CAMELOT Theatrical Special Effects

Hollywood BustBlockers 2009 - The Fun Begins!

2009-02-24T15:19:00.003-06:00

Thank goodness the Academy Awards have been academically awarded and Hollywood can now release the reservoir of blockbusters they've been holding back. Zip down to your local movie house and grab some popcorn because here they come!

1. Jonas Brothers 3D Concert Experience. If you thought these teenaged heartthrobs were spectacular on Hannah Montana, wait until you see them through red and blue plastic glasses. You'll blow Mr. Pibb out of your nose when Kevin, Joe and Nick lay down their hot evangelical gut-wrenchers. Even God barfs his Raisinettes when these guys hit the screen.

2. Crossing Over. Can't get enough of Sean Penn? Loved Indiana Jones? Here's Sean and Harrison in what Variety calls "An overweeningly deterministic mosaic of U.S. immigration case studies." Does that tighten your sphincter? Wait until you see these typically sensitive INS officers choking down tamales and getting all weepy as they try to understand why so many Mexicans leave hellholes like Acapulco and move to the paradise of urban L.A. Ay carumba!

3. An American Affair. It's 1963. Thirteen-year-old Adam Stafford spies a beautiful naked woman in the house across the street and his curiosity is inflamed. If that isn't strange, she and Adam soon find themselves enmeshed in the growing confusion and intrigue leading to the assassination of President Kennedy. Wow, teenaged angst AND conspiraracy theory all lumped together in one movie! Be sure to miss it.

4. Echelon Conspiracy. Shane West comes upon a magic cellphone that makes his wildest dreams come true but who could ever guess that this Blackberry has a black heart? The minutes will roll over too slowly as you lose your bars. Bet you can't hear me now!

5. Garrison Keillor: The Man on the Radio in the Red Shoes. First of all, how did the radio get those shoes? If your radio doesn't get A Prairie Home Companion and you missed the last movie, you can follow Garry the K on the road for a year in this gripping documentary. Your woe will be gone and you'll blow your biscuits as you watch people in front of microphones pretend they're not making another movie. Lindsay Lohan was unavailable for comment.

6. Lesbian Vampire Killers.Just when you thought it was safe for two teenaged slackers to take a walk on the moors, Jimmy and Fletch find themselves stuck in a remote cottage with a camper-van full of sexy foreign student girls, besieged by a hungry army of lascivious lesbian vampires. Man, they had me at "moors." Derring-don't.

7. Wolverine. Hugh Jackman reprises the role that made him a superstar – as the fierce fighting machine who possesses amazing healing powers, retractable claws and a primal fury. But when he suddenly dons a tophat and cane and breaks into a Broadway song-and-dance routine, the villains run for cover. This guy is scary!

8. Terminator Salvation. Finally, Ah-nold has become bored with Sacramento and... wait a minute... it's Christian Bale as John Connor! But... isn't he Batman? It doesn't matter. Watch him scare the crap out of the poor stagehand walking across the set right in the middle of the most poignant piece of script-reading ever filmed. Better get some extra napkins with that Big Bucket.

9. Inglourious Basterds. Lieutenant Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt) organizes a group of Jewish soldiers to engage in targeted acts of retribution.(Didn't Daniel Craig just do this? Or was it Tom Cruise?) Known to their enemy as "The Basterds," Raine's squad joins German actress and undercover agent Bridget Von Hammersmark (Diane Kruger) on a mission to take down the leaders of The Third Reich. Lily Von Schtup must show up somewhere. No wonder those poor Nazis never got their act off the ground. Mmmmm... Brad Pitt.

10. Anything with Adam Sandler, Ben Stiller, Will Ferrell, Owen Wilson or Jack Black. Come on, you know that ten-dollar bill is burning a hole in your pocket and you love it when your shoes stick to the floor! Get going!

Hollywood Bustblockers 2008

2008-12-27T12:51:00.009-06:00

Okay, I'm back from the movies, full of popcorn and disgust. What's wrong with these people?

First of all, The Day the Earth Stood Still. The Earth must have because nobody went to this piece of poo. I've seen some empty theaters in my life but usually because I was on stage. Why any producer would be desperate enough to remake this classic and then screw it up so badly is beyond me. Here's a hint about science-fiction: First you need some fiction and then, what's that other thing? Oh, right... science! This steaming lump had neither unless you can believe that an alien race had been watching the planet Earth for thousands of years and then landed as if they were the Griswolds showing up at Wally World without a clue of where they were or what was going on.

They had a plan, of course. Their plan was to gather up all the animals whose names began with the letter "S" and then blow the shit out of everything else. Some plan. So they rounded up some snakes, squids, scorpions and skeeters, then turned some nanogoo loose to destroy stadiums and semitrailers (maybe because they started with "S" but didn't look breedable.)

Oh, another suggestion: The ending. Have one. In this stinker, everybody just goes back to Zeta Reticuli or wherever they came from. They didn't say. They didn't even say goodbye. I walked out of the theater wondering what the hell any of what I had just seen meant. I later found out that it meant the producers lost their pants at the box-office. Justice was served.

Another ruined franchise was James Bond. Quantum of Solace lacked everything one goes to a James Bond movie to see. It certainly lacked John Cleese as Q because he was over at The Day the Earth Stood Still as a very confused-looking Professor Barnhart. Without gadgets and naked babes, James Bond has nothing to do but hurt himself which Daniel Craig actually did during the filming. Good. I'm sure his pain was no match for mine when my eyeballs started to bleed halfway through the movie.

So I decided to forearm myself before venturing out again to the popcorn repository. I actually read The Tale of Desperaux by Kate DeCamillo before even considering going to see how Disney would butcher it. You remember Disney? That's the studio that takes classics with actual plotlines and morals and turns them into animated family fare featuring "The Disney Girl." She's always the same girl: Belle, Pocahontas, Mulan, Jasmine, Ariel or whatever name they come up with. Same eyes, same expressions, same animator (around Disney he's probably called Glen Keane or maybe just "the girl guy." Keane... Keane... oh, yeah! His father is Bil Keane who does that sappy Family Circus strip about, well, little Glen.) Disney took Hans Christian Andersen's The Little Mermaid and gave it the Disney "They all lived happily ever after" ending even though Andersen's little mermaid goes nuts, attempts to murder the handsome prince after he dumps her for a babe with actual feet, then commits suicide. I can't imagine what they'll do with The Tale of Desperaux, a story about a little girl who is abused and beaten until her head is deformed then traded into slavery by her father for a handful of cigarettes and conned into a murder plot by a mental-case rat. That should make a wonderful movie once all those details are shitcanned and they all live happily ever after. I can't wait... to miss it. But if you see someone run into the theater lobby, buy a large bucket of popcorn with real butter, than duck back out the door without buying a ticket... that's me heading over to Blockbusters to rent a flick.

Photo courtesy http://www.designsbydarren.com

The Day The Earth Stood Still - Waiting for Keanu

2008-12-04T14:14:00.004-06:00

The question in my mind, upon hearing that Scott Derrickson was directing a remake of the 1951 movie from a new screenplay by David Scarpa, was not "Why mess with a classic?" but rather "Why call it by that title?" Beyond the obvious serendipity of having an actor with a five-letter name starting with "K" and ending with "u" playing a character with a six-letter name starting with "K" and ending with "u", there are rumors that the Scarpa screenplay hews more closely to the 1940 short story Farewell to the Master by Harry Bates than the Edmund North script of 1951. Why didn't they call it that unless they were afraid that "Master - Bates" would show up in print somewhere? Oops. Too late now.

I read the story many years after I had seen the movie many times. The original remains my favorite science-fiction movie of all time while the short story leaves me disappointed. Still, I'm skeptical of the remake for many reasons, reminding me of my concerns about "War of the Worlds" a couple years ago.

1. Michael Rennie was a cool, sophisticated Klaatu. Keanu Reeves is an action hero. I don't see this as an action movie but then, I'm thinking of the romantic 1951 version. Derrickson seems to have a different vision and a different plot with a different ending so I'll give him the benefit of my patience until I get my popcorn in hand.

2. I hate CGI. I'm a computer graphics engineer but I'm also a nuts-and-bolts-and-motors live theatre special effects designer. I would much rather see an eight-foot-tall Gort built by the Asimo Team at Honda than another goddamned cartoon robot. If Derrickson has to blow things up, I prefer dynamite to fractals. But that's just me.

3. The 1951 script by Edmund North was intellectual as well as suspenseful. In his story, scientists were smart, reasonable and the true powerbrokers of the world. The minute the tanks, jet fighters and field artillery show up the audiences start drooling IQ points into their Mister Pibbs and I start wanting my money back.

4. I don't want to hear anybody say "Klaatu barada nikto." Patricia Neal said that. So did Ringo Starr. That's enough.

I'll be back after the movie to let you know whether I still like movies or not.

The Uncanny Valley Revisited

2008-04-01T16:35:00.003-05:00

This is not an April Fool's Day joke, despite the date, nor is it a goatse or cheap sound gag (you can leave your speakers on, trust me.) Nonetheless, it scared the crap out of me at first. Let me explain why.

You may recall, a couple of years ago, I blogged about Masahiro Mori, the Japanese roboticist who published "Bukimi No Tani" (English title: The Uncanny Valley) in Energy. The article forwarded the hypothesis that as robots become more humanlike they appear more familiar until a point is reached at which subtle imperfections of appearance make them look downright creepy. The observation lead Mori to the belief that robot builders should not attempt to make their creations overly lifelike in appearance and motion.

The people who created this, possibly either Japanese or Brazilian, did a marvelous job. The girl will track your cursor as you move it around until she loses interest in a few seconds and returns to simply being curious, amused and, well, almost alive for godssake! That, for me, is when she simply becomes too lifelike and falls into the Uncanny Valley. Take a look. You've been warned.

http://www.motionportrait.com/about/TIminoriHair.swf

No Country for Old Men - Carson Wells

2008-03-04T19:43:00.002-06:00

I'm still cheesed off about the Coen Brothers "No Country for Old Men" and Cormac McCarthy's story. The character that sticks in my craw is Carson Wells, played by poor Woody Harrelson. I like Woody as an actor. You see him on screen, you figure you're going to laugh. Except in Larry Flynt. He was dramatic in that. So what was Carson Wells all about?

The Carson Wells character in McCarthy's novel is a retired lieutenant colonel from the Special Forces or some supposedly highly-trained military organization where they, you know, learn stuff like how to kill a man with a blade of grass or how to seriously wound a guy with a marshmallow or a shitload of martial arts stuff that would make them into walking weapons of mass destruction. You would expect them to be packing a load of James Bond gadgets that would make them, well, scary. So what was the Woody Harrelson character all about?

He shows up, all macho, and deals out a bunch of spooky warnings about how unstoppable Anton Chigurh is and how he's the only guy on the planet who really understands him and can deal with him. So we figure he's our guy, right? He must be well-heeled and packing some serious shit and is somebody you don't want to mess with. He ends up begging for his life in a hotel room, where he never should have gone in the first place, and Chigurh just blows him away. What happened to the ninja spin on the stairway? How about the .44 magnum belt buckle? Not even a Smith & Wesson Escort in the wallet? This guy's got nothing? All hat and no cattle? How sad. Ruined the story for me.

No Country for Old Me - a Late Review

2008-03-02T21:30:00.004-06:00

Okay, I read Cormac McCarthy's "No Country for Old Men." Then I watched Conan O'Brien's sendup of the coin-toss scene (which I can't link you to because the network demanded it be removed from YouTube. It was hilarious; be faster on the trigger, friendo.) Finally, I went to see the movie and, despite warnings from the New York Times's Dennis Lim, I bought the big bucket of popcorn but was careful not to chew during the quiet scenes. Which were all of them as there was no score. If you like the sounds of wind blowing, coffee perking, gunshots and car crashes and are also blind then this is the movie for you.

(SPOILERS AHEAD SO DON'T BOTHER READING ON IF YOU WANT TO BE SURPRISED. ON THE OTHER HAND, THERE ARE NO SURPRISES SO DON'T BOTHER SEEING THE MOVIE. READ THE GODDAMNED BOOK EXCEPT FOR THE LAST 60 PAGES.)

Cormac McCarthy has created this character, Anton Chigurh, who is sort of what The Terminator would be if The Terminator was human instead of a robot. While Schwartzenegger rebuilds his eyeball in the motel room, McCarthy's Chigurh rebuilds his entire body using veterinary supplies and drugs he steals from a drugstore whose name is an inside joke; it's the name of a drugstore where the Coen brothers used to hang out when they were kids. Haha. Anyway, Chigurh is the McGyver of bad guys. He's hip to weaponry, physiology, pharmacology, electronics, psychology, mechanics and all kinds of arcane shit... in the book. Problem is, that book was supposedly 600 pages when it hit the publisher's office and was pruned to 309 pages. That was then pruned to about 180 pages by the Coens, leaving everyone who had read the book to wonder what the hell was going on. Who is this guy? Where did he come from? What does he do? How does he know all this stuff? The Coens stripped everything cool from the Chigurh character leaving him as just a badass with a bad hairdo. As Javier Bardem said: "Great. Now I won't get laid for six months." I was bummed as I listened to people in the theater whispering "How did he know that?!!!" Thanks for nothing, Joel and Ethan. At least in Fargo we knew exactly what was going on. In this movie we haven't a clue. Maybe that's the point. Chigurh is superhuman and just keeps coming. There's nothing new about that; it's been done hundreds of times in the movies. It wasn't until Batman Begins that the question "Where did Bruce Wayne get all that cool shit?" was answered. In No Country For Old Men, nothing gets answered.

In the movie, we see Chigurh limping off down the block. In the book he actually reappears and cuts a deal with a wealthy criminal mastermind. Aha! you say. Sequel coming! Well, maybe but doubtful. After the movie you say: "Aha! I don't care what the PreFlix slide said about picking up your trash. The Coens left me high and dry and I'm leaving my Mr. Pibb and popcorn bag on the floor." We must suffer for our art.

Smoking Ban Workaround? Yeah, this should end well.

2008-02-25T15:47:00.002-06:00

http://www.startribune.com/local/15859722.html

Followup. As I expected:

http://www.startribune.com/local/16261261.html

Sound and its Absence - No Country for Old Men

2008-02-23T11:58:00.001-06:00

“The essence of sound design is you can’t record the sound,” Mr. Lievsay said. “You have to take a lot of sounds and put them together. You can’t just go somewhere with a shotgun and a silencer. It wouldn’t be the sound that Joel and Ethan wanted anyway.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/06/movies/awardsseason/06lim.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

CJ Gets Some Ink

2008-02-19T13:19:00.003-06:00

I suppose you can call any press coverage "disappearing ink" since it vanishes pretty quickly. Here's my latest fifteen minutes of fame:

http://www.brainerddispatch.com/stories/021508/new_20080215021.shtml

Thanks, John! We now return you to our regularly scheduled obscurity.

Stagefright is not born - it's taught!

2008-02-05T00:50:00.000-06:00

A four-year old boy shows you how to go on stage and get-er-done!

http://www.biertijd.com/mediaplayer/?itemid=2763

Pirates of the Caribbean sure fooled me!

2008-01-27T10:28:00.000-06:00

While watching Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest and Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End, I honestly thought I was seeing Bill Nighy, the actor, in a marvelous animatronic prosthetic mask. After all, after reading the coffee-table book No Strings Attached: The Inside Story of Jim Henson's Creature Shop I have had no doubts about what can be accomplished with computerized controllers and motorized armatures in rubber. I thought for sure that's what I was seeing but... damn you, George Lucas! Industrial Light and Magic got me again. Alas, Nighy was never on camera.

The character of Davy Jones was totally Jar-Jar Binks and Gollum; it was 100% computer-generated graphics based on Nighy as a motion model (above left photo), rendered as a computer-generated figure (above center) and finally ray-traced, shaded and colorized into an animated cartoon character (above right) that fooled me completely.

Before I congratulate ILM on a job well done (I'll let the Academy do that; POTC:AWE has been nominated for Makeup and Visual Effects) I must reiterate how much I hate CGI. My reasons remain the same: I guess I was born 100 years too late and am therefore really a steampunk at heart. When given the options of building a clock or of drawing an animated picture of a clock, I appreciate the artist but I appreciate the watchmaker more. I guess the underlying thought is that a machine is something real. You can touch it. It can actually do real work which is why I loved Robbie the Robot in Forbidden Planet and hated the robots in I, Robot. Robbie could actually clean up. The only people cleaning up today are the geeks at ILM, Digital Domain and Weta Digital.

As for the movie itself, I rather hope that's the last of the series. You'll notice that POTC:AWE is not up for any other Academy Awards unless they have a new category called "Most Plots At One Time And All Of Them Confusing" that I haven't heard about yet.

How to Investigate a UFO Sighting

2008-01-18T13:10:00.000-06:00

As a special effects designer I've always been fascinated by UFOs. Last week's UFO sighting in Texas brought all of the ufology experts out in minivans from all over the country to finally get to the bottom of these scientific phenomena that have amazed, terrified and baffled mankind since, well, since mankind started putting things up into the air that have amazed, terrified and baffled everyone except the guy who put the thing up there. These are obviously visitors from other worlds and we (mankind) need your help to unravel the mystery.

I have carefully researched the methodology of UFO investigation one afternoon so allow me to give you a few pointers to hone your investigatory skills.

1. Photos are important proof. Nothing dispels disbelief better than a photograph because, as you may have heard, the camera never lies. Always carry a camera with you in your car or in your pocket so that you will be ready because you never know when or where a UFO will appear. For safety's sake, don't carry an expensive camera like a Nikon or something around in your car because that's just an invitation to junkies and car thieves to break your window and steal it while you're at the mall. You can buy a disposable box camera (in an actual cardboard box) at any convenience store for under three dollars. This optical wonder with its wavy plastic lens and electronic flash (very important when photographing things very far away) will provide the solid scientific evidence that we need. When you see a UFO or anything "funny" in the sky, start snapping. Don't forget to use the flash because these UFOs move really fast.

If you're lucky enough to have a movie camera with you, make sure you hand-hold it so that you can change position and track the fast-moving UFO. Never mind that your hands will be shaking: that's added proof that you were witnessing something pretty scary. Oh, and make sure the sound is on so that we can hear the important witness commentary: "What is it?" "It's Close Encounters From The Third Kind!" "Wow!" "Yeah!" "Damn, look at that!" "Yeah!" These comments will allow investigators to determine the psychological effect of the sighting and the alcohol level of the witnesses' bloodstreams.

2. Remember to utilize the principles of forensic photography. You know how those CSI guys always lay a ruler or something next to the dead body or the knife before they shoot the picture? Well, since UFOs are usually in the sky, use something in the foreground like a sign, a building, your girlfriend or a tree to give an accurate sense of scale for the investigators to determine the size of the thing. A tree is perfect, for that matter, regardless of whether the UFO is right there in the tree or ten miles away and it also proves that the photograph wasn't faked since, if no one believes you, you can take them back to the site and show them the tree.

3. Witness interrogation. If you need to travel to reach the site of the incident, make sure that you get there within the same month or the next to insure that witness memories are fresh. Don't waste time interviewing police officers, pilots, doctors or other professionals with known biases against such phenomena. Always choose people whose observations and judgement are unclouded by too much education or bad experiences with past instances. Find local residents with names like "Jim-Bob" or nicknames like "Goober" or "Beebo" as these will be your most reliable information sources.

Ask leading questions to avoid the witness's tendency to wander or embellish. For example:
Q: "How big would you say it was? The size of a football field or was it bigger?"
A: "About a mile long."
Q: "Did it have flashing lights or were they colored lights?"
A: "You bet!"
Q: "How fast was it moving? Faster than a bird or a plane?"
A: "About a thousand miles an hour."

Notice how the answers have a degree of accuracy to them that UFO professionals call "real accurate." These measurements provide a rich database regarding the characteristics of these menaces from another planet.

4. Landing sites. Omigod! The thing actually touched the ground! Now you want to carefully examine the area of the landing. This requires sensitive scientific equipment that only a professional UFO investigator will have in the trunk of his car, including: a geiger counter to see how radioactive everything is, an ultraviolet light to see if stuff glows at night and maybe some plaster to take copies of strange footprints or animal-looking tracks that the ominous aliens may have left behind. There might also be interstellar or extraterrestrial machinery or equipment left behind when they were scared away, often covered with indecipherable markings that usually can be translated in a top-secret laboratory somewhere where they translate things.

5. Abductions. Ask if anyone is missing from the area or has suddenly returned without remembering where they have been. Careful hypnosis by a professional hypnotizer will usually bring back clear and accurate memories of the horrible faces, excruciating probing or medical procedures and complex mathematical formulas and space secrets that may have been given to that person before their release. Have them write or draw these clearly using the pen or pencil that you carry in your investigator kit. Paper is good too.

I hope that these tips help you to help mankind in our search for truth and science and maybe save our planet from destruction. Happy hunting!

Oklahoma's "Little Wonder"

2007-11-06T15:00:00.000-06:00

I was just reading a blog regarding another production of "Oklahoma" in which the author stated that "The Little Wonder" gag was cut from the show because they couldn't find a suitable prop!

For those who don't know the show (is there anyone?) the "Little Wonder" is really the only suspenseful gag in the entire show. It's a kaleidoscope-like tube with pictures of naked women inside that Will innocently buys in Kansas City and passes around for all the boys, and Aunt Eller, to peep into and be amazed. We learn later from the villain, Judd Fry, that it's actually a deadly weapon containing a switchblade knife and then, when he buys it from Will, he comes close to murdering Curly with it. That's too cool of a gag to eliminate since it's pretty much the only exciting part of the entire show.

The part that probably throws most propmasters is the "switchblade" mechanism. What a special effects designer sees, though, is that having a retractable blade is a mere matter of centrifugal force and gravity. Here's the way I built it. In use, the actor simply holds it slotted-end up until "the moment" then merely swings it horizontally with a wrist snap. Wham - knife pops out. Tap it on the palm of the other hand and wham - the blade retracts. I made two of them, one with a knife inside and one without so the cowboys can hold that one up to their eyes without going blind in the process. The rest of the show will make you blind.

Back Home - Big Dog

2007-10-04T22:15:00.000-05:00

Well, I was sad about not getting to play Amos Hart in "Chicago" because of my age but I went home and had a few beverages and then I looked around. The director of "Oklahoma" twenty miles north was desperate for a Technical Director. Now, that's a paid position, as opposed to being an actor in community theater which is an unpaid position. Technical Directing is what I excel at; I was just feeling in an "acting" mood at the time. So I called up the director who was delighted to hear from me and immediately gave me the job.

So: my wife is now the Vocal Director of "Chicago" and is also playing Mama Morton at Central Lakes College Theater. I am the Technical Director of "Oklahoma" at Pequot Lakes Theater, 20 miles north. We both get the "big money" and we don't see one another for two months. That's a typical theatrical marriage.

Too Old for Theater

2007-09-04T23:57:00.000-05:00

Just got back from auditions for "Chicago" which is one of my favorite shows. My wife, who is ten years younger than I and was already hired as Vocal Director (a paid job) also auditioned for the role of Mama Morton. Now, Lauren has played "mama" roles for a long time. She's been "Mama Rose" in "Gypsy," Mother Superior in "Nunsense," the mother in "Fiddler on the Roof," the mother in "Take Me Along," Queen Agravain in "Once Upon a Mattress" and numerous other mother roles even though she's in her early 50's now. I was so proud of her at auditions tonight when she stood up among 40 other women and belted that song. I looked around the theater and all of the other women who had Mama Morton in their minds just said "Oh, shit!" She owned that role and took it.

Now, I can sing and act but I'm 64 years old. I wanted the role of Amos Hart but understood that Roxie Hart is the sexy young star of the show. In the movie she was played by Renee Zellweger and even in the non-musical version of "Chicago" called "Roxie Hart" (1942) she was played by a still-sexy Ginger Rogers, 32 years old and Amos was 42. So when I walked into auditions tonight and saw that all of the Roxies were in their early 20's, well, hell... what was I thinking? The only way I could play a husband of 64 to a lady in her early 20's was as some kind of "sugar daddy to trophy wife" or Hugh Hefner sort of time-warp. So I didn't get the part. I knew I wouldn't.

Parts for 64-year-olds are few. Don't even say "On Golden Pond" to me because that's been done to death everywhere simply to provide "fogey roles." Other shows for "baby boomers?" Haha... there aren't any even though we comprise the lion's share of the season-ticket-buying audience. What's the problem with playwrights? Don't they understand demographics? Or is it just that, like me, we'd rather see young ladies in scanty costumes and dream about the "good old days" than actually play the grandmas and grandpas that we've become? Screw this old age shit... I need a script where an irrascible old coot becomes a young man again and not by swapping actors but through makeup and hair. You can't do that in community theater... that's big-budget stuff and serious special effects.

Wicked in Chicago

2007-08-06T22:13:00.000-05:00

Our Chicago trip was a sycophantic dream. We stayed at the Club Quarters hotel at 111 Adams Street in the exact center of downtown Chitown and I cannot recommend it highly enough to anyone with business, monkey or otherwise, in the Loop. I give it five stars: location, location, location, luxury and price. With surrounding hostelries commanding 220 to 350 scooties a day in the Loop, here sits this little jewel at only 169 bones per evening. The lounge and clubroom are elegant, staff is fawning, rooms are immaculate and fully-equipped yet cozy and the attached English pub, the Elephant and Castle, is wonderful and has Strongbow Cider on tap as well as everything Brit (and I've been to a lot of pubs in Blighty.) But location: the CQ is a ten-minute walk from everything in the Chicago Loop. We tossed our car key to the valet who, for an additional 36 clams a day, vanished our car for two days. We didn't need it.

On our arrival evening, August 1st, we had dinner reservations at the Great Street Restaurant on the top floor of the Renaissance Hotel with seven members of the cast of "Wicked." They circulated from table to table as we ate a lovely three-course meal and were relaxed and chatty. We learned some terminology that I didn't know before: the difference between a lead, a standby, an understudy and a "swing." (Leads perform major roles in every show. Understudies perform other roles but are ready to "bump up" to a more important role if that actor is missing. Standbys know the major roles and are ready to "fill in." Swings know all of the minor roles of their sex and are ready to replace understudies when they "bump up." So: leads and understudies perform every day. Standbys and swings perform only when needed.) When your show is pulling in around half-a-million dollars per performance, you need to protect that income. I am still holding out for a similar system in community theatre but we're lucky to find leads. God help us if one gets hit by a truck. It must be nice to know that your role is covered four ways and that, if you're feeling mizzy you can call in sick and the show goes on. Natch, we got autographs.

Our seats for "Wicked" were second-row front dead center. Lauren (my wife) kept fighting the impulse to reach out and grab the conductor's ponytail as it bounced and swayed an arm's length away. Glinda's bubbles burst on our noses and Elphaba spit on us, plus I got to see up the skirts of all the girls. I see why they prohibit photographs. (Just kidding... well, actually not.) We loved the show and a lot of the score. Some of the music is Tim Ricey/Disney cartoonish and some of it keeps running in your head, like the song "Popular" which is pretty much the "blonde joke" central theme of the show.

On Thursday we walked to the Harold Washington Library Center (ten minutes away) and were shocked to learn that the three-to-four days work I had expected in scanning three months of newspaper archives and taking notes could be accomplished by the two of us in only four hours by pushing the "print" button and having copies dropped into our laps. When I asked about the cost, I was told "Why, it's all free, of course. Just call if you need more paper." I took the Chicago Public Library home with me and will now leisurely peruse the hundreds of articles we copied here at our lakeside retreat. Wow! What a city!

That left us time to go to the top of the Sears Tower (ten minutes away) and see the sights. Lauren had never been up there before and was impressed.

Thursday night, another fine restaurant (The Italian Village) across from the Chase Tower, then on to the Chase Auditorium to watch the live taping of our favorite NPR radio show, "Wait, Wait... Don't Tell Me." Nice theater, seats 400 to 500 and it was a full house, all liberal Democrats I'm sure so we were right at home. It was fun to see all the stars in person including Carl Kassel, the voice of NPR news for decades who actually flies in to Chicago from his home in Washington D.C. every week just to do this show. The special guest, via phone, was 90-year-old Phyllis Diller and it was a fun experience.

Then back to our hotel (ten minutes away) to find Adams and LaSalle Streets cordoned off by the police for the filming of "Batman, The Dark Knight." Natch they let us through the cordon to get to our hotel and we took seats at the window of the Elephant and Castle hoping to see maybe Christian Bale or some of the actors and film crew at work but no luck, they were working a block down the street. As we sat there, in the door walked the entire cast of "Wait, Wait... Don't Tell Me" who stay at our hotel! Carl Kassel even came over and sat with us so I got to grill him about his career in broadcasting and how he manages his schedule and the paradigm shift from world news to improv comedy every week. Natch, we got autographs from everybody!

So, sycophantic endeavors over and smothered in celebrity, we spent a relaxing Friday lakeside on the Gold Coast and then a leisurely two-day trip home. Now the hard work begins but boy... was that a fun trip!

Do Not Meddle...Tech Director

2006-12-04T22:08:00.000-06:00

On the back of my new black sweatshirt:

"Do not meddle in the affairs of the Technical Director for you are a clothesrack mumbling in the dark."

Hanging Lights the Easy Way

2006-09-21T15:37:00.000-05:00

Occasionally I wander into a school or community theatre during load-in and notice lots of strange goings-on. Lighting techs up on ladders, balanced precariously with a wrench in one hand, trying to focus fresnels on set pieces or else the electrics going up and down so another attempt can be made to get the darn lights focused on their marks. "Darn, too high. Okay, bring it down. Darn, now it's too low."

Not only does this put techs at risk of breaking their necks (which we can ill afford; techs are hard to find and train) but it also wastes hours of time in inefficient trial-and-error attempts.

It's all so unnecessary if a little simple geometry is employed. Here's how you do an entire light hang in one drop of the electric.

...and this is impressive because...?

2006-08-03T18:28:00.000-05:00

1. These guys are better than Tony Hawk? Well, no...
2. But they're great skateboarders? No, they aren't...
3. They found lots of planks and painted them green? No, that's not it...
4. Some doiler with a lot of time on his hands Photoshopped the planks out of several thousand images frame-by-frame? Nah...

Let me see... this is impressive because of the other thing. Oh, right... it's not!!!

Insultingly Stupid Movie Physics

2006-06-21T23:48:00.000-05:00

Now, I'm not saying that movies should be educational nor even that they should represent the world as it really is. That would be silly. When Elliott rides his bicycle through the sky across the face of the moon with E.T. in the basket, that's a great logo for Amblin Entertainment. It's not a documentary. It is assumed that a moviegoer, once he has his bucket of popcorn and a paper cup of something sticky to spill so that I can hear my feet go "click-click" when I come to the theatre next week, will park his brain under the seat with the chewing gum and just watch the screen. Thinking has always been discouraged at the movies. That's their advantage: you are excused from thinking for a couple of hours. To me, that and the popcorn are worth ten bucks.

The problem arises later when people whose primary source of education has been movies (and that's just about everybody, in America at least) is stopped on the street and asked questions about the world and how things work. They respond incorrectly. Some of these people are policymakers and educators. Why does a Schwartzenneger movie carry more weight than a Schwartzenegger technology initiative? Because the first has been observed, the second only imagined.

Should theatre be scientifically correct? Hell, no, but at the very least, the audience should be able to tell the difference between special effects and reality after the show is over. Here's a brilliant website that's not only fun to read but satisfying to fans of NUMB3RS as well.

Hey...Robots!

2006-06-21T22:57:00.000-05:00

Microsoft, yesterday, announced their new Robotics Studio. It includes development tools for controlling all sorts of junk that we use to build robotic stuff in the theatre. I'm not talking about metal guys that walk around and pour drinks. I'm talking about stuff that runs autonomously without the constant need of human control. Most complicated live theatre special effects will need robotic programming as there's just too much to go wrong otherwise. Machines don't miss cues. People miss cues. Read more about it here.

Try this at home...then run like hell!

2006-06-08T11:24:00.000-05:00

What happens when you combine 200 liters of Diet Coke and over 500 Mentos mints? It's amazing and completely insane.

What the hell? Fluorescent guns?

2006-06-07T10:55:00.000-05:00

Leslie Yeransian reports for ABC News:
"In 1999, the New York City Council passed a law requiring that toy guns be painted fluorescent to make them easily identifiable as toys. But now that real guns are colored with the same fluorescent paint, they look like toys."
"As part of a larger piece of gun legislation, [Mayor Michael] Bloomberg wants to ban the selling of gun coloration or paint kits to anyone in New York City's five boroughs."
"Hugh Lauer is the owner of Lauer Custom Weaponry in Chippewa Falls, Wis. and the inventor of Duracoat, a popular gun coloration chemical that has taken heat from Bloomberg. Lauer invented Duracoat more than a decade ago. He said he can't keep up with the abundance of phone and Internet orders for the product.
"Our customers are all avid hunters, law enforcement, not gang bangers," said Lauer. "We're not getting orders from New York City. Our sales records only show two orders placed from there, and same thing with Los Angeles. We're only getting orders from movie makers.""

Cops, hunters and movie makers are painting their guns fluorescent? What the hell is he talking about? To continue: "Lauer said he sells the gun paint mainly to law enforcement and the military, who either want to camouflage their guns or make them more visible in low-light situations. Lauer said he "rounds out" his sales by selling to the general public. "Women shooters like to accessorize. They like their gun to match their earrings," he said."

Hahahahaha! And here I was upset because I had to remove the orange tips from all my stage gun replicas. Now I need to remove fluorescent paint from all my real guns! I'm so confused. Can we just make a deal and leave all guns "gun-color?" Stop painting them! Cops will shoot you if you point anything at them: a stick, a book, a bottle of Coca-Cola. Cops will shoot you if you reach for your billfold or scratch your nuts. If you're holding anything in your hands and if your hands are not in the air when a cop points a gun at you, you will be shot. What part of "Bang! You're dead!" seems to be unclear to Mr. Bloomberg and Mr. Lauer here?

The Razor Cuts Both Ways

2006-05-18T10:36:00.000-05:00

There is a principle of logic and philosophy called "Occam's Razor" named after its first proponent, William of Ockham, a 14th-Century Franciscan friar. It is usually stated: "The simplest explanation is usually the best" or, sometimes: "When you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras."

So we were watching Keith Barry's magic special on CBS, "This is Extraordinary!", last week and came to his finale: a sort of Russian Roulette played with hangman's nooses. Barry pulled six nooses out of a box and passed five out to the audience for examination. The sixth, he demonstrated, was gimmicked: it separated in the middle when he simply pulled it apart. The audience, having no clue what they were looking for, pulled on the other five nooses which didn't come apart. "Aha!" I said to my wife. "The old Occam's Razor gag!" In the case of a stage magician or a theatre special effects designer, however, Occam's Razor is used in reverse: Let the audience buy the simple explanation or even imagine it but the truth is complex beyond their imaginations. I won't tell you how Barry's trick was done, as obvious as it was, but after collecting all the nooses and having them mixed up in the box, then going through some random selection monkey-business that ate up air time and finally, having himself hanged by a randomly-selected noose which, duh, turned out to be gimmicked, the show was over. Notice I said "a noose" and not "the noose"... and therin lies the deception.

You've all seen bad stage magic: the magus brings out some goofy-looking piece of apparatus and starts in with his "This cabinet was discovered in the tomb of Pharoah Hoop-De-Doop in the Valley of the Kings blah blah blah" and you just think "Oh, shut up!" and head for the bar. Keith Barry at least started off with a great premise: "Here's a piece of rope. Examine this piece of rope." Hint hint: It's a piece of rope. You all know how to look at a piece of rope. Even I would never be such a jerk as to ask: "When you say examine, do you mean I can unbraid this rope into its individual fibers?" The answer would be "Of course not!" So we all "examine" the rope. How long does it take to look at a piece of rope? You'll see exactly what we want you to see. That's a great premise.

The audience doesn't have to be led into the Occam's Razor Trap; the human mind instinctively thinks horses when it hears hoofbeats. The really imaginative might think zebras but what even they don't know is that it's a guy with a pan of Silly Slime and two coconut shell halves backstage. Simpler yet: the audience sees A and expects B. Our job is to show them A then B. What they'll never know is that the sequence was A, Q, L, W-X-R simultaneously, then B. Just because it's a piece of rope doesn't mean there isn't a lot of mechanics, some electronics, a little bit of magnetics and some chemistry involved. They wouldn't believe you if you told them.

Rube Goldberg, Heath Robinson and Honda

2006-02-25T15:48:00.000-06:00

There is a long-standing argument between Yanks and Brits as to whether Reuben Lucius Goldberg (Rube Goldberg, 1883-1970) or William Heath Robinson (Heath Robinson, 1872-1944) was the originator of the ridiculous mechanisms that now bear each of their names on opposite sides of The Pond. It's possible that both men, and several other artists as well, independently conceived the concept of "unnecessary complexity" as a reaction to the technological tidal wave of the 1890s when machines took over the world. I just try to remember to say "It's a Rube Goldberg" when I'm in the States and "It's a Heath Robinson" when I'm in England.

These devices are compelling in their operation, not in their purpose which is always ludicrous. There are several annual competitions: the official and the Purdue University among them, which inspire inventors all over to come up with the least efficient ways of accomplishing a mundane task. The rules almost always require a minimum of 20 steps to do something that could normally be done in one; last year's winners at Purdue built a machine that required 125 steps to replace the batteries in a flashlight. The more steps the merrier and if they involve a parrot, a mousetrap, an eggbeater and an umbrella, that's typical.

I use the term "Goldberg-Robinson" to describe two theatrical phenomena. The first involves the plots/premises of the plays themselves which tend toward situation comedy in most cases: someone doing something simple is confounded by complications. If you are a theatre critic, you have an easy job: most plays are built around simple problems as viewed through the mind of, let's say, Cosmo Kramer of "Seinfeld." Take the play I'm in now, Frederick Knott's "Wait Until Dark." What are the most inefficient ways to get a man to give you back a doll or for a blind woman to call the police? No, asking him for it and dialing the police station are not among the options: you need to stretch that situation out to two hours involving three crooks, three murders, smashing all the lightbulbs in an apartment building, ammonia, lots of gasoline, a safe, several knives and a refrigerator. Goldberg and Robinson would be proud.

The second phenomenon usually occurs as a result of something I call "Midnight Engineering" when a gag just isn't working and the curtain goes up tomorrow night. This is when we live-theatre special-effects artists earn our money. In the motion-picture industry, the cameras stop rolling and money gets thrown at the problem until a team of engineers comes up with an answer. (Note: there is no such thing as the answer in special effects.) But in live theatre, the answer usually requires us to stay up late and rummage through the shop, garage and house at two o'clock in the morning looking for anything that might become part of what might make something look like what the director wants the audience to see. That's why "Geraldine," the ivory figurine concealing a stiletto in this show, consists of a plastic-cast doll sawed in half, a spring, a clothespin, a plastic gag knife blade, the hose adapter from a kitchen-faucet sprayer, nuts, bolts and lots of superglue. From the back it looks ridiculous. From the front, it actually caused several audience members to jump out of their seats and audible and soul-satisfying gasps.

The "Goldberg-Robinson" inventions were all about implementation with the result being obvious. The special-effect designer's world is all about result with the implementation, no matter how silly, being our little secret.

Now for the greatest Rube Goldberg-Heath Robinson effect ever created, here is an ad for the Honda Accord. You can believe your eyes: nothing here is CGI although many of the parts are gagged. The entire two-minute spot is shot in real-time and everything you see is done with actual Honda Accord parts (they disassembled two of them) and done in one take. There are no computer graphics or digital tricks in the film. Everything you see really happened in real time exactly as you see it. The spot took 606 takes. On the first 605, something, usually minor, didn't work so they had to set the whole thing up again. The sequence cost six million dollars and took three months to complete including engineering. What I love the most is that it's live theatre!

Oh NO! Radio Shack to close 700 stores!

2006-02-20T15:29:00.000-06:00

Now where the hell am I going to find cheap electronic parts at five-minutes notice? Radio Shack has figured into over half of everything I've built! Read the bad news here.

Cigarettes on stage

2006-02-07T22:23:00.000-06:00

While today's playwrights tend to eschew smoking as a character trait, there still remain thousands of period pieces in which "He lights a cigarette" appears as a stage direction. Directors can skate around this in many instances: when I directed Mister Roberts I had Doc delay his approach to the captain's cabin by unwrapping a stick of gum and offering some to the crew instead of lighting a cigarette. It was an easily reworked bit of business. Some plays, however, such as the one I'm in now, Frederick Knott's Wait Until Dark, were written with cigarettes as integral devices to the plot. The heroine is blind and relies on her other senses, such as smell. A burning cigarette is a key plot point and also serves as a device to introduce matches into the action so that fire becomes a threat in the last act. Of the six characters, three are required to smoke. Natch, those three actors are all non-smokers or reformed smokers! Not only that but the theatre is located in a college building which is marked as "Smoke-Free." What to do?

There are several solutions from the simple to the technically complex. Our director dodged the issue with a few packs of Bravo Cigarettes. Bravo is a nicotine-free cigarette made from lettuce leaves that looks like a cigarette, burns like a cigarette, tastes like sour owl shit and gives absolutely no satisfaction whatsoever. The director was happy that he could post signs in the lobby that there was no danger of second-hand smoke during the performance because, well, the only thing you get from smoking lettuce is a sudden craving for tomatoes, croutons and dressing.

If actual smoke and fire are not critical to the plot, there are many other solutions. There is a "gag" cigarette available at party stores that consists of a cardboard tube filled with talcum powder and a red-foil tip. The actor blows into the cigarette instead of puffs (which looks unnatural) and a puff of powder comes out the end. I do not recommend these; they look as fake as they are and leave a mess on costumes.

A reasonable facsimile can be built using a triple-A (AAA) battery and a small electrolytic capacitor in parallel with a 1/8 watt resistor and coupled to an LED covered with ash, all wrapped in a paper tube with a microswitch at the filter end. This device will actually brighten slowly when the switch is depressed then dim gradually, giving the impression of an actual cigarette. It still looks fake because there is no smoke coming from the actor's mouth but if the actor is in motion it works quite well. If the actor is sitting, thinking (let's imagine Sherlock Holmes's cavendish pipe) then a plastic capillary tube connected to a mini-fogger could be the answer.

Now that lighting up is out, we need creative ways to work this gag.

Symmetry - It's a law!

2006-01-08T11:17:00.000-06:00

I just finished reading Mario Livio's The Equation That Couldn't be Solved, a great book that straddles my two favorite genres: science and biography. The title refers to the problem of the quintic equation, one step beyond the familiar quadratic and a mathematical mind-boggler, along with the lives of two young men who got a handle on it then died at ridiculously early ages.

What's interesting about the quintic (five-based) and anything to do with odd numbers in general is that odd numbers aren't symmetrical and symmetry is an essential requirement in the universe. I've skated around this issue many times in previous posts, particularly my War of the Worlds series in which I pointed out that tripods can't walk.

It's a natural follow-on to my previous post about evolution when one considers the concept of how many legs the octopus will have next (or had before.) We don't know yet but there's one thing of which we can be damned sure: it won't be nine or seven or eleven or any odd number. It's no coincidence that there are no seven-legged animals or that humans have two ears. The laws of the universe just work that way and lead to crazy concepts such as quantum entanglement, teleportation and tachyons. These ideas are nutty but what the hell... they're symmetrical which gives them a better shot at being possible than if they were based on odd numbers.

Evolution versus Intelligent Design

2006-01-04T23:55:00.000-06:00

What has this got to do with Theatrical Special Effects? Nothing and everything.

I'm a scientist. An engineer, actually: one who applies scientific principles and theories to practical applications. That's the definition of an engineer. We do that. Scientists discover the laws that make things happen. Engineers use those laws to make things happen. It's simple.

So what's the problem with "Evolution" versus "Intelligent Design?" I'm flustered.

The Intelligent Design camp (Creationists) say that "A Supreme Being" (it/he/she/God) is responsible for everything that exists. Okay. Most of us scientists and engineers have no problem with that. Let's take the "Big Bang" as a starter: God said "Let there be a universe and here are the rules, laws and principles: physics, chemistry, biology, mathematics... there you go. It's all there." Boom!

I have no problem with that. It works for me. Hey... it works, period. We can see that.

So: if the rules and laws and principles are all there, then what's the beef with evolution? Isn't that one of the principles? Don't the laws of biology cover how organisms originate, develop, change, mutate and prosper or become extinct? Where's the disparity here? I don't see any conflict. You can believe in God and you can trust Darwin. It works just fine. The only time you get into trouble is when you have God putting eight legs on an octopus. God didn't do that. He/she/it didn't need to. The laws of biology and evolution put eight legs on the octopus. If you believe in God, then you need to wait to see how many legs the octopus gets next.

Patience, my Creationist/ID friends, patience. You won't live long enough to see what comes next. It will keep changing. That's "evolution." What's evolution? That's "intelligent design." End of argument.

The end of the Aliun Levitation!

2005-11-17T09:29:00.000-06:00

Whew! You can set your minds at ease and stop your daily Googling: The Aliun Levitation has been... cancelled! Hahahahaha! I'm not kidding. Andster posted this on his "I, Magician" blog.

In addition to being dangerous it would have been expensive. Brad Christian, its creator, said: "We were trying to get the illusion down to $750 - $1000 somewhere."

Remote Control of Battery Powered Devices: Two Cents Worth

2005-10-12T00:00:00.000-05:00

Now and then it becomes necessary to make a battery-operated device work onstage. Examples include cassette tape players or DVD players, lanterns, flashlights, fans, motors or a zillion other things that are battery operated. The device has some batteries in it and an on/off switch. That's it. Most of the on/off switches are weird cam devices, like a flashlight switch, which are not easily soldered to. How do we temporarily make these things work by remote control without destroying them?

I call this the two-cent solution: we use two pennies. Pennies are great because they're copper and zinc which means:
1. They are great conductors of electricity.
2. They can be easily soldered to.

Build a remote switch like this: solder a wire to a penny. Now get another penny and solder another wire to that one. Too easy: you've now got two pennies, each with a wire soldered to it.

Place a thin piece of plastic or any other non-conductor (thick paper or cardboard) between the two pennies. Let's call that the insulator. Make sure the pennies don't touch.

Now: Place the assembly (penny, insulator, penny) between any two batteries in the device. You now have two wires that you can run offstage to a switch. Turn the device on. It won't work. Now turn the offstage switch on. It will work! Too cool: a two-cent remote control. Your director will think you're a genius.

Okay, here's the Aliun Levitation video. Happy?

2005-10-01T11:14:00.000-05:00

The Aliun Levitation demo video from the Shapeshifter DVD is located here. I know nothing else.

32 dead in Egypt theater fire

2005-09-06T10:38:00.000-05:00

At last count, 32 people died in this fire from a candle that was knocked over by an actor surrounded by a paper set.

I've written several posts about the use of live flame on stage, always beginning with the word don't. There are enough simulated flames, from candles to campfires and even full-stage conflagrations (see A Wall of Flame: Technifex FauxFire) available that look totally realistic and which are totally safe. Don't even consider using real flames in a theatre, ever.

Another levitation? Oh boy!

2005-08-31T10:08:00.000-05:00

Back again, are you? Still looking for that Aliun Levitation? Well, forget all about it because Hocus-Pocus has just announced another new levitation: The Icarus Effect by Aaron Paterson. It's only $395 and they have a video right on their website. You need to build something at home but no worry: the kit contains space age material! That's right: space age. I don't know what age that was; I always figured the late 1950's were the Space Age but no matter, there's some material in there that makes you float. No, I don't own it and I don't know how it works but when I've got 400 scooties to spend on getting upstairs one step at a time, I'm buying this thing!

No, I don't have the Aliun video...

2005-08-23T09:45:00.000-05:00

...and I'm not going to buy the Shapeshifter DVD just to see a two-year-old premature ad for an effect that isn't needed and will probably never appear. Andster, however, may have discovered the secret! Go check out his blog entry if you're just wetting your pants to learn how to pretend you're flying and ready to spend a shitload of money!

Only a million bucks? WOTW WOW!

2005-08-22T11:20:00.000-05:00

Hollywood production budgets make me want to yack. No, I'm not jealous; I simply don't believe that Steven Spielberg needed 128 million to make War of the Worlds screenworthy... and here's David Latt with a measly million dollars to prove it. His version of WOTW was actually enjoyable, well-acted and had pretty nifty CG effects too. But what was most amazing was that he did it all for a tiny percentage of what Tom Cruise alone took home for the Spielberg blockbuster.

Does anyone need that much money to make a decent movie? No way, unless they're extremely sloppy, have overpaid actors, no imagination and way-too-complicated CG development equipment and staff. But we're talking Steven Spielberg, George Lucas and Paramount Pictures here! They're no dummies at this art, right? Let's take a look.

1. Sets. David Latt did a wonderful job of scouting locations. For example: if you need a ruined building that looks like some Martian war-machines just blew it to shiznit, you can build one for lots of money, do a CG green-screen-scene or do like Latt did: go find a demolition site and get permission to film. It looks great and authentic as hell because that's exactly what it would look like!

Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow had no sets at all! The entire thing was green-screened. Total cost? 70 million. Mere peanuts... hahaha!

2. Matte Shots. When one does need a set that doesn't exist, one uses a matte shot in which an imaginary artwork background is blended with a real foreground which contains the actors. It isn't rocket science and it doesn't require a lot of expensive equipment. From what I saw in the background of Latt's studio, it looked like they had a couple of laptops. I wouldn't doubt it.

3. CG Graphics. Keep them to the minimum necessary to maintain suspense but when they do appear, let the audience get a good look at them in action. The Asylum version doesn't try to fight the "tripods can't walk" problem: the Martian machines are given six legs. Problem solved. Do they look like giant bugs? Yes, but scary 60-foot-tall bugs with heat rays. They show up just enough to keep everyone screaming and in one scene, very unexpectedly. It worked for me.

The heat ray victims die the best deaths of any of the four versions extant including Spielberg's who simply vaporized them (but not their clothes... huh?) In Latt's version, the victims are burned to skeletons which crash to the ground as they are running. Hines used skeletons too but his skeletons flopped around writhing on the ground. Skeletons don't flop and writhe so the Pendragon version just looked silly.

The acting was great. The story rewrite was well-done (except that there is no explanation of why the creatures all died; you're expected to know the story.) Finally, this DVD actually had outtakes and deleted scenes! That means that Latt did some editing. There's a trick that Timothy Hines should have learned.

Pendragon's "War of the Worst"

2005-08-01T12:40:00.000-05:00

I was really excited to see Timothy Hines's entry in the "war of The Wars of the Worlds" as I'm one of those guys who cheers the underdog. I thought it was wonderful to see a producer with a 20-million dollar budget take on Steven Spielberg and his 128-million dollar steamroller and was further enticed by the cover blurb:

Now for the first time ever, the true adaptation of the classic novel hits the screen with devastating effect!

How devastating was soon to be apparent.

Granted, I made only one mistake. No, buying it wasn't a mistake; you have to own a DVD to view it. Nor was watching it a mistake; you have to watch a movie to comment on it. My mistake was inviting my wife and my brother-in-law to watch it with me. I realized this two hours into its three-hour running time as I was gnashing my teeth and rending my garments when my wife's head spontaneously combusted and my brother-in-law gouged out his eyes with a prune-spoon. Devastation was all around us.

To say that we were disappointed would be like saying that the Great Chicago Fire was "annoying." The actors attempted to outdo one another in a scenery-chewing competition, the eventual winner being John Kaufman as "The Curate" who chewed not only scenery but endless quantities of bread, all the while screaming that he was starving while washing it down with bottle after bottle of wine. I can hear Timothy Hines patiently explaining that "he is a clergyman...bread...wine...it's symbolic...get it?" Yes, I got it after the first mouthful. An hour later, when Kaufman was stuffed with more bread than a Butterball Turkey and still craving more, even with the protagonist punching him unmercifully and screaming "You've had enough bread!" I was considering swearing off the stuff for life.

But the special effects? Let's be kind and only tiptoe through that mess. Back in the 1930's and '40's, rear-projection screens were all the rage for moving vehicle scenes and, if you think back, they actually worked when the perspective of the foreground motion was calculated to the correct ratio of the background motion. Hines had none of that: he used green screen shots in which the actors were matted in against the moving background, leaving wide black outlines around their faces and making the entire shot look oh-so-phony. As for motion ratio, sometimes the background was moving as fast as the carriage and sometimes not at all! Hines just didn't care.

The Martian Tripods? Oh, they were tripods all right. I waited to see how correct the "walking" appeared but Hines foxed us there as well. Motion pictures today are shot at 24 frames per second to account for the advent of sound, but visual retention is such that the old 18 fps silent movies still looked pretty good. When adding CG graphics to a 24 fps movie, you want to render 24 frames per second...unless you're on a tight budget like Hines. Then you start cheaping out by cutting down on the fps count. Hines mixed 18 fps, 12 fps and a bunch of scenes that I swear were 4 fps together so that the Martian Tripods literally galloped across the screen in two strides. Forget leg motion; you barely had time to realize they were there at all! Even the classic "probe scene" that George Pal and Steven Spielberg did so well was a herky-jerky mess that reeked of amateurism and bogusness.

This will be a wonderful addition to my collection of "drunken Halloween party" movies, right up there with Leslie Nielsen in "The Creature Wasn't Nice." It's long enough to allow for the consumption of inordinate amounts of alcohol, bad enough to bring wisecracks, ad-libs and jeers from the audience and inspiring in its "Boy, I wish that I had been in the editing room" potential for improvement. I'd have started by cutting an hour-and-a-half from the running time. Unfortunately, I wasn't there.

The "Uncanny Valley" - Part II

2005-07-28T11:37:00.000-05:00

Japanese scientists have unveiled the most human-looking robot yet devised - a "female" android called Repliee Q1.

This is the same robot that was premiered at the World Expo several months ago and it falls well on the uphill side of "The Uncanny Valley" of creepiness that I discussed earlier: it's really, really cute.

"I have developed many robots before," Repliee Q1's designer, Professor Ishiguro, told the BBC News website, "but I soon realised the importance of its appearance. A human-like appearance gives a robot a strong feeling of presence."

Professor Ishiguro believes that it may prove possible to build an android that could pass for a human, if only for a brief period.

"An android could get away with it for a short time, 5-10 seconds. However, if we carefully select the situation, we could extend that, to perhaps 10 minutes," he said.

"More importantly, we have found that people forget she is an android while interacting with her. Consciously, it is easy to see that she is an android, but unconsciously, we react to the android as if she were a woman."

Actually, it depends on whom the robot is modeled after. Some people (friends of yours, I'm sure) are very mechanical in their motions and speech and would be indistinguishable from a machine no matter how long you hung around with them. I'd be careful from here on in; such a machine could easily be elected and end up running something. Why, come to think of it: how can we be sure that hasn't already happened? Pass the WD-40 please.

Angel Wings

2005-07-26T22:33:00.000-05:00

The show was "The Best of How To Talk Minnesotan, The Musical" and it required a number of special effects. Besides the radio-controlled ringing phone (if this isn't a standard in your SpecFX inventory, you're just not doing theatre) there was a "snow angel" who needed not only the LightningWire halo I described earlier but a pair of flapping wings.

I referred earlier to the wings built by the University of San Diego which were on display at the USITT Conference in Toronto and published in the USITT Magazine: Theatre Design & Technology. Those folks had a budget. Our community theatre had very little so here's what I did:

The driver is a windshield wiper motor from the junkyard. I added a longer arm, a steel brace from the hardware store, then covered that with a blind box cover from the electrical department to give a curved surface, shielding the crank arm and preventing cable tangling. I used metal tubing, cut to size, as bearings, and light-gauge aircraft cable looped through eyebolt bearings to the T-Bars on each wing (biscuit-jointed birch) attached by strap hinges at the top and screen-door spring hinges at the bottom. The assembly was mounted on a plywood board with 8 D-cells (two four-cell Radio Shack battery holders) mounted with plumber's strap to the plywood and with shoulder straps cut from a backpack attached to the front of the plywood with fender washers. The switch was mounted on a wire that reached over the actor's shoulder so that he could activate the flap mechanism once he had passed through the entry door to the stage.

It worked perfectly and looked great! The angel appeared on stage and flapped his wings but got the greatest laugh when he turned around for his exit and the audience saw the machine which I had left exposed on purpose. The character playing the angel was, after all, an auto mechanic and it was exactly what he would have built. I owe a lot to Mark Reaney and his Edge of the Illusion concept; the audience saw not simply an angel flapping his wings but the actual machine that produced the effect and they loved it!

War of the Worlds: Two down, three to go.

2005-07-23T17:14:00.000-05:00

Since my last post about the "war of the Wars of the Worlds" in which I wrote about the three versions of WOTW then in production (Paramount/Spielberg (2005), Pendragon/Hines (2005) and the animated Jeff Wayne's musical version (2007)), I have now seen the Spielberg version and re-watched the George Pal version (1953). Sitting on my coffee table, as of yet unviewed, are the Pendragon/Hines version and yet another one that caught me totally by surprise: The Asylum version directed by David Latt originally titled Invasion but now renamed War of the Worlds. How did I miss that one? Same way you did: almost no publicity, a tiny production budget (a measly million dollars) and the fact that it went directly to DVD. Is it any good? I'll let you know when I've watched it but it has received amazingly positive reviews. So: that's five movie versions of the H. G. Wells classic extant, one from 1953 (let's call that the cheesy flying-things version), three from 2005 (what the hell?) and one yet to come in 2007. Forgive me if I'm a bit overwhelmed and I trust you are too.

So, what did I think of the Spielberg version with Tom Cruise? Y'know what? I sort of liked it. I'm not going to give a review of the acting as there are plenty over at Rotten Tomatoes and because, after all, this is a special effects blog. Let's talk about the special effects.

My original concerns were that, since tripods can't walk and even George Pal cheesed-out by having the fighting machines fly instead, the CG effects would be cartoon-silly. They weren't entirely, although Spielberg's special effects team (Industrial Light and Magic of Lucas fame, duh) did cheese out. But they got the science right. There was obviously a pre-production meeting (or several) regarding the issue and I imagine it went something like this:

Pablo Helman (ILM Visual Effects Supervisor): "Okay, we need walking tripods. Tripods can't walk. Ideas?"
ILM geek: "How about if each of the three legs have three more legs? Then they'd be stable when the thing takes a step."
Pablo: "So we're talking nine legs here?"
ILM geek: "Yeah. It's a nonopod."
Pablo: "Anybody else?"
ILM nerd: "The body is metal but the legs could be organic."
Pablo: "That's silly."
ILM nerd: "Hey, this is CG."
Pablo: "What kind of organic?"
ILM dudette: "Sort of tentacles maybe, but big, like elephant legs?"
Pablo: "An octopus?"
All: "It's a nonopus!"

So that's what they did: the machines were metal with organic elephantentacles that bent in every direction. If such a thing existed, it could walk. Then, because they were ILM, they added that THX sub-woofer audio so that each time a trifoot came down there was a huge thud that caused the popcorn to flip out of our buckets and the people in the cineplex next door watching The Longest Yard to spill their drinks, which was all right with me: people who go to Adam Sandler movies deserve wet pants.

I would have been happier if Spielberg and ILM hadn't been under quite so much time-pressure that they felt it necessary to lift quite as much from the 1953 Pal version. Gene Barry and Ann Robinson, still alive, were both given bit parts as "old fogeys." That was unnecessary. Back to the technical stuff that you came for.

The scariest part of both films (and the 1898 book as well) was "the probe scene" when the creatures operating the stories-tall fighting machines get tired of blowing everything to shit and decide to poke around inside an old farmhouse. It never made sense, even to H. G. Wells, but it makes for wonderful suspense so there it is. Our hero is hiding out in a rathole farmhouse, totally unremarkable for any sort of technological secrets, when a fighting machine decides to send a "probe" into the house to "snoop around." In the novel it's a metallic tentacle that actually brushes against the hero's shoe. In the Pal movie, a camera was added to the tentacle consisting of a red, green and blue lens in a housing attached to an obvious wire and coupled to several dozen feet of automobile "flex exhaust pipe." It was brilliant, though, considering that the RGB concept of color graphics and TV was still on the laboratory bench, making Pal's vision totally accurate and a harbinger of the technology still in use today, 50 years later. And it was scary, did I mention that?

ILM obviously thought so too, but 50 years in the future, they had CG graphics. They needed to rip off the Pal scene but, rather than spend too much time on it, they ripped off Steve Johnson's XFX, Inc., the creators of the water-creature probe in The Abyss. Johnson and XFX mapped water onto a snake and came up with this. ILM mapped metal with some gold ribbon thingy on it onto a snake, or maybe a vacuum-cleaner hose, and came up with this. Same thing only different.

But it was scary. Ripped-off but scary. And then: Pal screwed it up. Because his cheesy flying-things weren't scary, he decided to let the drivers get out and walk around inside the farmhouse. Too bad: they were cute! Why did Spielberg have to copy that? Not only that: why did he have to make his monsters even cuter? He just can't get past that Close Encounters/E.T. cuteness look and in the end, the dying monster looks at the camera with big, Shrek 2 Puss-in-Boots cute-kittycat eyes and then they glaze over. Funny... so did mine.

Forget CGI - The Batmobile was real!

2005-07-14T00:40:00.000-05:00

CNN describes in detail how the special effects process worked in Batman Begins to produce several actual cars.
CNN.com - The real Batmobile - Jun 28, 2005

Tech Expo: the theatre special effects "Science Fair"

2005-06-19T21:46:00.000-05:00

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!

Kids today: Instant fame!

2005-06-11T01:57:00.000-05:00

I posted a comment to Scott Guinn's blog (Great Scott! It's Magic!) the other day that I thought I'd share (dump all over you) here. I don't know anything about Scott's performance but he writes extremely well and his archives are well worth reading. Scott posted about why so many young and inexperienced magicians, with no developed stage presence or following, are putting their "creations" on the market to the financial dismay of buyers and the viewing dismay of audiences. I wrote:

Today's youth are a product of the lessons of Hollywood. In "Legally Blonde," a bim stumbles out of the cheerleading squad into Harvard Law School. There's a lesson in the work/study ethic disguised as "native talent." Then, get this: she hasn't even graduated yet and her first case, FIRST case, is before the United States Supreme Court! And what do you suppose happens? Does she win? Huh? What do you think? "Native talent."

Peter Parker has just figured out how to flip his first wristful of sticky goo. What does he do? Immediately tests it... by jumping off a 20-story building. There's your lesson: "You'll never know if you don't try." "Shoot for the moon." "Don't be afraid of failure." "Get 'er done! Go for it!"

That's what these kids know. Why, the magic boards actively promote this agenda to one another! "Take a chance. Take the bull by the horns. Get out there and do it." Today's youth believe that the Wright Brothers just slapped some rubbish together in their bike shop and it flew first time. Why? Because they had "the courage of their convictions."

That's why you're seeing so much crap out there, poorly-thought-out, poorly executed and poorly received. These are what used to be called "first attempts", "youthful exuberance" and "embarrassing foolhardiness" disguised as "courage" and "native talent." If it doesn't work, they say, so what? I tried.

Houdini would have drowned.

Be afraid of failure. Be very afraid. Be so afraid that you study, research, practice, test, re-examine, restructure, re-test until you have eliminated all but the tiniest possibility of failure. That's how they put men on the moon in the 1960s. That's why today's rocket scientists are in deep shit: they shot first and asked questions later... several lives, billions of dollars and three wasted decades later. Fame doesn't come by shotgunning the market with crap in hopes that one pellet might hit the target. You get there by using a rifle and aiming very, very carefully.

Cardboard: it's not just for props.

2005-06-02T12:40:00.000-05:00

You can construct wonderful modern buildings out of paper tubes. Well, at least these Japanese architects can.

Lightning Wire Angel Halo

2005-06-02T11:47:00.000-05:00

The current show I'm working on has some fun special effects in it, one being a "Snow Angel" that shows up with flapping wings, glowing halo and a pair of jumper cables. (If you don't know what those are you obviously live south of the 40th parallel.)

We're playing this for comedy so an obvious-looking wire loop is funniest. Lightning Wire (EL Wire) is the perfect solution for this gag. Three feet of EL Wire makes a halo about a foot in diameter (11.46 inches) and the whole thing can be lighted with a 9-volt battery or a pair of AA cells driving a small power inverter, all available from Fiber Optic Products Inc. at the above link. The power drain is so small that the batteries will last for weeks of intermittent use.

I wanted the largest diameter of white EL Wire I could find, 5 mm, but the order form on the site didn't offer that color in that size. I e-mailed the company and they fixed the order form. Cool! The entire apparatus was less than $12.00 which makes it perfect for school Christmas pageants as well.

Special questions for superheroes

2005-06-01T12:51:00.000-05:00

With all the superhero movies coming out again (and again and again and again), each one promising something that we really need to know, that could never be told before, that promises the true story behind whoever-the-hell-man (because all of the previous movies were lies?) I have composed a final list of questions that, if they're finally answered this time around, will eliminate any need to ever, ever re-make these same movies everytime Hollywood runs out of ideas and needs to re-milk a dead cow. Yeah, that's gonna happen!

Hey, Batman! Where did you get all those cool toys without anyone becoming suspicious that Bruce Wayne was up to something weird? Did you build them yourself? Did Alfred build them? Where did you guys learn how to do that? Where did you get the materials for bulletproof cars, wires that don't break, flameproof suits, rocket engines and all of those fancy computers? I know you're wealthy, but did you just walk into Acme Defense Systems and say "I'd like a small nuclear reactor and a dozen pocket-sized antiaircraft missles? Just deliver them to Wayne Manor? No, I'm not up to anything... they're for a party?" I'd better see you with a damned acetylene torch in your hand in this next movie looking like Jesse James with a machine shop that rivals West Coast Choppers or I'm going to be really pissed.

Hey, Spiderman! You swing around the city every night looking for trouble and leaving miles and miles of that sticky web shit everywhere! Who cleans it up? How come people aren't swearing at you as they walk down the street looking like they just fell into a cotton-candy machine? How do you make all that stuff, anyway? Do you stop every block to drink a gallon of Mrs. Butterworth's?

Hey, Superman! If pieces of Kryptonite make you so sick, how come you didn't die back on Krypton where the entire planet is made out of the stuff? Huh? Huh? Why is that?

I seriously expect answers to all these questions in the upcoming remash of all these movies. Sure, I do. I also expect peace on earth, cooked vegetables that taste good and a cure for cancer by next Tuesday. Get a move on.

I had a bad feeling about this...Dude!

2005-05-30T18:44:00.000-05:00

Well, I lied. I told you all that I'd be first in line to see this mess but I wasn't. Actually, I didn't lie; I mispredicted. I waited until today to drag my sorry ass to Revenge of the Sith and I just got back.

Was it as bad as I said it would be? I'd be lying again if I said that it was a big epiphany for me and that George Lucas sure surprised me with a classy finish to his 28-year-long story. That's why I waited two weeks. I read all the reviews on Rotten Tomatoes, read all the spoilers on the other blogs and watched all the George Lucas interviews on TV. Then I watched all five of the other movies again. One featured an interview with George, who was asked if he could sum up the entire series in one word. "Unpredictable," said George. Unpredictable? Indigestible, maybe, but hardly unpredictable.

If you Google the term "special effects" you'll see several sites selling weird contact lenses and the rest selling fog machines. That's pretty much all that the internet associates with the term "special effects". Makes my blog pretty hard to find, doesn't it?

There were only two special effects in Revenge of the Sith: fog machines and weird contact lenses. Okay, Obi-wan rode around on a giant computer-generated Komodo dragon lizard (which meant he was really sitting on a stool) but it was the best part of the movie. All the rest was green-screen computer-generated fractal geometry. If you haven't seen it yet, wait for the DVD so that you can mute the volume and fast-forward through two-thirds of the film, otherwise you'll be forced to listen to Natalie, the Valley Girl, burble lines like "Annie, you're breaking my heart." I leaned over to my wife and whispered "Dude!" Then we both blew cherry Coke out of our noses. It was that kind of movie.

Acting? Horrible! Dialogue? Horrible! Plot? Duh. CG effects? If I had to choose another favorite besides the lizard, I'd select the "rust animators." They were the folks who followed the "mechanical artists" and "texture-mapped" the rust spots onto all the machines to make them look real. I liked that a lot. It saved me from thinking about things, like:

Why did Anakin Skywalker go over to "The Dark Side?" We never found out. He just said something like "No! No! Well, all right...I guess it sounds like a good deal." Supposedly it was because he loved Padme and didn't want her to die in childbirth, like he was excited about that! "I'm going to have a baby, Annie!" Annie: "Whatever." Nah, that wasn't the reason. Also: why does a race like the Jedi who can fly, predict the future and read people's minds from light-years away not suspect that Padme is carrying twins until she delivers the second one? Where was the Bettie Droid? She was probably not PG-13. What was supposed to be PG-13 was the "King Herod Slaughter of the Innocents" where Anakin kills all the kids. Now, I would have paid matinee prices to see that. Unfortunately, it was never shown.

It's passed, like a kidney stone, but now I read rumors of a TV series...two TV series! Dude! Without popcorn? It'll never work. We went home and watched the first Star Wars (the real one) to see the segues of the sets and costumes 28 years back in time. Those were well-done but I'll bet Peter Mayhew never wants to smell that Wookie suit again.

The Reverse Moth Effect

2005-05-26T21:41:00.000-05:00

I mentioned this in a previous posting. Professor John Flynn coined the term moth effect to describe the tendency of humans in commercial establishments, like bars and restaurants, to gravitate toward the lighted area or, at least, to sit facing the lighted area instead of with their backs toward it.

In the theatre world, we engineers take great pains as lighting designers to set up areas on the stage that are lit for each scene. We focus the FOH (front of house) lights, consisting of parcans and long-throw ellipsoidals from the catwalk, on an area designated by the director, then fill from the forward overhead electrics with fresnels and special short-throw ellipsoidals, then back-fill from the rear electric with more fresnels. When we're done with a light design, we walk through it with a piece of white paper to make sure it's evenly lit, then we bring actors out in costume and set the color gels to work with the costumes and the set.

Then we build the light plot, program the board for each scene or "look" and we're ready to run two days of tech rehearsals, that is, with lights, sound and special effects, followed by two days of full dress rehearsals with actors in costumes and makeup. Then it's showtime. Opening night. Full house, audience of paying customers, everyone's excited.

What happens? Act One, Scene Four. The stage manager calls to the booth on the headset "We're dark upstage right." The lighting tech looks at his light plot, runs the slide pot for channel 47 up and down and realizes that he's dead on 47, a long-throw ellipsoidal from the catwalk. He immediately dispatches a tech to the catwalk with a replacement bulb. These babies are 40 bucks apiece, by the way. Now, the tech can't swap out the bulb in the middle of the scene; that would look awful, so the lightboard operator and the tech hold off until channel 47 goes down then the tech has minutes or seconds to make the swap without throwing the ellipsoidal off its mark. In the meantime...

...all the actors, for some reason as yet unresolved in the theatre world, decide to skip their two months of blocking rehearsal and move over to upstage right. Why? I dunno. I act sometimes when I'm not tech directing. I guess it's a safe place but it's guaranteed: blow a lightbulb anywhere, there go the actors. We call it the reverse moth effect. We don't know why it works, we just know that a blown lightbulb means a blown show.

Here's the trick. Hey, directors! Get a clue! When you're blocking your show, tell your actors that lights are going to go dark. They just are. They're silly wire filaments in glass bottles and they burn out every so many hours. That's why they're called lightbulbs... duh! What are the odds, when we throw 48 high-intensity lamps onto your set that one of them is going to burn out in the middle of a scene? 100%! Guaranteed we're going dark in some area, every show! So: Tell your actors that they must improvise their blocking and stay the hell out of the dark spot until the techs swap out the bulb. It's not rocket science, it's just Theatre 101. Teach it to your cast. We can't change the laws of physics. You can produce smarter actors.

Comments? Please do!

2005-05-20T14:37:00.000-05:00

There has been an ongoing debate among the magic blogs the last few weeks regarding the value of having comments enabled on blogsites, ever since Steve Pellegrino turned off the comments on Magicrants. He was taken to task by John LeBlanc of Escamoteurettes who wrote

"...a blog that doesn't afford visitors the ability to interact with the author is a one-way street and I consider (it) a traditional web site."

Then Andy at Magic Circle Jerk wrote

"Completely unnecessary. It's a blog. Short for "web log." You're logging your thoughts and activities. Star Trek starts out with Kirk saying, "Captain's Log..." it doesn't end with Spock adding, "2 kewl!!!!"

Andy always cracks me up.

I have comments turned on because I'm hoping to hear your opinions and experiences regarding the topics I write about. It's no secret that I'm writing a book with the working title "Special Effects for Limited Budgets" and that this blog is a great place to test chapter ideas and topics on you, my potential readers (and, I hope, buyers.)

Why do I think your comments will be worthwhile? I check my stats each day and I see some of you coming from NASA, M.I.T., Harvard and lots of very impressive domains. Now, I'm not fooling myself: I know you're all searching for the latest news on the Aliun Levitation (especially you NASA guys who are looking to cheap out on rockets) but on the rare chance that you are theatre majors or engineers, I'd really value your input! Actually, I value everyone's input... well, okay, not everyone's:

1. If your name is Bambi and you think it's important to tell us about your website where you and your roomies show off your panties, you'd better all be theatre majors or at least, not charge for the pantyshots.

2. If you've got a rad blog on Xanga.com and you want to leave me some eprops, those aren't the kind of props I'm interested in. Go away.

3. Viagra and Cialis are not special effects. Silicone breast implants are special effects.

There was a cable TV station, back in the early days of cable when local stations were scrambling for content, which had a camera focused on a bowl of goldfish for 24 hours a day. Live goldfish. That was it, something to test the channel with until they came up with some shows. One day, a station janitor was cleaning the studio and moved the bowl out of the camera frame. The phone lines lit up with indignant viewers demanding the goldfish back!

I figure that there must be a huge demographic out there who'll watch anything (otherwise, why does Ben Stiller make movies?) I also notice that there are thousands of new blogs appearing each day with content like: "toosday i fed my cat some tunafish and u wudn't belive what he puked on my bed!!!" followed by 20 comments from concerned readers. I assume that there were no Ben Stiller movies playing that week. I assume they did not work for NASA or attend Harvard or M.I.T. Those are just assumptions though, right? Comments?

Why motion-picture special effects are for sissies.

2005-05-18T09:42:00.000-05:00

There's an old joke, a really old joke, that goes like this:

Cecil B. DeMille is shooting a phenomenal battle scene: 10,000 extras costumed as Roman soldiers and barbarians, 5,000 horses, chariots, catapults and even some elephants. At the end, the mountain erupts in a massive volcano and rivers of flaming lava cover 80 acres. Everyone who hasn't been slaughtered perishes in a fiery death. The scene has cost millions of dollars to build and it can only be done once so DeMille has three camera crews covering it from different angles. "Action!" he shouts and all hell breaks loose for 20 minutes.

When the smoke clears, DeMille yells to the first camera: "Did you get all that?" "Aw, geez," says the guy. "I had the damned lens cap on!" "That's okay," says DeMille, then hollers to the second crew. "Sorry, C.B.," yells the photog. "We lost power when the volcano blew and the camera died." "No problem," shouts DeMille, then hollers up to the third crew through his megaphone: "Hey, Louie. You okay?" Louie yells back: "Ready when you are, C.B.!"

Hahahaha! Ha. Pretty funny, right? The reason I brought this up is that I just finished reading a wonderful coffee-table book: No Strings Attached: The Inside Story of Jim Henson's "Creature Shop" by Matt Bacon in which the author describes the difficulties of shooting a three-year television series ("Dinosaurs") featuring animatronic characters versus building a one-time special-effect creature for a movie (like the brontocrane in The Flintstones.) The problem is that the effects are complex, intricate and fragile so they're fine for a one-shot appearance but need to be continually rebuilt during a long-running show.

In live theater, we're faced with runs of anywhere from a few weeks to many years and, barring some touch-up maintenance, lubrication and tightening of screws, our effects have got to last as well as be repeatable time after time, sometimes in multiple shows per day. We must always build for longevity. The motion-picture special-effects shop can say "The arm will fall off this thing after a few swings but who cares?" whereas we have to say: "I dare you to break this thing!" and build it to remain trouble-free despite the dreaded Actor Factor (an actor will find a dozen ways to screw up a foolproof gag, just like they will gravitate to the dark spot on an otherwise well-lighted stage in the amazing Reverse Moth Effect.)

The traveling show is one of our greatest accomplishments. I've loaded enough Children's Theatre Company productions in and out to appreciate their construction: never use wood when steel angle-iron is available, never use a 1/4" bolt when you can use a 1" bolt, weld everything. Who cares that it requires a fork lift to move the stuff? It won't break!

Think about this the next time you go to the movies: Where is that thing now? It's long gone, merely a memory on a strip of film. Theatre effects, on the other hand, simply go back into storage to await cannibalization of their parts for another show. "But Craig," you say, "you just finished writing about building stuff out of cardboard! Now you're talking about welded steel?" Yes, but I'm also talking about moving parts. Carboard props, gessoed and painted, last almost forever and are easy to rebuild if need be. But animatronics and machinery in live theater need to rival that stuff that NASA sent to Mars.

Corrugated cardboard: a magical medium. (Part Three)

2005-05-12T20:09:00.000-05:00

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.

Cultural Pollution (Part Two)

2005-05-10T16:46:00.000-05:00

In northern central Greece, halfway between Athens and Thessalonika (about three hours drive from either), is the city of Volos on the Pagasitikos Gulf. Mythology places this as the point from which Jason and his Argonauts sailed in their trireme in search of The Golden Fleece. It's a good-sized city, about a quarter-million population, an industrial seaport and tourist center but not very well-known. Behind Volos rises Mount Pelion, one mile high, dotted with small villages, apple and pear orchards and olive groves. Pelion is the mythical home of the centaurs: half-man, half horse. It's a pretty, quiet place.

Halfway up the mountain, a 17 kilometer drive, is the village of Drakeia, an old Greek word meaning "palm of the hand" because the village sits in a valley like, well, like it was sitting in the palm of a giant's hand. The 800 residents of Drakeia are mostly apple farmers and goatherds. That's pretty much it. They work hard in their orchards all day and drink tsipouro (an anise-flavored booze similar to ouzo but homemade) in the kafeneio at night. They go to church on Sundays and some of them may be centaurs but they keep pretty much to themselves.

One winter evening in 1992, a number of the residents were sitting around in the kafeneio discussing how quiet things were. There isn't much to do in the orchards during the winter, which is why tsipouro was invented, but the owner of the kafeneio was lamenting the lack of tourism over the last few years. Not that Drakeia is a tourist stop; "quaintly provincial and unsullied" would be more like it. And good tsipouro. Everyone was listening quietly including the village doctor, an Englishwoman with Greek nationality, and her boyfriend, an American expatriate engineer who had lived in Greece for six years and learned the language.

"Didn't the village have a Carnival celebration, like Patras does, many years ago?" asked the doctor. (Carnival in Rio and Mardi Gras in New Orleans take place the week before Lent and consist of parades with costumes, floats, music, royalty and lots of booze.) "That would bring people in."

"That was a long time ago" said a village elder. "There was one man in the village who was a carpenter. He built a wonderful float: a big airplane of wood. It took him a year. He's dead now and no one else knows how to build things like that. And it would be very expensive. This is a poor village." Greek optimism.

"We could do groups," said one of the women. "Like, well, fruit. This is a fruit-growing village. The children could be fruit. We could make costumes."

"Too expensive. Too much work. Not enough people to sew."

The American engineer sat quietly at a table in the corner, drinking tsipouro and idly sketching on a napkin. (In my study of technological innovation, it's amazing the prominent roles played by alcohol and napkins in the creative process.) "Let's ask him," said the doctor. "He's a theatre engineer." So they did.

"Well," said the American, "wonderful three-dimensional shapes can be built using cardboard from appliance boxes and duct tape." He showed them the napkin sketches. "An apple is just a bunch of segments, called vesica, taped together to form a sphere. You can make any sort of fruit or any shape out of cardboard sheets by curving them both with and against the corrugations, then putting people inside."

"American technology!" said the woman.

"Actually it was Euclid and Pythagoras, a couple of Greek guys," said the American.

So the men started bringing cardboard boxes up the mountain each day in their pickup trucks: refrigerator boxes, oven boxes, television boxes. And rolls and rolls of packing tape. The women cut and bent and taped. The children painted. The American drank tsipouro and sketched designs. They built apples, pears, bananas and bunches of grapes. They built a team of cooking utensils: teapots, skillets, clocks, refrigerators and ovens. They built a team of beverage containers: beer bottles, tsipouro glasses, soda cans and wine barrels. Then the American built a huge motorized dragon and the doctor rode her horse as Saint George and slayed it. It was a wonderful parade. There was a queen and four princesses. Thousands of people came up the mountain to see it and they drank and danced and spent lots of money. It made the national television. The parade became an annual tradition again.

The villagers became masters at the art of three-dimensional cardboard modeling. Farmers and goatherds relearned the concepts of solid and spherical geometry. Five years later, watching the parade over a glass of tsipouro, the American laughed and said: "Two generations from now, some cultural anthropologist is going to discover this and wonder what the hell happened here." Then he went back to America.

I miss tsipouro. Ouzo isn't quite the same.

Tomorrow I'll post Part 3: Corrugated cardboard, the miracle set construction material!

Julie Taymor, Margaret Mead and Schroedinger's Cat

2005-05-09T16:15:00.000-05:00

In her speech before the National Press Club on NPR in November, 2000, producer/director Julie Taymor (The Lion King stage version, Titus, Frida) told about her experiences in Bali at the age of 21 where she discovered a highly-developed shadow puppet theatre culture. The flat, jointed, shadow puppets were manipulated behind a translucent scrim, illuminated from behind by Coleman lanterns, and while the action appeared only in silhouette, she was amazed that the puppets themselves were brightly painted in intricate detail. (The Greek "Karaghiozi" puppets are decorated in the same way and came from the East, possibly the same source.) The audience never sees the colors, merely shadows, but Taymor pointed out that the decorations were artistically important to the performers themselves, a concept she carried forward into her own career and designs.

I waited for her to make an anthropological error at that point, but, to my delight and her credit, Taymor did not. She explained that painting was not part of the Balinese culture until it was brought to Bali by the Dutch, but that the Balinese used the foreign medium to express their own culture. (That makes sense: my hammer was invented by Oogaluk Australopithecus and made by Stanley Tools but the stuff I build with it is all mine.) Recognizing the foreign influence on a culture under study was a good catch, making 21-year-old Julie Taymor a lot sharper in the cultural anthropology department than, let's say, 24-year-old cultural anthropologist Margaret Mead.

In 1925, Mead left for a nine-month stay in Samoa, an island in the southwest central Pacific Ocean, to study adolescence and biological and cultural influences on behavior. Mead lived with the villagers during the day and at night, observing behavior and customs that otherwise would have remained unknowable to a person from the United States. She discovered that monogamy (marriage to one person) and jealousy were not valued or understood by the Samoans, and that divorce occurred simply by the husband or wife "going home." However, her most important work in Samoa was on courtship patterns in adolescents. Her book Coming of Age in Samoa, published in 1928 and based on her studies of adolescent behavior in a Polynesian society, became a best-seller and brought its author to the forefront of American anthropology where she would remain for half a century.

Unfortunately, as it turned out, Mead was "snookered real good" by the crafty Samoans who felt that telling her what she wanted to hear was the way to please this foreign visitor. Basically, their stories of a liberal sex life among teens was total baloney and served to titillate millions around the world while eventually bringing discredit to Mead. Margaret Mead had fallen afoul of the classic "Schroedinger's Cat" in which the act of observing a phenomenon alters the phenomenon and even the Samoans, reading the popular Coming of Age in Samoa, apparently felt that their neighbors were having way too much fun and that they should get hip themselves. Samoan culture changed drastically.

Tomorrow I will continue with the second part of this story: "How I screwed up the culture of a simple village and hosed off future anthropologists. You can too!"

The Lion King - Limited View

2005-05-09T00:50:00.000-05:00

I just got back from the stage version of The Lion King, a travelling three-hour special effects overload extravaganza. Yes, Julie Taymor's puppet creations were marvelous and the actors who controlled them were brilliant. As for the rest, I need to see it again from further back in the theatre to appreciate it all. I mean, it featured every stage special effect known to man... all going on simultaneously! You want volcano vents spewing steam? Got it. Flying by Foy? Yup, Dave Hearn designed that. Intelligent lights? Check. How about some strobes to give the epileptics in the audience fits? Sure, those too.

The story? As you recall from the cartoon, it's Hamlet "where a ghost and a prince meet and everyone ends in mincemeat" except it's a family show so Ophelia doesn't go mad, Hamlet doesn't die and they get married in the end. Well, lions don't actually marry; they just get together and make more lions. They are very efficient.

I got the tickets through Ticketmaster the hour they went on sale. I selected the best seats in the house: ground floor, ten rows back, on the aisle so we could see the animal parade and Taymor's work close at hand. I hit the "Submit" button under pressure ("You have one minute remaining... You have 30 seconds remaining...") and back came the confimation: LIMITED VIEW, NO REFUNDS OR EXCHANGES. I hate Ticketmaster.

So there we were, at the theatre, all worried about whether we were going to be sitting behind a post or what. I had hoped, at best, that the LIMITED VIEW might be some of the special effects machinery, perhaps, which would not have bothered me at all; I would have been more interested in that than in Elton John's musical score. Instead, the LIMITED VIEW turned out to be "Seating for oversized audience member." Yup, you've got it: there was a special chair in front of my seat for a guy who brought his own gravitational system with him. Here's the view from my seat at The Lion King.

Okay, the ticket was 20 bucks cheaper than those of the folks sitting two seats over, but hey, Ticketmaster: How about providing that information BEFORE the order is accepted, or maybe give Jumbo a shorter chair or a part in the show?

Hot new Aliun Levitation rumor...

2005-05-08T23:39:00.000-05:00

...which I just made up! How's this?

There is no Aliun Levitation. It's just trick photography (notice the bogus camera angles?) to lure people into buying Ellusionist's Shapeshifter DVD. Without the teaser, who would blow $24.95 to learn a card change? Not you, that's for sure. Actually, ALIUN is a cleverly misspelled acronym for "Another Levitation Is UNnecessary."

Pretty good rumor, huh? Pass it on!

The Aliun Levitation...

2005-05-05T16:30:00.000-05:00

...isn't here! I'm getting dozens of search engine hits each week from people searching for the Aliun Levitation. All I know is what you know: It's slated to be released in Spring 2005 (uh, that's like... now.) Until then, the only evidence of its existence is as a demo preview on the Shapeshifter video. Looking at the number of inquiries that just I am receiving, that Shapeshifter must be one hot seller! Ellusionist says:

Currently included on the Shapeshifter DVD is an exclusive, never-before-seen first glimpse of ALIUN. Thousands of emails have been received by Team Ellusionist over the past year from users around the globe wanting to know the latest on the end-all underground levitation project. The first glimpse of ALIUN, the only information released anywhere, is on SHAPESHIFTER.

I've heard lots of rumors. I'll have to remind myself to stop starting them.

Monkey Business

2005-04-28T15:09:00.000-05:00

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.

Saintly Special Effects

2005-04-22T18:18:00.000-05:00

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.

Stage Special Effects: Amazing or Awesome?

2005-04-20T14:06:00.000-05:00

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:

Lew Wallace was doubtful Ben-Hur would translate into a successful stage adaptation. He observed two problems in particular. First was dealing sensitively with the religious nature of the book and the problems with an actor portraying Jesus Christ. The second problem was how a chariot race could be accomplished in a theater, and without a chariot race, it would hardly be Ben-Hur. However, stage magnates Marc Klaw and Abraham Erlanger managed to convince Wallace otherwise. It was agreed that Jesus Christ would only be depicted as a beam of white light. The problem of the chariot race was solved by training eight horses, pulling two chariots, to run on treadmills installed in the floor of the stage. While the horses ran at full gallop on the stage, the background scenery was installed on a cyclorama and moved behind the racing chariots to complete the illusion that the chariots and horses were actually moving.

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.

Round Balloons

2005-04-19T16:26:00.000-05:00

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.

Wallpaper Flats - Clever or Brilliant?

2005-04-10T13:51:00.000-05:00

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."

I scream, you scream, we all scream at the green screen scene.

2005-04-07T11:16:00.000-05:00

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?

George Lucas: Dyslexic

2005-04-01T21:48:00.000-06:00

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.

The "Uncanny Valley" of Creepy Robots

2005-03-16T17:04:00.000-06:00

Way back in 1978, Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori coined a term that loosely translates into "Uncanny Valley" to describe the sudden drop in, let's say, "cuteness" that human perception of robots undergoes as the form of the robot approaches the form of the human. In other words: If you want to build a robot that everybody loves, either make it look perfectly human or else make it look mechanical. Don't make it look "almost human except..." or you'll creep people out and they'll run away screaming as they did from "The Polar Express."

While not all psychologists, roboticists and moviemakers agree with Mori's study, I have given it some serious thought and believe the following robot photos will illustrate the curve more graphically:

Really Cute

Cute

Not Very Cute

Scary

Really Scary

Really, Really Cute

Quod erat demonstrandum.

A Thoughtful Gift

2005-03-03T19:41:00.000-06:00

Wondering what to give the stars at your "Little Shop of Horrors" cast party? They need this.

Peter Foy, a Special Effects Legend

2005-03-03T12:48:00.000-06:00

Peter Foy, the founder of Flying By Foy, died February 17th in Las Vegas, Nevada, of a heart attack. He was 79.

I hate posting obituaries of the greats. You always think: "Why didn't I write more about this guy when he was alive?" But there are so many and you have to choose. I have mentioned FBF in the past, usually as: "Q: How do I fly people? A: You don't; Peter Foy does." I have lifted his biography directly from the FBF website. Sorry I'm late.

Foy revolutionized stage flying with the development of the Inter-related Pendulum System for the original Broadway production of the musical Peter Pan in 1954. Born on June 11, 1925 in London, England, he was fascinated as a child by James M. Barrie's tale of Peter Pan, a story and character that would profoundly alter the course of his life.

At the age of 15, Foy first flew on a slim steel wire in a production of "Where The Rainbow Ends" in which he performed the character of "the Sea Witch". When the show's stage manager was hospitalized he also assumed those duties, which included the supervision of Kirby's Flying Machines and the flying actors. He continued to act on stage and in film, joining the Royal Air Force in 1942 as a Navigator and Entertainment Officer.

After the war and the completion of his military service, he went to work for Joseph Kirby, a move that eventually brought Peter to New York as the flying supervisor for a 1950 Broadway production of Peter Pan, starring Jean Arthur and Boris Karloff. He began to experiment with and refine the Kirby equipment, redesignimg the Compound Drum and eventually linking two of the systems together at a single suspension point which he called the Inter-related Pendulum. This innovation made possible the soaring aerial choreography that helped define Mary Martin's signature performance as Peter Pan for the 1954 Broadway musical and for the live NBC telecast of the show in 1956.

Peter left Kirby to form his own company, Flying By Foy, in 1957.

The creation of the Inter-Related Pendulum ushered in an era of spectacular, highly controlled, free flight, but required operators with a high degree of skill and a minimum 40 feet of ceiling height in order to create a natural-looking, effective pendulum swing. Foy solved the problem of flying actors in low height situations with the invention of the Floating Pulley in 1958. While this development was highly effective, the device was often visible to the audience.

His determination to preserve the magic of theatrical flight by concealing its apparatus from the audience's view led to his introduction of the patented Track on Track system in 1962, which allows two operators to independently control lift and travel. Since that time, Foy has improved upon the basic concept of Track on Track, most notably with the patented Inter-Reacting Compensator system, developed for touring productions of the Ice Capades.

Throughout his lifetime, Peter Foy applied his artistic vision and mechanical ingenuity to the challenge of safely flying performers in a variety of different and often difficult circumstances. His creation of the Multi-Point Balance Harness for the 1965 movie Fantastic Voyage set a standard still used today for flying actors on film; he pioneered the use of self-contained truss systems for touring shows, and also introduced the first self-contained radio-controlled flying system at the Flower Expo in Osaka, Japan in 1990.

Over the past half-century, he single-handedly revolutionized methods and techniques used in stage flying that had remained virtually unchanged for 2,000 years. Perhaps this is one reason the Health and Safety Codes Commission of the United States Institute of Theatre Technology (USITT) presented to Peter Foy the 1990 International Entertainment Safety Award "for his singular, personal and creative contributions to safeguarding human life during a period of 50 years in the entertainment industry and elevating the task of flying people with rigging to an art form".

Flying By Foy has provided theatrical flying effects for thousands of stage productions, musicals, operas, ballets, rock concerts, film and television shows worldwide. The company has flown three Broadway productions of Peter Pan (with Mary Martin in 1954, Sandy Duncan in 1979, and Cathy Rigby in 1990) and originated the flying for Superman, Angels in America, Tommy, Aida and The Lion King, among others.

Foy flew Nadia Comaneci from the NASDAQ Building 170 feet over Times Square for the 2004 Olympic Torch Relay Event in New York and created flying effects for the opening ceremonies at the Olympic Games in Athens. Recent Broadway projects include Man of LaMancha and Dracula the Musical. Foy flying effects are also featured in two upcoming Broadway shows: Spamalot, the stage musical adaptation of the film Monty Python and the Holy Grail, and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.

Donations may be made to: The Actors' Fund of America, 729 Seventh Avenue, 10th Floor, New York, NY 10019. Phone: (212) 221-7300, or visit the website at http://www.actorsfund.org

Somebody Answer the Ceiling!

2005-02-03T11:13:00.000-06:00

Unless you're performing Shakespeare or a Greek tragicomedy, there's probably a telephone in your show.

Why do playwrights love the telephone so much? Because it's such an easy plot device to deliver the news that changes everything to a character without having to add a minor role (usually the messenger) and clunk up the action with some poor guy who just sits around for an hour backstage waiting for his big (only) line. It's also a universally-recognized appliance, needs no explanation, fits any set (except maybe a forest) and is easy to scrounge.

That being said (I just said it!): Why do directors have so much trouble working the telephone into their shows? There seems to be a mindset among directors that takes them back to their first high-school play and keeps them there: "That's how Mrs. Farbelwitz did it so that's the way I've always done it." The curtain goes up, there's the living room, the audience sees a telephone sitting on an end table next to the sofa, then suddenly in Scene 4 the auditorium ceiling rings or there's a ding-a-ling offstage and the actor answers the phone! What's that all about?

Violation of Expectation is a negative principle in theatre. The telephone is a special effect, not a prop. The audience expects a telephone to ring. How hard is that? Well, actually, it's pretty tricky and those directors that don't call their special effects wizard in to set up the gag are the reason that so many school and community theatre productions still bear the stamp of Mrs. Farbelwitz after all these years.

My upcoming book has an entire chapter devoted to the telephone: the styles of each period, where to get them for free (or very cheap) and oodles of ways to make them ring that Mrs. Farbelwitz and most directors never imagined. I'll just limit this post to the current show that I'm working on and how I worked the gag.

The show, "See How They Run," is set in England during WWII and the phone required is a "candlestick" variety which, in the 21st century, is not that easy to come by, or so you might think. While I usually raid my local phone companies for my supply (I have shelves full now), the candlesticks have all been snapped up by antique dealers and are valuable collectors' items. I went directly to eBay where I found lots of them in the 200-dollar range and up. But there, sitting all by itself, was a "candlestick telephone AM radio" for four dollars... and no bidders! Why not? Well, it was a plastic replica (perfect in every detail) so it was of no interest to an antique collector. It had an AM radio built into the base. Who wants a bad AM radio? Who even wants a radio? I snapped the thing up for four bucks and it arrived two days later.

The AM radio board went directly into the trash. I replaced the cheap plastic "springy cord" to the handset with black woven cord from the fabric shop (actually more authentic; candlesticks didn't have "springy cords") and there it was. Well, not quite.

My Mrs. Farbelwitz touch the last few years has been to add a radio-controlled ringer to my phones. (I came up with this for a production of "Noises Off" in which the phone is a running gag: it gets thrown through a window, the receiver gets ripped off and yet, in the last scene, it still rings in the actor's hand.) While it sounds high-tech, it couldn't be simpler: the radio transmitter and receiver came from a cheap toy car from the Radio Shack "Christmas close-out" table (ten bucks) and the ringer is a doorbell from the hardware store. Push the button anywhere within 100 feet of the phone and it rings. That eliminates any kind of wiring on stage or any positioning problems; all the cords are just black nylon rope and the whole gag is self-contained and operated by the Stage Manager at the appropriate times. When this show is over, that baby goes right into Camelot inventory and will be available for rental... or you can wait for my book and build your own!

A Minnesota Magical Moment - Sub-Arctic Phenomenon

2005-01-18T19:03:00.000-06:00

We woke up yesterday to -38 degrees F. here in central Minnesota. The schools were closed, the cars and buses wouldn't start and it was a federal holiday besides. What to do? Fun with sub-arctic magic, that's what!

Here's the effect: Go outdoors anywhere it's 30 degrees below zero or more. Hand a spectator a steaming hot cup of water, coffee or tea and tell him that you want him to throw it on you from 20 feet away. Advise the audience that this could be extremely dangerous: you could be scalded badly by the hot liquid or, worse yet, soaking wet at 38 degrees below zero which could be fatal.

Walk 20 feet away and yell: "Soak me!" (You can shout a magic word here if you like.) What happens to the liquid is truly amazing and quite spectacular as well. Needless to say, not a drop reaches you; the water dissipates into vapor immediately leaving a magical cloud in the air (and perhaps a sprinkling of freeze-dried coffee powder!)

VOE: Violation of Expectation

2005-01-09T16:19:00.000-06:00

My brother, the behavioral psychologist in our family (and an amateur magician), explained something to me today that I never considered. He's reading "Wild Minds: What Animals Really Think" by Marc D. Hauser and came upon the concept of VOE, "Violation of Expectation," as a long-researched concept by behavioral psychologists that has served as a measure of not only sentience in animals but childhood development in humans.

It has been found in many studies (do a Google search) that infants as young as four months begin to react when they sense the VOE phenomenon. My brother used the "French Drop" as an example but psychologists have used several different tests. Try this "Dishabituation Event" on your child.

Children develop this "concept of impossibility" at such an early age that psychologists now argue whether it is "learned" or "genetic." Hauser, in his book, says that dogs and primates (monkeys, apes, you) are suckers for "magic tricks" but cats are not (which might have been a good thing for Roy Horn to have known.) Monty Python had great fun with "Confuse-A-Cat," "Puzzle-A-Puma" and "Bewilderbeast" but Hauser points out that cats simply cannot be confused because they have no concept of "expectation" as much as we, their masters, would like to anthropomorphize them.

"Violation of Expectation" (VOE) therefore becomes the principle upon which "Magic" is based, and explains why you can be a big success at childrens' birthday parties as well as on-stage in Las Vegas. We humans, genetically, know at a very early age (four months) when something "just doesn't seem right." A magic trick, therefore, is anything that violates your expectation. Your eye follows the French Drop worker's moving hand and, when it opens empty, gives you that primitive "What the...?" reaction. The dog raises its ears, the monkey furrows its brow and the kittycat could care less... it doesn't even sense that something happened.

So the next time a spec asks you how you did that, just tell him: "I simply violated your expectation. You did it to yourself!"

Unless he's a cat.

We theatrical special effects mavens need to conceptualize this in reverse: Whatever "violates the expectation" on stage is a bad effect. If the ceiling rings and the actor answers the phone, that's no good. If the gun goes "pop" instead of "BLAM!" that's no good. VOE is good for magicians, bad for theatre.

Unless you're performing "Cats." (I crack myself up!)

Handguns on Stage - Here's a Tip!

2005-01-07T13:43:00.000-06:00

Back in April, 2004, I wrote a post called: "If You're Going to Shoot Somebody...BLAM!" in which I stated:

...he pulls out a starter pistol that he borrowed from the track coach. It's a tiny toy with a gray cylinder and that stupid red plastic thing at the tip of the barrel that screams FAKE...

Natch, this raised some fears from the folks that still worry about those Do Not Remove... tags on their mattresses when they're not busy arguing with their oatmeal. I mean, they look unsightly but gosh, the Federal Government put them there and they must have some reason and I sure don't want to go to jail because look what happened to Martha Stewart etc. etc.

Yes, there's a Federal Regulation that says that manufacturers and importers of replica guns must mark the barrel tip with blaze orange paint. There's a reason for this, we're told: It's so that law enforcement officers can clearly see that you're waving a toy gun around instead of a real gun and that way they won't shoot you. That makes perfect sense. No? Oh, I get it; you think that the next time you rob a bank, you'll just dip the snout of your betsy in some orange paint first so that nobody suspects it's a real gun, don't you? Well, what happens when the tellers just laugh at you and don't give you the money, huh, wise guy? You didn't think about that, did you? But, of course, the cops will just have a big chuckle when you come out of the bank and they'll let you go, right? Yeah, what a silly regulation.

But gee, those orange-tipped guns just look so dumb on stage and they ruin the entire show! Well, that's what they thought in Hollywood too, so the State of California wrote its own law, full of grammatical errors (maybe Arnold proofread it), which says:

12553.Any person who changes, alters, removes, or obliterates any coloration or markings that are required for by any applicable state or federal law or regulation, for any imitation firearm, or device described in subdivision (c) of Section 12555, in any way that makes the imitation firearm or device look more like a firearm is guilty of a misdemeanor. This subdivision shall not apply to manufacturer, importer, or distributor of imitation firearms or to the lawful use in theatrical productions, including motion pictures, television, and stage productions.

Ha! So there. What does Uncle Sam have to say about that? Well, as I read the law (I use a strobe light) it says:

Sec. 1150.4 Waiver.

The prohibitions set forth in Sec. 1150.2 of this part may be
waived for any toy, look-alike or imitation firearm that will be used
only in the theatrical, movie or television industries. A request for
such a waiver should be made, in writing, to the Chief Counsel for
Technology, United States Department of Commerce, Washington, DC 20230.
The request must include a sworn affidavit which states that the toy,
look-alike, or imitation firearm will be used only in the theatrical,
movie or television industry. A sample of the item must be included with
the request.

[57 FR 48454, Oct. 26, 1992]

Now, that law applies to manufacturers and importers. You can tell because the Chief Counsel for Technology, a guy by the name of Mark F. Bohannon (I Googled myself blind wandering through the hundreds of names in the Department of Commerce while wondering what all these people actually do), wants a sample of the firearm. I don't have a frigging sample: I've got one bogus roscoe which I've modified the shiznit out of and that's my stage gun and Mark can have it when he pries it from my actor's cold, dead fingers. But I have removed the stupid orange paint from the barrel tip before I installed the red LED inside the barrel and replaced the clip with a battery pack and yeah, it really looks real!

How about all the laws? Well, the theatre is posted outside: "We Prohibit Fireams On These Premises." Okay, it's not a firearm: it's a prop. How about that off-duty cop in the audience who gets excited in the middle of Act II? Well, he'd better not be heeled or he didn't read the sign. Maybe he also missed the sign in the lobby that said: "Warning: Simulated gunshots will be fired in Act II." But what if we all get arrested? Well, the law says "used in the theatrical industry." I'll let my lawyer worry about that one when it goes to court.

As for me, I've gotta go rip some tags off my mattress now.

Phun With Photoshop

2004-12-17T18:55:00.000-06:00

Right after 9/11, an e-mail began making the rounds containing an attached photo of a poor guy on top of the World Trade Center with a jet airliner headed straight for him in the background. The e-mail said that the photo was from a camera recovered from the wreckage of the WTC and quickly became the most-circulated e-mail on the Net. Months later, a young Hungarian named Peter Guzli identified himself as the creator of the fake photo to which he had added the wrong kind of plane at the wrong time of year on the wrong side of the building but it was too late. Millions of people had seen the picture and so did you, didn't you?

A new art form had sprung up called "Photoshopping" named after Adobe Photoshop, a graphics editing program designed mainly, we must conclude, for falsifying photographic evidence and keeping practical jokers off the streets. Dozens of photos containing "The Tourist Guy" began popping up on websites everywhere, placing Peter at the scene of every tragedy in history from the Hindenberg disaster to the Kennedy assassination.

This is special effects gone hilariously amok, nor has the fun stopped. I just received an e-mail today containing a sequence of eleven photos from a pier in Ireland where a strange series of events had occurred involving a car and two wrecker trucks. You've received it too, right? Don't worry; you will.

Funny thing is: the photographer at the scene only took ten photos. Where did this eleventh one come from? Ah, the "Photoshop Phairy" has been busy again!

Mark Reaney: The Edge of the Illusion

2004-12-01T21:34:00.000-06:00

In my March 26, 2004 post, in which I introduced the concept behind "Anderson's Ghost," I quoted Tim Hansen of Oasis Stage Werks on where the industry is heading in the next 5 years or so:

"I see more technology entering the industry, more moving lights, more motorized rigging, more projected and video effects, more LED's, for instance. This is not a bad thing but it will require more savvy technicians. It will also allow bigger and better shows in smaller spaces. As the technology becomes more affordable, the things that the High School drama teacher has always wanted for a show now become possible. Helping people execute their creative vision is a really great thing."

Later, on September 17, I pondered the future again in light of "The Sky Captain Syndrome:"

Does any of this translate to the live stage? Maybe when holographic projection becomes readily available, that is, reaches that stage where the hardware and software fall into the gap between "available to professionals" and "available to every kid on the block." In the meantime, consider optical illusion more strongly: imaginary sets and props of the Kurt Wenner type and projected background tricks like "Anderson's Ghost." After all, the audience expects us to justify the ticket prices even if we don't sell as much popcorn as "Sky Captain."

Today arrived the Fall 2004 issue of Theatre Design & Technology magazine from USITT containing an article called "The Edge of the Illusion" regarding Mark Reaney's virtual reality production of Mozart's "The Magic Flute" at the University of Kansas that pushed the envelope of what I had been trying to convey. Actually, Reaney sums it up well on his own website with a quote from Robert Edmund Jones: "The business of workers in the theatre is, as I see it, to express a timeless theme by means of the tools of one's own time."

Mark Reaney: I really, really like this guy even though I've never met him. I first stumbled upon his work back in 2000 when I was researching (i.e. stealing from the best) lighting and set designs for "Amahl and the Night Visitors" and found myself on Reaney's website which I promptly bookmarked with the comment: "Keep an eye on this guy." Then I ripped off as much of his lighting design as our instrumentation could handle! It was a pleasant surprise to see him pop up again at the cutting edge of my dream world: the merging of computer graphic technology with live theatre. He goes "Sky Captain" one better: there is no fixed set, it's all computer-generated, but it's re-created live every night and never exactly the same. That's what I've been talking about all these years.

To quote Reaney:

Virtual reality or VR is the practice of using computer generated models that can be manipulated in real-time. Unlike video or computer animations it is not prerecorded and so is unique to every performance. This technology allows artists to communicate to a modern, media-savvy audience and retain important characteristics that make live performance special and distinctive. Furthermore new staging techniques have provided a great deal of freedom and flexibility compared to conventional scenery. Changes of scene are instantaneous, virtual locales are not constrained to budgets of money or manpower. They are not limited to the physical confines of the theatre or even to the laws of physics. VR scenery is ultimately portable, entire productions being created with a computer and a video projector. Fantastic special effects can be achieved with no extra cost, special equipment or danger to the performers. But the real power of VR scenery may be in its malleable nature. VR scenic environments can move, grow or otherwise change in order to reflect the development of the drama.

If you're not a USITT member and can't get your hands on the magazine, at least take a look at Reaney's Magic Flute website, then go back to his i.e.VR homepage and look at the Research section. The concept of "The Edge of the Illusion" flies in the face of what most directors have been taught to believe: that the audience must not see backstage or be aware of the mechanics behind the show. My last director would not even allow the actors to acknowledge the booth at the curtain call; they could acknowledge the pit orchestra but the tech crew were nonentities in his opinion. I had to mount an active revolt on closing night to get the cast to acknowledge the crew. Hey, techs work just as hard as those talking clothesracks out there or, as I said to one director once in the words of the McDonald's ad: "Would you like lights with that?"

War Of The Worlds - Oh no!

2004-11-27T15:36:00.000-06:00

This will be an interesting battle, possibly a story of its own called "War Of The Box-Office." For those of you who live on a small planet circling a rather nondescript star on the edge of a modest galaxy, like the rest of us, it may be news that the Steven Spielberg version of "War of the Worlds" has been moved from its projected 2007 release date to a June 29, 2005 release. That's not a move; that's a quantum leap! The rumor mill has it that Spielberg has shelved everything in order to devote full resources to hitting his new deadline.

Why the rush? Well, it seems that Pendragon Pictures is also filming "War of the Worlds" with a release date of March 30, 2005. What? TWO WOTWs within three months? That's insane! That's madness! Oh... that's the motion-picture industry. Add Jeff Wayne's animated WOTW: a $48 million feature-length animated project currently in pre-production and using state-of-the-art CGI and Motion Capture technology and you've got THREE WOTWs coming this way. Run for your lives!

Whatever happened to "rights?" After all, in the live theatre world we have to apply for production rights every time we plan a show. If someone else in the area already has them, or it's been done too recently, the rights are withheld; it's "first-come-first-served" on stage. Doesn't the same apply to motion pictures? Obviously not, although it is highly likely that two of the three WOTWs will go directly to DVD or cable, and let me guess, one of 'em ain't gonna be Spielberg's.

The Pendragon production is a "true-to-the-book" enactment, set in England and holding to a budget of $20 million or so. The Spielberg production is a "modern-day" enactment starring Tom Cruise, set in America (New York, New Jersey) and boasting a budget of $200 million. Wait a minute... even with cost overruns, didn't James Cameron's "Titanic" only cost a piddling $170 million and still set a record as the most expensive movie ever filmed? And didn't the actual Titanic itself (the ship, not the movie) cost a mere $12 million as the most expensive ship ever built? What are these people smoking and where does it grow? I want some. Some reports are that the budget has been trimmed to $128 million. Whew! I thought we were getting into real money here.

I hate to sound sacreligious but my money is not on Spielberg this time around. Don't think "E.T." or "Jurassic Park" or even "Close Encounters of the Third Kind." Think of the TV series "Steven Spielberg's Amazing Stories:" the dumbest, most god-awful, horribly-written and stupid pieces of trash to have been foisted on the television public since "Gilligan's Island." Think "Artificial Intelligence" if you don't recall that Steve occasionally steps in a pile of poo.

A big budget and an all-star cast aren't enough to save this turkey from the scrapheap of history according to my crystal ball. Here are a few reasons:

Only eight months of filming. Now, while eight months should be enough for Tom Cruise, who specializes in one character, Tom Cruise, that's only okay for "a Tom Cruise movie" which "War of the Worlds" isn't. Tom does heroics and the protagonist of WOTW is not a hero.
500 special effects shots. I understand that ILM is rushing like crazy to get them all ready in time. Oh boy, rushed special effects! This could be right up there with "The Creature Wasn't Nice" for camp value.
Aliens invading the United States? Didn't Roland Emmerich do that in "Independence Day" back in 1996? And wasn't that a gigantic "oink?"
For that matter, wasn't this done already in 1953 by Byron Haskin? Oh, wait, that was set in California. This one is set in New York. Duh.
The thought of aliens destroying New York comes too close in time to the real thing to be considered tasteful.
We already know that there is no "master race" on Mars because we've been there. Any attempt to move the menace to another planet or through some goofy "Oops, we missed them" gimmick will be just plain silly.

My other beef with even trying to film this thing at all lies with, again, the special effects. In Haskin's 1953 version with Gene Barry, the "fighting machines" were cheap-assed flying wing contraptions hung from wires. In H. G. Wells's novel, the machines are giant tripods that walk. Now that would be a great effect, impressive and truly scary to see since a tripod can't walk. (Quick: name a three-legged animal! Okay, I saw a dog once that had lost a leg but he didn't walk, he hopped.) Three points determine a plane and a tripod is totally stable; that's why it's called a tripod. If three-legged animals ever evolved, they were quickly devoured by even-number-legged animals because they just stood there looking helpless and stupid. So which way is Spielberg going to go? Tripods or flying things? The concept of a walking tripod would be so great, such a call for amazing computer special effects, a true breakthrough. Betcha he goes with flying things. Did I say "oink?"

Ranking the potentials of the three, I'm going with 1) Jeff Wayne because of the great music, 2) Pendragon because it holds to the book and 3) Spielberg because, given an existing novel with a solid morality story and a time-proven setting to rewrite on the fly, he can be guaranteed to screw it up.

Levitation

2004-11-07T21:55:00.000-06:00

Every now and then you'll encounter a script that requires an actor to levitate. Before you call Flying By Foy, ask the age-old question: "How high?" A few inches is impressive. For that matter, what constitutes levitation anyway? The answer is: anything that isn't
980 cm/second/second on earth or, more universally (if you're performing on another planet)
F=G((m1*m2)/r²)) gives the appearance of defying gravity. Duh. All right, so how do you do it?

Believe it or not, there's a website devoted to this topic: http://www.levitation.org/ and it's presented by the folks at Ellusionist who will be happy to sell you some secrets to get you airborne. They're not alone. Effects on the market now, coming, rumored-to-be-coming, imitations and others include: Balducci, King Rising, Asrah, Zero Gravity, Elevator, Aliun, Fearson's Fantastic Flotation, Retro Gravity, Invisible Force, BroomFlight, Airborne, Floating on the Edge, Mid-Air and On Thin Air. Those are just a few (gasp!) I'm not even going to start describing them all let alone buying and trying them all. Let's just say: the performers are not the only ones up-in-the-air here. I own a few and they work. Some are cheap and some are expensive. My down-to-earth advice right now? The cheaper, the better.

Dry Ice, My Ass!

2004-10-27T16:03:00.000-05:00

People are funny. We learn things as kids and for some silly reason they override logic, common sense and incoming information for the rest of our lives. I will always call the apatosaurus a "brontosaurus" because I like the name, even though I've learned that it's no longer taxonomically correct.

So it's no great shock to me every time I get involved in a show that calls for ground fog, boiling cauldrons or goblets of fuming potions to hear somebody say: "We'll just use dry ice." Yeah, I too was impressed when my grade school science teacher brought a piece to class and pulled all sorts of stunts with it before it disappeared. I have, however, a litany of questions for the director who makes that statement.

Q: "What do you mean use dry ice?"
A: "Well, dry ice makes fog."
Q: "How?"
A: "Ummm, you add some water?"
Q: "How? Where? When?"
A: "Uhhhh..."
Q: "Where do you get dry ice around here?"
A: "Uhhhh..."
Q: "How do you get it here? Where do you keep it after it arrives? How long does it last? How do you handle it? How much do you need to buy? Can you get some more in time for the next show?"
A: "Uhhhh..."

That's usually when I say: "Dry ice, my ass!"

Now, I have no scientific argument against dry ice. A cage of dry ice lowered into a tub of hot water goes bananas and produces fog up the gazoo. Lots of it. You can fog an entire football field with the stuff and many have. My point is: the acquisition, transportation, storage, handling, dispersion and basic logistics involved in the use of dry ice usually result in my renting and plugging in a fogger or hazer. Cue fog on, cue fog off, everybody's happy, done deal.

I'm not saying that I never use dry ice. There are occasions when all of the elements I just mentioned come together nicely and make it the ideal solution, such as the production I'm working on right now. You should be familiar with these elements if you're going to be a special effects guru.

What is "dry ice?" It's frozen carbon dioxide gas. Unlike water, which is a gas at +212 degrees (F) and a solid at +32 degrees (F), carbon dioxide, at atmospheric pressure, goes from a gas to a solid and back again at -109.3 degrees (F) (-78.5 degrees (C)) in a process called "sublimation." It never "melts" which is why it's called "dry" ice.

Where do you get it? Aha! That's a definite stopper to any directorial argument. If there isn't a reliable and constant source within a few miles of your theatre, it's all over: you're not using no stinkin' dry ice. Forget all about it. How do you find a supplier? Go to dryicedirectory.com and click the appropriate link. Type in your telephone area code and you'll get a listing of every supplier in your area. Is one of them close enough? Good for you. How much does it cost? My local supplier gets $2.00 per pound for it... it's very expensive stuff.

How do you transport it and store it? Very quickly. You'll need an ice chest, preferably a metal-box Coleman or Thermos, not one of the cheap plastic coolers which won't last long: plastic becomes brittle and shatters at dry ice temperature.
What do you put into the chest with the dry ice to make it last longer? Haha! More dry ice! No, you don't put regular ice in with it: we're talking 109.3 degrees below zero here. Anything warmer than that just makes it sublimate faster: regular ice is actually "hot" compared to dry ice.

Don't use a sealed container like a thermos bottle: the gas pressure of the sublimating dry ice will cause it to explode. Put the container in the trunk of the car, not the passenger compartment, and keep the trip short. If you're running the heater or air conditioner, make sure it's set to "outside vent" and not "recirculate": carbon dioxide at concentrations of higher than 0.5% will cause you to become drowsy and pass out. Then you'll suffocate and die. Did I mention the head-on collision? Are we having fun yet?

How long will it last backstage? 5 to 10 pounds of dry ice in an ice chest will be gone within 24 hours. That's a good indication of how much of it you'll need to start with and how soon before the show to pick it up from the supplier.

How do you handle it? Very carefully. Use long tongs, like barbecue tongs, and/or wear insulated gloves or an oven mitt. Never touch dry ice: -109.3 degrees (F) causes immediate frostbite and kills tissue (like skin) instantly. The resulting injury is often referred to as a "burn" and is just as dangerous. To give you an example: dry ice is the second most popular method of branding cattle. (Ask any cowboy or rustler.)

How do you make fog and disperse it on stage? Go to dryiceinfo.com for great information on "Special Effects Using Dry Ice."

So, what am I using it for in this production? We have a brief, five-minute scene in the wizard's "laboratory" with a steaming cauldron of "something weird" fuming away. The cauldron is free-standing making it impossible to run flex-tubing to it from a fog machine. One of the actors drives right past the dry-ice supplier, fifteen minutes away, and they're open seven days a week: close and reliable. Everything about this scenario made dry ice the best choice.

There is one more option: If you have a long-running show (or a haunted house attraction) you might consider making your own dry ice! You'll need four things:

1. A siphon cylinder of Liquid CO2 from your local compressed industrial gas supplier.
2. A Frost-stick dry ice machine.
3. A Frost-Stick Catch/Storage Bag.
4. A Frost-Stick Dry Ice Press.

All of this equipment (except the CO2) is available from frost-stick.com and, including the CO2 tank, will cost you around $200 total. Not bad, considering that you will now have your own dry ice factory and can make as much as you want, when you need it. You can even sell it to other theatres or folks around town and make it pay for itself or even turn a profit.

Cool, huh? (I crack myself up!)

Bones on Stage

2004-10-25T14:12:00.000-05:00

Now and then, a show calls for some macabre body parts. Yes, Hamlet needs Yorick's skull for that scene and I'm off next weekend to see a midnight performance of "Sweeney Todd" at CLC's Chalberg Theatre. Legend tells us that the meat from his victims went into Mrs. Lovett's pies while the bones were scattered about in the catacombs of London. The show is certainly enhanced by a few stray arms and legs.

I once dated a surgeon who had a real human skull on her bookshelf, a leftover from medical school where the students had to purchase them from a skeleton supplier in Bangladesh. Creepy, yes, but the poor decedent had no idea that his cranium spent most of its time with a cigarette hanging out of his mouth or as a prop at numerous costume parties. "I'm Henry the Eighth, I am. Allow me to introduce you to my ex-wife, Anne." Then the skull, which we naturally named Yorick, would appear from a shoulder bag and get a good scream. Horribly irreverent, eh what? Med school must be a lot of fun... imagine the practical jokes.

In Greece, where I lived for many years, the cemeteries are small and bodies are only allowed to be buried for five years. Then the relatives have to dig them up and transfer the bones (if they're ready) to a box in the ossuary, a small building in each cemetery. Wealthier folks have metal boxes with their names engraved but a poor person is just as likely to end up in something from the supermarket; many an indigent is memorialized as "Corn Flakes." As for the "agnosti," the "unknowns," their skeletons pop up from time to time and are usually dumped in a burlap sack in the corner of the ossuary. Need a skull? Help yourself. (Is this grossing you out? Hey, different cultures, different customs, and real theatre special effects folks love stories like this!)

Okay, where do you get this stuff if graverobbing is frowned upon in your neighborhood? You want it to look real but, with a limited budget, not cost an arm and a leg. (Hahaha! Good one, CJ.) Well, take a look at the CreepyFX website where you can get anatomically perfect parts for quite reasonable prices. Need some arms? They're $19.99 each and whole skeletons are only $128.98. They'll be happy to give you a hand or a "leg up" with your show. (I crack myself up!)

Unused Marionettes (some strings attached)

2004-10-16T10:52:00.000-05:00

Just when I thought that every full-length feature concept had been topped by "Sky Captain," along come my favorite guys with "Team America: World Police." No, I'm not talking about Trey Parker and Matt Stone although I like their work (who else would have thought about making a TV series using a box of Colorforms? And "The South Park Movie" gave at least one 14-year-old stranger an excuse to sit next to me and pretend I was his father.)

No, I'm talking about the Chiodo Brothers: Charles, Stephen and Edward, the most famous puppeteers since Jim Henson. I added them to my list of special-effects superstars after seeing their classic "Killer Klowns from Outer Space" back in the '80's. While there hasn't been a "Revenge of the Klowns" (yet, and I hope there is!), the Chiodos have been working hard all along and the marionettes in "Team America" are their latest masterpieces.

While all of the puppets get a workout (and worked over) in the movie, the George Bush and John Kerry puppets were shelved as the producers were leery of using candidates during an election year or of appearing biased in any way politically; rather, they chose to offend everyone else equally. So: somewhere, sitting on a shelf, are the two candidate marionettes, still fresh in their boxes yet both more animated (and perhaps smarter) than their live models. I'm sure they'll end up as part of a private collection or in a museum someday so don't watch for them on eBay. Another marionette you won't be seeing is Michael Moore, which is, let's say, "hors de combat" at the end of the movie. Unless he had a stand-in.

Janet Leigh (1927-2004)

2004-10-04T22:34:00.000-05:00

Having mentioned her twice in this blog in the past year, we note the passing of actress Janet Leigh. While most remember her as the unfortunate Marion Crane in Hitchcock's "Psycho" (1960) that was not the role that sticks in my memory: in 1958, my father, Don, took me and my friends to see Richard Fleischer's "The Vikings" starring Kirk Douglas, Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh on my birthday. I was 15 years old at the time and Janet's Morgana stayed with me for many years after as the most beautiful movie heroine ever. Then, in 1984, my father won a technical Academy Award presented by Janet Leigh. We'll miss her.

A Washday Miracle!

2004-10-02T21:22:00.000-05:00

Do you collect souvenir t-shirts from every show you work? Me too! Now you've got drawers and drawers full of t-shirts? Me too! Is your idea of "dress-up" a clean t-shirt? Mine too! When you do laundry, and you end up with all those piles of t-shirts, don't you hate the time it takes to fold them all? Me too!

Last week, Jay Leno noted that when Martha Stewart begins her prison term, she'll begin working at a wage of between 18 and 40 cents an hour. "In other words," said Leno, "she'll be earning the same as all the people currently making the Martha Stewart line of clothing."

What Martha doesn't know, yet, is how efficient those Asian sweatshop employees are thanks to the application of such arts as Japanese origami. Thanks to this short but incredible training video, I can now fold thirty t-shirts perfectly in less than one minute. Yes, you read that right: in less than two seconds and in one smooth motion you can have a flawlessly folded t-shirt: talk about washday miracles!

What has this got to do with theatrical special effects? Everything! Those wardrobe people will absolutely freak out when you demonstrate this and you'll be acknowledged as the backstage wizard that we know you are.

Bloody Brilliant!

2004-09-23T10:50:00.000-05:00

While we're on the subject of Halloween, I've received a lot of questions lately regarding "stage blood" such as "What's the best brand?" "Where do you buy it?" "How do I make it?" and "How do I clean up the mess?" I usually direct folks to the Stagecraft FAQ (see link in the list on the left.) Just scroll down to item 3 in the Special Effects section: "Stage Blood" and you'll learn everything you need to know. Hint: while yummy on hot dogs, ketchup is not the answer.

One interesting question was posed on the Magic Cafe forum in which the magician needed blood with very unique properties: it had to be sprayable on an ordinary tablecloth and then easily cleaned afterwards. Here's what I wrote:

Let the tablecloth clean itself: Make yourself some red disappearing ink (as opposed to the normal blue) which will evaporate to colorless in a few minutes, ready for the next show. The disappearing ink is made by dissolving a small amount of phenolphthalein in ethyl alcohol, then dilute it with water to consistency. The red color is obtained by the addition of a small quantity of sodium hydroxide (lye) although I would think that any base, such as baking soda (not powder!), would work and be less caustic. Juggling the percentage of water to alcohol is how you control the "disappearing" time. More alcohol, disappears more quickly. More water, disappears more slowly. A little vermouth and an olive instead of the laxative phenolphthalein and you have a "Houdini Martini" which disappears immediately!

Haunted House Ideas

2004-09-23T10:16:00.000-05:00

A little over a month until Halloween. If you haven't started that "haunt" project yet, you're up against a tight deadline, especially if you've never done one before. I've been visiting the haunt forums lately for new effects and, while there's not much new this year, there are hundreds of great gags available on the internet.
Haunts are usually summer projects: the gags are built in someone's garage or workshop, then installed in the venue starting about now. If you weren't aware, haunters make up a huge subculture and they really live to scare the pants off people. Thousands of haunts are built and operated each year, many by volunteers as a charity or fundraiser. After all, if you're going to give someone a heart attack, at least they'll be glad that it was for a good cause!
Your venue may be a school, church basement, empty warehouse or, if you're lucky, an abandoned, creepy, old mansion that is donated each year. Perhaps you're just looking for ideas for a great Halloween party and don't know where to start. Mark Butler's site has 663 great projects and is probably the "motherlode" of haunting ideas which will make you scream with delight. You may never leave it... moohaha! http://markbutler.8m.com/monsterlist.htm

The Sky Captain Syndrome

2004-09-17T11:22:00.000-05:00

Every time that a new technology becomes practical, it isn't official until it appears in a major motion picture. I always watch these carefully to see what their impact will be on live theatre, especially at the community level where budgets are tight. I'm not necessarily interested in whether the technology is applicable to live theatre special effects; it usually isn't. I'm more interested in the "jading" of the audience to the point that people cease expecting anything on stage that is nearly as exciting as what's available down at the movieplex.

In the last decade we've seen morphing appear in "Terminator 2", computer-generated actors such as velociraptors in "Jurassic Park" and Jar-Jar Binks in "Star Wars First Episode," and now, a completely computer-generated set in "Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow." Boy, movies are fun, aren't they? Makes the old stage look pretty boring.

George Lucas was asked, in regards to Jar-Jar: "If you can make a realistic actor out of nothing but pixels, how soon before we see a movie starring dead screen icons in major roles?" Lucas replied that, while he "could" do that, he had no intention of doing it as he disagreed with the concept. Shortly after that, Fred Astaire appeared selling Dust-Busters on TV and folks let out a collective howl. Now here's Sir Laurence Olivier, who died in 1989, playing the villain in the 2004 "Sky Captain." While Olivier (and the dust-busting Astaire) were not computer-generated like Jar-Jar was, they were edited together from live footage taken during their lives and inserted into places they never imagined they would be. Sounds a bit ghoulish and creepy, doesn't it? But at least it's honest: They aren't recreated in total digital format where they could then be made to do things they would never have done and say things they would never have said. That would be meddling with history in a way that could be politically frightening and truly obnoxious: Imagine JFK and Marilyn Monroe in a movie about, well, JFK and Marilyn Monroe. What would be the difference between actors playing JFK and Marilyn as opposed to CGI images? The latter could be deceiving, possibly even finding their way into history as actual events in the hands of a shrewd revisionist. Yes, all film is suspicious these days. I assume that Olivier's heirs approved of the "Sky Captain" scenes and as for Lucas, well, Industrial Light and Magic did have a hand in the visual effects although George cannot be faulted for changing his mind; he hasn't built a pixellated dead icon yet.

As far as the imagery goes, it's amazing to watch the actors instead. Now, this is "pure" acting at its best; they are reacting to things that aren't happening and looking at things that aren't there. The entire movie was shot on a Chromakey Blue set which leaves a blank background that can be filled-in in the computer lab. It's an old technology (watch Colin Mockerie's on-the-spot reporting on "Whose Line is It Anyway?") but has never been used for an entire motion picture. Plan on seeing this one several times, once for the full rush, once to watch the actors and once again to watch the intricate prop insertion: in one shot, Gwyneth Paltrow steps down onto the wheel of an airplane. Not only is the airplane not there: the wheel isn't either! Breathtaking stuff.

Does any of this translate to the live stage? Maybe when holographic projection becomes readily available, that is, reaches that stage where the hardware and software fall into the gap between "available to professionals" and "available to every kid on the block." In the meantime, consider optical illusion more strongly: imaginary sets and props of the Kurt Wenner type and projected background tricks like "Anderson's Ghost." After all, the audience expects us to justify the ticket prices even if we don't sell as much popcorn as "Sky Captain."

I'm Back - Magically!

2004-09-08T15:19:00.000-05:00

I apologize for my protracted absence (about 180 degrees... hahaha!) from this Blog but I've been researching the world of magic on the internet.

Why? Well, stage magic and theatrical special effects are two sides of the same coin and I've been trying to make heads or tails of it all. Hahahaha... okay, I'll settle down now.

There are oodles of magic discussion forums on the world-wide-web where professional magicians, amateur magicians, David Copperfield wannabes and just plain curious, annoying little buggers compare opinions and ideas then spend the rest of the time slagging one another off. Apparently, the most controversial site on the web is The Magic Cafe founded by Steve Brooks three years ago and boasting 15,000 members. It's very tightly policed by aides as far as language, content and a paranoid fear of something called "exposure" where newbies ask how tricks are done and get yelled at for asking or where people are expelled for telling them. The Cafe is divided into rooms and once a user reaches 51 posts he can enter a secret place called "The Banquet Room" where it is allowed to talk about how tricks are done. Natch, this is the place you want to reach because why else would you go to The Magic Cafe? In the Banquet Room is a forum called "Secret Sessions" (moohaha) containing the heart of the entire site: a topic called "Howie Diddits" consisting of 14 pages (at this writing) of extremely useful information for the theatrical special effects designer. It takes a while to post 51 meaningful messages but once you have, the door opens and there you are; shove a ream of paper and a new ink cartridge into your printer and print, print, print until you've got it all.

One would get the impression that a number of people don't like The Magic Cafe by the sheer number of anti-Steve Brooks blogs on the internet. We can assume that these are all maintained by people who've been expelled from The Magic Cafe for writing bad words or slagging off some of the regulars there; the Cafe Police enforce a "Let's all play nice" policy and encourage the 15,000 subscribers to rat on one another when somebody writes "Bullshit" on the blackboard (even though it's a popular Penn & Teller TV show.) The paranoia is a bit overwhelming: posts contain phrases like "st***ed d**k" to fool the Cafe Police into thinking they might not be talking about a deck being stacked. Nonetheless, some of the anti-cafe sites have useful information as well as being refreshingly hilarious, so you might want to check out The Magic Circle Jerk, Magic Rants and The Gunnsight just to keep your scorecard on "who-hates-whom-today" up to date. After all, you wouldn't want to make the mistake of getting too close to anybody on these forums or you might become what Donald Rumsfeld euphemistically calls "collateral damage."

Other interesting and occasionally useful forums, of the dozens I've visited, are:
The Penguin Magic Forum of Penguin Magic Inc.
The Genii Forum of Genii Magazine
Street Magic Revealed
and Ellusionist.

There are lots more; you can make yourself crazy by searching for them all. Of course, you'll notice right away that all of them look exactly alike and have posts by the same people. Sometimes you need to look at your browser address bar to remember which forum you're in.

Now that I'm armed with all of this magic information, I'm ready to tackle the special effects for the upcoming GLAPA production of "Once Upon A Mattress" where I need to teach the "Wizard" how to turn a silk scarf into a cane and how to produce a flower bouquet out of thin air. How will I do that, you ask? Well, I don't want to "expose" any "secret methods" but I just bought one of these and one of these. Shhhh... don't tell the Magic Police or I may be expelled or, worse yet, slagged off!

It's great to be back.

Build Your Own Nuclear Reactor (or maybe NOT!)

2004-07-15T17:33:00.000-05:00

I thought that "Spiderman 2" was loads of fun, especially when Doc Ock's fission reactor got out of control (see the movie), but as always, truth is stranger than fiction! In the early 1990's, in a suburb of Detroit, a 17-year-old Boy Scout named David Hahn commenced the construction of a nuclear breeder reactor in a backyard garden potting shed and ended up creating a radioactive nightmare that required the Environmental Protection Agency to dismantle and clean up after putting 40,000 residents at risk. The story was kept under wraps until Harper's Magazine published the story, by Ken Silverstein, in November 1998. It's the kind of story that gives the Department of Homeland Security the heebie-jeebies just thinking about!

What has this got to do with Theatrical Special Effects?
1. Nothing.
2. Warning: Don't Try This At Home!
3. As a teenager, I built a linear accelerator in our basement (didn't you?) Special Effects geeks are drawn to stories like this, so read and enjoy, especially about David's dedication and his talent for scrounging hard-to-find materials and skill at improvisation.
4. I expect to see this story become a major motion picture. They'll use lots of special effects.

Blowing stuff up... or down...

2004-06-05T10:53:00.000-05:00

Since we Theatrical Special Effects designers are often dismissed as being focused on "killing people and blowing things up," we may as well know what it is that we don't do! The following is an illustrated transcript of implosionworld.com's
"A History of Structural Demolition in America", which was presented at the 28th Annual International Society of Explosives Engineers Conference in Las Vegas, Nevada on February 11th, 2002. BOOM!

How to calculate the speed of light...

2004-05-28T13:47:00.000-05:00

...with a microwave oven and a bag of marshmallows! What has this to do with theatrical special effects, you ask? Not much, but it's so brilliantly non-intuitive and so technically amazing that I had to link to it! After the experiment, says physics teacher Robert Stauffer Jr., "...the students can eat the marshmallows."

"Psycho" shower scene voted best movie death

2004-05-20T11:41:00.000-05:00

Total Film Magazine's deputy editor, Simon Crook, stated in the most recent issue:

"It's the sheer violence of the edit rather than any explicit gore; 70 different angles, over 90 cuts and those shrieking violins. It's a master class in montage and audience manipulation."

Crook added: "Knowing that the blood is Bosco's chocolate syrup and that a pulped casaba melon stood in for the stabbing noises does nothing to reduce the impact."

Stanley Kubrick's "Dr. Strangelove Or: How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Bomb" (1964) came second, with Slim Pickens riding an atomic bomb like a rodeo cowboy. King Kong's fall from the Empire State Building in the 1933 classic of the same name took third in Total Film's ratings, and Bambi's mother's death in 1942 rated sixth (although never seen.)

Alan Rickman's fall from a 30-story building in "Die Hard" (1988) comes fourth, with fifth place going to "Bonnie and Clyde" (1967).

"Some of the deaths in the poll, like The Wicked Witch melting in 'The Wizard Of Oz' (13th), are iconic but laughable, but nearly 45 years on, 'Psycho's' shower scene is still distressing," said Crook.

A wall of flame: Technifex FauxFire

2004-05-16T14:46:00.000-05:00

I hate running into those directors, and unfortunately they are legion, who equate the term special effects with killing people and blowing things up. They're the English teachers or drama majors who have found themselves pushed into directing student theatre as part of their job, hate every minute of it and usually aren't paid extra for it so they give us the requisite senior class play each year which barely passes the grandparent test. (The "grandparent test," if you're new to this blog, is when the audience consists mostly of family and everything and everyone is wonderful because if it weren't for the Drama Club, Billy and Susie would be watching 56 hours of television a week or, heaven help us, playing basketball!)

We take these directors aside and patiently explain that the script calls for a ringing alarm clock and a thunderstorm but at our best, we can show them how to download sound effects from SoundDogs or Mean Rabbit and play them over the auditorium PA. There is no budget and very little time expended so that's the standard high-school fare and it carries over into community college and eventually, community theatre. That's also why most amateur theatre productions look, well, amateur.

Occasionally, however, a school or community theatre finds itself blessed with a talented vocal director and/or choreographer and decides to tackle a show like Barbara Damasheck's Quilters. When a gem like this comes across our radar, we need to twist some arms and get involved. Quilters involves a great fire in Act II, the "Crosses and Losses" scene, in which the entire stage bursts into flames. (The same gag works for Gone With the Wind and Joan of Arc, along with many others.)

Obviously, open flames are out of the question and no community theatre has a deep enough stage to allow a wide, rear-projected fire behind the scrim. Silk flames, like the Le Maitre Le Flame are okay for campfires and torches but out of the question for setting the entire proscenium width on fire.

Along comes Technifex with their fantastic FauxFire illusion. Take a look at the video downloads; the effect is absolutely breathtaking! You will immediately notice that the eight-foot unit rents for $1000 a day and you would need at least three of these to cover the average stage width. Out of your budget? Okay, does the school have an industrial arts shop and a sheet metal press brake? Then build your own! You'll need some inexpensive galvanized sheet metal (aluminum is too soft and too expensive), some three-foot fluorescent fixtures (scrap,) orange/red/yellow gels (cheap), a fogger/hazer or two (rented) and some small desk fans for the agitators (borrowed.) As for the construction details, Technifex kindly gives us those here.

Remember: This effect is patented so you can't sell it or rent it out, but the law allows you to build it for your own use and you'll make enough modifications to the design (I already have in my explanation) to avoid any infringement. Oh, yes: DO remember to warn the audience, with signs, in the program and perhaps in an announcement that... hey, it's theater. But what a show you'll have!

Lightning Wire

2004-05-02T11:14:00.000-05:00

Of course, Jay Maynard and his "Tron" costume are now world-famous, having been picked up by dozens of blogs and several TV interviewers. Jay's fame, it becomes apparent, is due to his lack of self-consciousness regarding his physique more than to the design of his "Tron" costume, which has been done to death by many others.
This blog, however, is in awe of one component of the costume: "Lightningwire" from Fiber Optic Products, Inc. Take a look at their website and let your imagination run wild. In my imagination, this product has replaced neon as the special effects material of choice for lighted signs on stage. The prices are also well within your budget no matter how small your production.

If you're going to shoot somebody... BLAM!

2004-04-24T17:57:00.000-05:00

I just returned from a local high-school production of "West Side Story." Yes, that's right; a high-school production. I was obliged to go and to support our up-and-coming local talent but I had all of the obvious reservations, the main one being "Why?"
I mean, here's a powerhouse of a show. It needs a powerhouse production: singers, dancers, an orchestra that can really play Bernstein's best. You just don't find it at the high-school level and it's not a show that even community theatres think about much. So it didn't come off very well but it passed the "parent test" (Oh, wasn't Jimmy wonderful? Yes, he hit his marks and said his lines and sort of sang so he was wonderful. My, but it's changed his life! He's so into theatre now!)
Good for Jimmy. How about the rest of the audience that wasn't part of Jimmy's extended family? Basically, the show sucked. Let me straighten a few things out. I'm a special effects guy so I won't talk about the high-school band trying to play "Jump" from Bernstein's score (actually and fortunately they couldn't so they wisely didn't; we got an edited version of the play.) I'm just going to talk about Tony's death scene.
So here's Tony, wandering about the stage yelling "Chino! Come and get me!" So here comes Chino and he pulls out a starter pistol that he borrowed from the track coach. It's a tiny toy with a gray cylinder and that stupid red plastic thing at the tip of the barrel that screams FAKE and he pulls the trigger. The thing goes "pop" and Tony does the requisite "ugggghhhh" and falls down. Duh. Now, the audience had just come back from Denzel Washington's "Man On Fire" where they had seen a zillion people blown away with blood and guts flying everywhere. So what was this "Pop... Uggggghhh" thing? It sure wasn't theatre.
Hey, directors! Give them their money's worth! If you really have to shoot somebody on stage, call your local special effects guy and do it right! Here's how.
First of all, every school and community theatre must own a prop gun. I mean something that actually looks like a gun. No, not a real gun (not ever) and the "Columbine Laws" across the United States prohibit bringing an actual firearm onto school property so we use replicas. Back when I was younger, Revell, Monogram and other modelmakers sold great plastic kits. My favorite was their plastic .45 Automatic that was authentic in every detail and even fired wooden "bullets" while mimicking the recoil of the slide mechanism. It sold for 98 cents back in the late 1950s and if you can find one of them now, grab it! Otherwise, replica pistols run around 50 bucks or so. Pick a gun, any gun, buy it and add it to your theatre prop inventory. You'll use it a lot. Automatic, six-shooter, it doesn't matter as long as it's BIG and looks exactly, in every detail, like a real pistol.
Now we wire the shooter. Get a 4-inch, 8-ohm speaker from some junk appliance: a trashed radio, TV, boombox, whatever as long as it's free. Mount it on a piece of masonite or thin wood about 8 inches square and attach a neck strap to the top of it so that when the actor puts it on it hangs at the center of his chest. Attach two wires to the speaker contacts, about three feet long and terminate them in a 1/4 inch plug, available from any Radio Shack for under a buck. Run the wire down to the actor's pocket where we conceal:
A tiny cassette recorder, like a Radio Shack CTR-112. If you're really high-tech, an MP3 player is even better... and smaller. Add these to your inventory... you'll use them a lot!
Now make the tape. What I do is, using an Xacto knife, open a C-30 cassette (or any) and throw away everything but twelve inches of tape. I then splice that together (use a bias splice instead of a butt splice - it elimnates the "pop") to produce an endless loop. Once I have gimmicked the cassette, I record a good gunshot. You'll find the best at Sounddogs.com or at Mean Rabbit , the best choices for sound effects on the Internet.
The effect works like this: the shooter raises his prop gun and, with his other hand, presses the "play" button on his pocket player. His chest resounds with a mighty "BLAM" and he jerks his hand at the recoil while simultaneously hitting the "stop" button. The victim "takes the hit" and falls. Great effect!
If you want to get more complex and have the shooter's gun actually flash and emit smoke, or have the victim actually show a bullet hit and start to bleed or, even more fun, have his brains or guts splatter against the wall as he collapses, then you need the Camelot white paper on "Gunshot effects." In that paper I also cover the construction of a machine gun (Tommy Gun, Chicago Style) and the wiring of squibs across the set and the victims as well as the gagging of exploding props in the gunpath.
Hey... If you're going to shoot some people on stage, make it entertaining!

"Anderson's Ghost" - adding 21st-Century salt to "Pepper's"

2004-03-26T00:27:00.000-06:00

The illusion that is today known in stage magic, motion pictures, haunted houses and optical FX as "Pepper's Ghost" is well-agreed-upon by theatrical historians as having been designed by the English engineer Henry Dircks, who had created a small working model of the effect around 1860. The showman, Professor John Pepper, heard about this optical principle and the two men became partners and began collaborating to create the effect as a stage illusion. They applied for a patent together in 1862. In those days such principles were patentable since late 19th-century science was a period of amazement and phenomenal leaps in all directions. Showmanship was at the cutting edge and premiered many inventions and achievements before their practical applications had been discovered.

Dircks and Pepper used a large pane of plate glass set at a 45-degree angle (either vertical or horizontal) that reflected brightly lit actors off-stage or below-stage, superimposing them with the on-stage set and actors. "Pepper's Ghost" was featured at the Royal Polytechnic in London, a science museum and auditorium on Regent Street. The actor portraying the "ghost" was illuminated by an oxygen-hydrogen lamp (both gases readily available by simple electrolysis of water) and the illusion attracted hundreds of thousands of visitors, became the talk of London, made Pepper a lot of money and was imitated around the world. If you've been through "The Haunted Mansion" at Disneyland you've seen Pepper's Ghost; twice, actually. The ballroom dancers for one and "Beware of Hitch-hiking Ghosts" for the second.

The illusion was a permanent installation at the Royal Polytechnic requiring one monstrous sheet of plate glass the width of the stage and almost double the proscenium height. Pulling this gag in a community theatre production today is not even a physical possibility let alone a financial or logistical one. Where are you gonna get a 40 foot square piece of plate glass to start with? In your dreams. And then what? Forget it. Not that it isn't used today: smaller pieces of plate glass, doorway-sized, still amaze people in "dark rides," haunted houses and stage magic illusions but the gag is outdated, unwieldy, expensive and transparent (pun intended) to today's sophisticated audience.

Welcome to the 21st Century! First, let's look at the future:

Tim Hansen of Oasis Stage Werks and a major force in ESTA (Entertainment Services & Technology Association) was interviewed by Bill Sapsis of Sapsis Rigging Inc. Part of the interview went as follows:

Sapsis: "Care to gaze into your crystal ball and see where the industry is heading in the next 5 years or so?"

Hansen: "I see more technology entering the industry, more moving lights, more motorized rigging, more projected and video effects, more LED's, for instance. This is not a bad thing but it will require more savvy
technicians. It will also allow bigger and better shows in smaller spaces. As the technology becomes more affordable, the things that the High School drama teacher has always wanted for a show now become possible. Helping people execute their creative vision is a really great thing."

Thanks, Tim! "Projected and video effects" is the phrase I needed. Allow me to introduce "Anderson's Ghost," the state-of-the-art ghost effect for every production from Charles Dickens's "A Christmas Carol" to Noel Coward's "Blithe Spirit." It requires components readily-available to every high school or college theatre: a digital camera, a laptop computer, a digital projector (800 lumens or more), an overhead electric with dimmable fresnels, Adobe Photoshop or a similar editor and, if you really want to wow the crowd, an animation utility for GIF89a such as GIF Construction Set or Microsoft GIF Animator.

Effect: An actor enters the stage, totally transparent. The audience can see through the actor as he/she passes across the set. At any given point, the ghost interacts with objects behind it such as straightening framed pictures or picking up objects such as a flower from a vase. This is seen through the back of the ghost, yet, as the ghost turns, the object behind it (picture, flower) has changed! Better yet, the ghost becomes less transparent and finally moves to center stage fully opaque!

It's not expensive to snap the components together but it is incredibly complex as far as technical know-how. That's why you'll need my white-paper on "Anderson's Ghost," available via e-mail to Camelot (click the link) or soon on our upcoming website for a nominal fee. We're putting video together soon to show the effect and it's a shocker, guaranteed to make an audience gasp and ask afterward, in the joydit line: "How did you do that?" Write me for details.

Intelligent table saw won't cut flesh: brilliant safety device

2004-03-24T18:24:00.000-06:00

You'll sleep easier with one of these in the theatre shop. Watch the live video of the SawStop contacting a hot dog and stopping within 5/msec leaving nothing but a tiny nick. Prices start at $700. It's obvously useless as a piece of deli equipment...

Robotics

2004-03-14T19:46:00.000-06:00

I'm working on the chapter in my upcoming book on Special Effects for Community and Municipal Theatre called Robotics. It's important to remember the budget in our field and the budget for Special Effects is usually either nonexistent or buried somewhere within "Set Design" or "Props." So: when the script of Rodgers and Hammerstein's "Cinderella" says, during the Fairy Godmother entrance in Act I, Scene 4: "She motions to a chair and it moves across the floor until it is neatly under her and she sits," the director should start thinking "special effects" and the Special Effects Designer should start thinking "Robotics."
The concept of the "quadruped walker" is well-known among roboticists and well-documented on the internet. While the "cheap-and-cheerful" approach usually involves dragging a chair across the floor with fishline, that doesn't give us the audience "gasp" or the "How did they do that?" response that we stage illusionists want to hear. A robotic walking chair is the only way to play this gag and it requires a windshield-wiper motor from an automobile junkyard and some battery holders and a toy radio-control module from Radio Shack. The plans and schematics will shortly be available on the Camelot website and in my book.
Robotics isn't easy. I have catalogued dozens of links to amateur robotics sites with impressive videos and construction techniques, as well as followed the development of Honda's Asimo and Sony's Qrio. I really felt overwhelmed when NASA landed the two robots on Mars and felt that the robotics world had passed me by when DARPA announced the million-dollar prize for the first autonomous robot to make it 142 miles across the Mojave Desert to Las Vegas yesterday. I thought that, with all of the research and talent out there, it would be a piece of cake. "This is too simple, too easy," I thought, so hadn't even bothered starting work on a machine that could do it.
Well, the contest is over. Not one of the 15 companies, universities or private groups made it any further than seven miles! What a hoot... read the results!
The "Cinderella Chair" only needs to walk ten feet. I'm delighted that we, in live theatre, don't have quite the challenge yet. Of course, we also don't get to play for a million dollars.

Just when I became bored with motion-picture special effects...

2004-03-09T16:35:00.000-06:00

...along comes an ad agency like Submedia with a concept that is so elegant in its simplicity that it makes me wish that I lived in Manhattan and could ride this subway every day. You'll need Quicktime or Windows Media Player to view the videos, and a broadband connection is nice, then check out the Dasani ad that's wowing New Yorkers. You might even get thirsty.

Sequential stationary images, but the audience is in motion. That's brilliant! Of course, the Italians have their own version, MotionPoster, but their technology is nowhere near as elegant as Submedia's which uses fundamentally no technology at all!

Need some Moxie?...

2004-03-06T18:22:00.000-06:00

...or any vintage type of soda pop or candy from the last two centuries, in the original bottles and packages and brewed from the original recipes? The Soda Pop Stop in Los Angeles has over 300 varieties and ships anywhere (although the shipping costs for the glass bottles are equal to the price of the soda and there is a $12 minimum.) So, when you need sarsaparilla or Moxie for that next production of The Music Man, get the real thing. Who knows? You might even like the taste of it!

3-D or not 3-D?

2004-03-02T19:37:00.000-06:00

The work of the artist Kurt Wenner speaks for itself, especially his phenomenal "sidewalk art" which takes days to create and each is a masterpiece in itself. Wenner's pieces feature caverns into the depths of hell with demons crawling upward, huge pools with reflections of the live actors standing next to them and even marble pedestals with actual people standing on them... all two-dimensional artwork giving the impression of being actual objects in a three-dimensional world.

While the viewing angle is critical to these works, which lend themselves only to "front-on" viewing (such as photography) or the trick becomes apparent, they utilize the concept of "perspective" as an optical illusion that is seldom considered. I got to thinking one day: "What if you needed walls, columns or furniture on a proscenium stage as a set for a choir or as a special effect?" Take a look and see for yourselves, especially at this piece entitled "Cocito" done in Pasadena, CA in 1988. No, those people are not elevated!

Set designers: try this trick at home. Cut a piece of paper into a long trapezoid then lay it on a table, long edge to the back. Now step backward until it becomes a rectangle. Get the idea?

Technical Certification

2004-03-01T00:04:00.000-06:00

It was wonderful to attend the Greater Lakes Association of Performing Arts (GLAPA) production of Ken Ludwig's "Moon Over Buffalo" last Saturday night and to see all of the running crew's names in the program with asterisks after each signifying "Technical Theatre Certified." This meant that every tech on the crew, rigging, lighting and sound, had attended and passed our three-week Technical Theatre Certification Course involving a week on rigging theory, operation and safety, a week on lighting design, programming, instrument intallation, maintenance and operation, and a half-week on audio (mikes, placement, sound effects and operation of the sound board and computers) plus a practicum involving a live performance. These techs now hold certification cards for the Pequot Lakes Community Theatre allowing them to operate the equipment and giving the school administration a degree of comfort in knowing that "the most dangerous place in town" was in trained hands.

It's interesting to see that ESTA, the Entertainment Services & Technology Association, is working on developing an Entertainment Technician Certification Program (ETCP), (follow the hyperlinks) a new industry-wide program being developed with the following organizations: Canadian Institute for Theatre Technology (CITT), International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE), International Association of Assembly Managers (IAAM), Themed Entertainment Association (TEA), and United States Institute for Theatre Technology (USITT). Two key areas have been identified for initial development - electrical skills and rigging skills.

Okay, I'm excited to hear about this initiative but, looking deeper into it, it sounds a bit like herding cats to me. So you've got your ESTA ETCP card; now what? If you're a non-union employee of a community or municipal theatre with ETCP certification hosting a visiting IATSE company loading in, who pulls rank? Can non-union techs even qualify for the certification? Does the ETCP guarantee you IATSE or CITT membership? And my "spider-sense" really starts tingling when I read that a goal of the ETCP is to provide a "legally defensible" set of standards. Yipes! The program is already being designed with a courtroom in mind.

Electrical codes are fully established in all 50 states. Most states have no theatrical rigging codes or inspection requirements. Accidents happen every day, usually involving grade school or high school kids who are setting up a pageant or a show under the guidance of an untrained teacher. "Multi-use, community-access" theatres are the danger ground here, and "Theatre Use Policies" are a must. Is this where the ETCP Certificate holder reigns? Does it give the "legally defensible" right to challenge shool superintendants across the country and to lock down theatres to "certified personnel only?" I'll be interested to see how the ESTA initiative progresses; the driving forces look pretty impressive but I hope they're not just thinking Broadway and Disney World here. The schools, community and municipal theatres are where the focus needs to be; we've got the same gear out here and the owners and administrators haven't a clue until the ambulance arrives.

Recognition at last

2004-02-29T23:15:00.000-06:00

I would like to thank the members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for finally acknowledging the category "Visual Effects." That eliminates some of the years of confusion that we Special Effects Technicians in live theatre have had to suffer through and it's like a weight has been lifted from our shoulders. It was difficult enough when CGI, which used to mean "common graphics interface," was suddenly ripped away by the motion picture industry to signify "computer generated imagery" and worse yet when pixel manipulation took over on-screen for the mechanical, chemical and electrical illusions for which our trade was once famous.
I'd also like to acknowledge my father, Don Anderson, who in 1985 won a Technical and Scientific Academy Award for his development, with his chemist partner at 3M, Diana Reiners, of Cinetrak film, a better magnetic film for sound recording that had improved signal-to-noise properties through use of low-noise oxide giving a tremendous improvement in dynamic range that changed Hollywood sound for two decades. While the Scientific and Technical Academy Awards aren't broadcast like the regular Oscars since they involve backstage geeks who wouldn't draw a crowd if they lit their hair on fire and gave away ten-dollar bills, the ceremony is a red-carpet affair in Hollywood with celebrities and tuxedoes and a very great honor to those unsung heroes in the theatre technical arts. Here are photos of my father and Diana with Janet Leigh, the 1985 presenter, and at a party with Bob Hope on the following day. I am, needless to say, indebted to Dad for setting me off on this backstage course.

HEADS! Newsletter and "Uncle Bill"

2004-02-12T15:52:00.000-06:00

I just finished reading the latest (and too infrequent!) copy of the "NetHEADS!" newsletter from "Uncle Bill" Sapsis of Sapsis Rigging Inc. also available on-line at his webHEADS! site. I cannot recommend it strongly enough to anyone involved backstage; I've been quoting sections of it in every Theatre Tech class I've taught over the past few years. In case you wonder about the title ("HEADS!") that's the tech's answer to Saint Peter when he asks: "What was the last thing you heard as you stepped up to the lock rail?"

While I've yet to meet Bill Sapsis in person (we're both USITT members but in different regions) I think I would like him for three reasons:
1. He writes well.
2. He rides a Harley.
3. He's old enough to have family in the business.

As far as his professional qualifications are concerned, he must be good (see 3 above) since counterweight systems have a unique way of weeding out the incompetent and careless. So give HEADS! a read, especially the chapters on "Counterweight Systems" and "Rope Locks." We have a couple dozen techs here who might live long enough to own Harleys some day thanks to Uncle Bill.

Curtain up!

2004-02-12T15:09:00.000-06:00

Welcome to the Camelot Blog, a place to come for news, tips and links to items of interest in the field of budget special effects for live theatre. I'd like to begin by thanking Mark at ibreed.net for the beautiful logo design above. Take a look at their portfolio and drop them a line if you need imaginative graphics or a really unique website!