CAMELOT Theatrical Special Effects

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."

posted by C. J. # 1:51 PM