CAMELOT Theatrical Special Effects

Cardboard props are nothing new. Cardboard boxes come ready-made in all sizes and can be taped together and painted as they are to create squared or rectangular looking things. No imagination needed there: boxes are boxes whether they're buildings, appliances or furniture. But what about spherical or oblate objects? How about animals, monsters and teapots? Well, computer graphics special effects folks build a wire frame model and then join the lines to create a polyhedral solid. That solid is then rendered by sophisticated algorithms to produce a ray-traced, Gouraud-shaded three-dimensional looking object on the screen which is, basically, why Pixar looks different than classical Disney and forms the fundamentals of CGI special effects on-screen in big-budget films. But that doesn't work in real life with actual flat panels, like corrugated cardboard, does it? Yes, it does and it's a technique well worth learning, young special-effects Jedi.

We begin with the art of origami, Japanese paper-folding, which allows the construction of polyhedral shapes from flat pieces of paper (or cardboard) with a minimum of cutting or piecing-together of parts. It gets pretty nuts: you can make a swan or a bunny, or you can make a truncated hexadecahedron or a stellated icosahedron. I recommend a fine book: 3-D Geometric Origami, Modular Polyhedra, by Rona Gurkewitz, Associate Professor of Mathematics and Computer Science at Western Connecticut State University and Bennett Arnstein, a mechanical hardware engineer in the aerospace industry. It's only $6.95 from Dover Publications and you need it, so buy it.

Once you have mastered the scam of making polyhedral solids from refrigerator shipping cartons with a minimum of cutting, the next step is pure Camelot. You "sculpture" the shapes by rounding the edges and blending the curves so that the polyhedron ceases to have sharp joints and becomes smooth and lifelike. This is a blog; I go into greater depth in my upcoming book, but the basic trick is:

You break the corrugations. Everyone who's ever smashed boxes for the trash knows that corrugated cardboard can be folded or rolled easily parallel to the corrugations. Duh. When you try to fold it against the corrugations, however, that doesn't work for sour owl shit and is why corrugated cardboard was invented in the first place. It folds funny, goes all weird and is totally unmanageable. So: you need to roll it. You can do it by hand on a large sculpture if you don't plan on needing to use your fingers for the next week or you can use a simple tool: a wooden dowel or a piece of pipe which will give you a smooth and even breaking perpendicular to the corrugations.

That's two dimensions. You can roll diagonally in infinite dimensions! Here's the beauty: the corrugated cardboard remembers each of those dimensions and becomes totally plastic. Now, by cutting slits, v-shapes and vesical slits (curved v-shapes) you can form smooth spherical, oblate or rounded shapes and then seal the seams with tape. What kind of tape? Hey, duct tape always works but packing tape is okay in a pinch and gives a flatter profile. As for the tape seams, Gesso or thick paint does the trick and the finished sculpture easily passes the "ten-foot rule." Then you paint it and nobody, even on close examination, will recognize that it once contained a Maytag.

This could be a university art or theatre course. It'll definitely be a book chapter with illustrations.

posted by C. J. # 8:09 PM