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What is the difference between "Stage Magic" and "Stage Special Effects?" Stage Magic is the art of making something impossible appear to happen through the use of mechanical, electrical or psychological monkey-business. Stage Special Effects is the art of making something normal appear to happen through the use of mechanical, electrical or psychological monkey-business. So we have something in common: Monkey-business. The stage magician, however, showcases the effect or illusion. He shines lights on it, plays music, draws the audience's attention to it. Steve Wyric goes through a lot of fanfare, has sexy dancing girls unfold fancy draperies to music and lights then makes an airplane materialize. David Copperfield walks into the whirling blades of an industrial fan and is transformed into smoke. Kevin James sawed Kurtis Walker's legs off. The audience is supposed to notice these things and react in a "What the...???" manner. The smarter ones know it's all monkey-business, but try to figure it out as they may, they cannot. The stage special effects designer draws no attention to the illusion at all; the actors pretend that everything is normal. The illusion is that normal things are happening... in a place (the stage) where they couldn't possibly happen! A telephone rings and someone answers it. It's either not a real telephone or, if it is, it couldn't possibly ring because it's not connected to anything. Automobile headlights appear in the dark and grow larger and closer as the engine sound gets louder. Suddenly the headlights spin wildly out of control then roll over and over to the sound of a horrendous crash. The lights come on and there's Paul Sheldon, lying in bed as Annie Wilkes nonchalantly tells him about the accident he was in. There was no accident, not even a car or any trace of a car. Later on she chops off his foot with an axe (a real axe and the foot goes flying toward the audience in the normal "I chop off your foot" manner) and he smashes a typewriter over her head in the normal "I smash a typewriter over your head" manner. Blood, hair and typewriter keys fly everywhere as you would expect; there's no fanfare, no setup, no hint to the audience that these things are about to happen or that they couldn't happen. The smarter ones know it's all monkey-business, but try to figure it out as they may, they cannot. Frank Proffitt, maker and player of fretless banjoes, was once asked what he thought of Earl Scruggs's unique bluegrass banjo technique. "I'd like to be able to do it," he said, "and then not do it." So it is with stage monkey business: as a special effects maven, you need to know everything the stage magician knows and then don't do it as something impossible but as something normal. For example, when the director of Miss Saigon tells you he wants a helicopter to appear on stage, it's useful to know how Steve Wyric gets that airplane on stage. You can go to the same source: the secret will be found in The Blackstone Book of Magic and Illusion. When it's time for Annie to chop off Paul's foot, it's helpful to know how Kevin James sawed off Kurtis Walker's legs. (Here's a hint: Kurtis Walker had no legs.) I subscribe to several magic magazines (including Magic Magazine) and have a good-sized magic library. I spend an inordinate amount of time on magic websites, forums and blogs and an inordinate amount of money on magic books and DVDs. I'm not a magician, I'm a stage special effects guy. It's the same old monkey-business.
Friday, April 22, 2005
There've been some rumblings within the Catholic Church about "fast-tracking" the late Pope John Paul on the road to sainthood. As I understand the rules, part of the process involves proving that praying to the saint-to-be in question has resulted in two miracles. I imagine that becoming a new saint is kind of like beginning a job on the internet help desk; you've got to learn the policies and procedures before they actually let you take calls. I hope the people who pray to Pope John Paul for help are smarter than the people who pray to the Virgin Mary. You would think by now that they'd start asking for some sensible miracles: please eliminate cancer, please give us world peace, please let me win the Lotto, please save Michael Jackson... miracle stuff, y'know? But instead, here's the kind of spam that Mary has had to put up with in the last couple years: Please make an oilstain appear on a hospital window in Boston, Mass.  Granted! Now, how about the people inside the hospital? Please make some glass discolor on a church in Clearwater, Florida.  Too easy! And your Lotto numbers are 10-57-43-18-24-6 but you'll need to buy a ticket. Please make a picture of Greta Garbo appear on a grilled cheese sandwich in Miami.  It's toast! Would you like world peace with that? Please make a water leak in a Chicago tunnel look like an oilstained window in Boston.  Ta da! Now, about Michael's nose... Now, there are some people (like tens of thousands) who rush right out to see these things and buy bouquets of flowers and teddy bears to dump in front of them because they say "they look like the Virgin Mary." Let's get something straight: these things do not look like the Virgin Mary. Nothing looks like the Virgin Mary because nobody knows what the Virgin Mary looked like! It's not that she was camera-shy, it's just that photography hadn't been invented yet. Nobody who knew her painted her picture because she wasn't important yet and she hung out with a bunch of fishermen who weren't into portraiture. So knock it off with the teddy bears, okay? What we're seeing here are some cool psychological special effects. Tell an audience that something that is nothing is really something that looks like something else that nobody has ever seen and they'll buy the gag. It worked for Steven Spielberg and E.T. and hey, it'll work for you, especially if you sell flowers or teddy bears.
Wednesday, April 20, 2005 Stage Special Effects: Amazing or Awesome?
 If you ask me which era I would like to have lived in, the last five years of the 19th Century would be my choice. The Late Victorian Age gave us telecommunications, automobiles, Kodak cameras, Babbage's computer, the beginning of airplane flight and lots of other great inventions that we still use over 100 years later. The late 1800s were exciting because science and engineering were at their peaks in all areas, not just electronics as they are today. Everybody was nuts for machinery and electrical stuff and nothing was impossible. Nothing! Natch, stage special effects were right there at the cutting edge. Here's one of my favorites. Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ by General Lew Wallace was published by Harper and Brothers on November 12, 1880. The novel grew in such popularity during Wallace's lifetime that it was adapted into a stage play in 1899. That dramatization was followed by the motion picture productions in 1907, 1925, and 1959; yeah, that Charlton Heston thing. The Lew Wallace Museum website tells us that:
Now there's a theatrical special effect I would love to have seen! I need to get back to the lab and finish my time machine.
Tuesday, April 19, 2005
Yeah, I know that balloons are round. I should have said "Perfectly Spherical Balloons." That's right: no neck, just like your Uncle Louie. Why do you want one of these? Well, maybe you have a special effect requiring a ball that doesn't weigh anything. You could levitate that ball with a small blast of air or an invisible thread or, if you're a magician, use it as a zombie ball. If nothing else, fill a black balloon with helium and really mess everyone's mind at the bowling alley: "Okay, watch me make this spare... Hey! What the...???" Here's how ya do it.
Sunday, April 10, 2005 Wallpaper Flats - Clever or Brilliant?
I've decided to give the cinema a rest for a bit and get back to what this blog is really all about: inexpensive special effects for limited-budget live theatre. I'm going to step into the sacred area of set design, normally reserved for my artsy colleagues, with a quick bit of "commando theatre."  Sometimes we are faced with a short-run production, let's say one weekend, with maybe a day's load-in time and zero budget. It happens a lot in student productions. Let's say the set consists of some rooms, maybe a living-room, a bedroom and a hallway as it did in Peter Shaffer's "Black Comedy." With a day to build a disposable set and no money, what to do? Beg, borrow and steal your way to fame! I started at the lumber yard where I begged several dozen ten-foot lengths of cheap pine 1-by-2's and some scrap 1/4" plywood. These were quickly nailed together into frames, braced at the corners, with leftover 1-by-2's for braces. Then off to the wallpaper shop. "Got any remnant rolls of really ugly wallpaper?" I asked. "Tons," they replied. "Help yourself." We loaded up with some nasty floral prints and garish stripes, free of charge, then raced back to the theatre. We mounted the wallpaper to the frames, stapling it with a staple gun. Ta-da! A beautiful wallpapered apartment in less than two hours! Set designers cringe when I describe this technique in theatre classes: there's a "rule" in set design that wallpaper patterns should be stencilled onto actual flats or sponge-painted onto styrofoam panels and that flats must be constructed to be sturdy and reusable and there's a mystical thing called the "ten-foot-rule" in regards to audience perception of set detail. Yeah, if it's your theatre and you have a "set budget" and a storage facility. This entire set cost almost nothing and went straight into the dumpster on Sunday afternoon after strike but it looked wonderfully expensive "for one brief, shining moment that was known as Camelot."
Thursday, April 07, 2005 I scream, you scream, we all scream at the green screen scene.
Steven Wright (the comedian, not Orville's other brother) said: I like to pick up hitchhikers. When they get in the car I say, "Put on your seat belt. I want to try something. I saw it once in a cartoon, but I think I can do it." Now that real special effects are almost unheard-of in the movies, we have to expect that any special effects we see are computer-generated cartoons. Soon we won't even need actors: we can have Humphrey Bogart, Marilyn Monroe, Gollum and Jar-Jar Binks all on the screen at the same time. Won't that be swell? Of course not. Now you know why I hate CGI. So here comes the war of The Wars of the Worlds, a summer shootout between Pendragon and Paramount (Tim Hines vs. Steven Spielberg) to see whose remake of WOTW can WOW the audiences the most. Hines's movie is based closely on the H. G. Wells novel and set in 1898 in England with period costumes and British actors. Spielberg's movie is based on a screenplay by David Koepp, set in 2005 in New Jersey with modern costumes and American actors (Tom Cruise and Dakota Fanning.) Both movies are guaranteed to use CGI for the Martian war machines and yes, this time they will be tripods like they were in the book rather than cheesy flying things like George Pal used in the 1953 version. Never mind that a tripod can't walk: these are CG cartoon-tripods so they can do anything that Wile E. Coyote could do, that is, violate the laws of physics. Did I mention that I hate CGI? I'll just mention it again in case you care. I personally prefer true-to-the-book period pieces set in England over American adaptations. The British are just so, well, so British!  Here is how real Englishmen in Woking, Surrey, England where H. G. Wells 1898 novel was really set react to a real metal sculpture of a Martian war machine. Looks restful to me. Is that a pub on the corner?  Here is how American actors in New Jersey where H. G. Wells 1898 novel wasn't set pretend to react to a nonexistent "green-screen" image of a Martian war machine. Naw, too frantic. Where's the pub?
Friday, April 01, 2005
Some people can't tell a joke. You know some of them. They screw it up by giving away the punchline first. For instance, they'll say: "Did you know that God is a bad golfer?" And you say "No" and they say: "If you're out on the golf course in a lightning storm, just hold up a 3-iron because even God can't hit a 3-iron!" Then they fall on the floor and soil their shorts. I hate those guys.  So here come the big, summer blockbusters and here comes George Lucas strolling casually down the street with the sixth and last episode of Star Wars sticking out of his pocket, looking all innocent as if we haven't been standing, waiting on the corner for 28 years wondering where the hell he was. The sixth episode is called Revenge of the Sith except it's actually the third episode and I guess George is dyslexic because he spelled Shit wrong. You've probably seen the trailers and all the ads trying to get you to rip your pants grabbing for your wallet and go on, admit it: you can't wait to see this thing, can you?  Here's my question: Why? Seriously. I mean, forget the fact that you already know the punchline unless you're 12 years old and you missed the first three (actually the last three but let's not even get into that.) Also forget the fact that the video for the last one, Attack of the Clones, started with a preview in which C3PO tells you the entire story: "...and then Luke Skywalker found out that Leia was really his twin sister and the teddy bears danced." There, I ruined it for you. Wait, no I didn't! George Lucas did back in 1983! So what's the deal now? Is there, like, some big surprise waiting for us? Oh, I'll bet you want to know why cute "Annie" Skywalker turned into nasty Darth Vader, right? Is that your question? Here's my question: Why?  See, we all know Annie is cute from the first movie. Jake Lloyd must have been cast for cuteness because he couldn't act his way out of a wet paper bag. Then in the second movie, which was a buddy cop film in which Hayden Christensen played Mel Gibson and Ewan McGregor played Danny Glover, we found out that he was even cuter and still couldn't act. So now what? Well, he gets messed up really badly and has to wear a C-PAP machine all day (looks like Bob Dylan playing the harmonica) with a plastic mask so that he can be voiced by James Earl Jones who actually can act. That's about it. Then he turns back into a really nice old guy who accidentally destroyed everything in the galaxy but it wasn't really his fault. He wasn't mean after all, merely misunderstood, and then he dies but his ghost comes back smiling a sad little smile. And then the frigging teddy bears dance. In a way, I'm glad it ends in the middle. If I had sat through all 15 hours of Star Wars only to be left with the sad old man and the dancing teddy bears, I would be so pissed that I would demand not only my money but my time back!  Am I going to be first in line to see this mess? You bet! The special effects look really expensive even if they are computer-generated but I doubt that I'll give a damn for the characters. When I was asked for my opinion of Episode I, I said: "Too much Jar-Jar Binks; not enough Darth Maul." I already have an opinion of Episode III: "Too much Annie Vader; not enough Bettie Droid." Who's this "Bettie Droid?" According to the pre-production sketches, she tops off the Uncanny Valley robots below: Really, Really, REALLY Cute! Large buttered popcorn and a Mr. Pibb, please.
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