entire side of the machine. The gaff tape should remove without leaving a residue, and the thin creases wrinkles in the fabric blend perfectly into the side of the machine from just a few steps away.

The only other problem we had with putting the machine onstage was the noise. The sound of the refrigerator motor, on our hollow set, in the marble floored theatre was just too much. The machine is rigged so that the lights and the refrigerator are run together on the same plug. 

Our lighting designer was able to solve the problem by installing long LED strips inside the machine and running them independently (this also allowed her to have more control over the lights and run them off the dimmer system). 

Proppeople.com

Hey everyone, just a quick note to let people know they should check out the prop people discussion forum.
The site (a part of the delphi forums site) had fallen pretty dead in the last year or two, but it looks as if Eric Hart (who write his own props blog at props.eric-hart.com) has taken over the project and is trying to get it up and running again. Here's hoping it's a success and we will again have a productive forum for asking questions, finding rentals, and sharing tricks.

And thanks Eric for taking on the challenge.