CAMELOT Theatrical Special Effects

I remember when, as a grade-schooler, I went to my first Science Fair. It was held in a big high-school gymnasium and several classrooms and consisted of hundreds of geeks and nerds with their exhibits. There were Van de Graaf generators, Tesla coils, tornadoes in a bottle, lots of pickled animals, a demonstration of how "washboard roads" happen and all kinds of original machines and their creators who talked about them in intricate detail and excited tones. Some of those kids were insane. They all went on to become scientists and engineers. A few even went into theatre. I dreamed of growing up, being an engineer and travelling around the world to industry exhibitions and trade shows where I could see the really neat stuff that big, wealthy companies were inventing, fresh from the laboratories.

So I did it. Grew up, I mean. That was pretty easy, actually. Becoming an engineer was easy too; I just kept doing geek stuff and next thing I knew, they stuck "engineer" on my job title. Then I got to go to the trade shows and exhibitions all over the world. They were okay but something was missing and it took a while to figure out. All of the booths were totally professional and they were staffed by marketeers and scantily-dressed models but, well, the engineers and inventors weren't there or any of the kinds of models I would really have liked to have gotten my hands on. (The scantily-dressed ones were not actually available for fooling around with.) The products on display were shiny, assembly-line ready-to-buy things, not engineering prototypes. No fun. And nobody talked about them in intricate detail and excited tones.

Now, marketeers do have a role in the creative process: they start it. They collect the customers' wishes and write the specs. Then it all goes to engineering. "Can we build this and make money?" they ask. The industrial lab isn't like the science fair; stuff is designed to be mass-produced at a profit. The science fair stuff is all one-of-a-kind (even the Van de Graaf machines; hell, I built several of those and each one was different.)

So we come to the United States Institute for Theatre Technology (USITT) and their biannual (every two years) Tech Expo held every odd-numbered year. This has been going on since its beginning in Minneapolis in 1987; Tech Expo 2005 was held last month in Toronto. It's worth the $95 to join USITT just to get their quarterly magazine: Theatre Design and Technology. The Spring 2005 issue, which just arrived, had articles on six of the projects featured at the Tech Expo in Toronto and they were all reminiscent of the excitement of the high-school science fair: unique and often mechanically complex solutions to problems that engineers in industry seldom ever get to work on. One was a pair of CO2 gas-powered, fully articulated angel wings for a show at San Diego State University two years ago. Another was a zombie effect for a dead body to rise out of solid ground. A 40-foot bridge span that could hold 18 dancers while rising eight feet into the air. Fun stuff! Geeky, one-of-a-kind special effects to dazzle an audience and perhaps never be seen again.

The next Tech Expo takes place in March, 2007 and entries are due in the fall of 2006. I've made myself a promise to get an exhibit in this one and I'm excited. It's a feeling that I haven't known since the high school science fair. See you there!

posted by C. J. # 9:46 PM