Almost time for load-in

OK, I have been really bad about blogging this time.  I haven't been able to say much until this past weekend, however, about WHY I haven't.  Time has been a little short the past few months.  In addition to designing and fabricating for Stray Dog's "God of Carnage" as well as Springer, I have been intimately involved in the development and design of New Line's new home, The Marcelle, being but by the Kranzbergs in Grand Center.  U-Studios was hired in November as the architect of the project specifically because of my affiliation with New Line.  As the resident scenic and lighting designer AND the project's architect, I was able to really mesh New Line's needs into the facility.  While this has been a very rewarding experience, it has consumed a fair amount of extra time on my part. In addition, I am still trying to run a regular architecture firm. Something had to go, and I am afraid that blogging was it.  Besides, it was really hard to not reveal information about the new space before it was officially announced.  Now that it is public knowledge, I am free to share the finished plan.


So, enough about that.  About Springer, last time I talked about the design being as much of a reproduction of the actual set for the TV show as I could do.  I felt that it was important that it was quickly recognizable as the Springer studio.

With that, there comes a shit-ton of brick work.  Springer's set is all industrial/warehouse brick and rusty metal.  We are re-using the brick originally made for RENT last spring and used again for Bonnie and Clyde last fall.  This will be repainted to blend with the new pieces.  One last appearance on the New Line stage before it is scrapped.  They are starting to look a little ragged and I do not feel like moving those panels to the new facility.

We started by making the new brick logo wall and two adjacent door openings.  The door openings are large, rusted metal frames with big pipes sticking out of the transom.  These are just 10' flats with the transom framed out. The rivet panel is a block of 2" foam with 1" styrofoam balls cut in half and glued on for rivets.  The pipe is a piece of 12" cardboard tube concrete form.  This motif is repeated in the panel above the fan...more about it later.

The brick portion is more 3/4" foam applied over luan flats and carved, just like all of the brick from the past.  The louver at the bottom is corrugated plastic roof panel framed with some wood and 1 1/2" foam balls for rivets.

For the fan, I was dreading fabricating the fan. Scott said that he didn't care whether or not it turned, so the original thought was blades out of luan on 2x2 arms tied to a plywood hub. Then Kate Wilkerson, our newest scenic artist was is a resale shop and came across a salvaged whole-house attic fan.  For $150, it saved me a bunch of time.  So we made a flat framework that appeared similar to the wall around Springer's fan.  It will be mounted in the opening once we set the walls up and brace them on stage.

The Springer set has 4 big silver pipes with rust streaks on them, setting on a base and terminating under a catwalk that guests periodically strut around on, sliding down the fireman's pole stage right.  Often this ends up becoming a stripper pole for one of his colorful guests who have aspirations of a career in the "performing arts".  The pipes are more 12" cardboard tube concrete forms setting on luan boxes.  Our catwalk will NOT be walkable.  It is 10' in the air with no way to brace it.  I told Scott that wasn't happening. :) I'm not taking that risk.  So, they are little more than 2x2 frames and railings that will rest on the pipes and the top of the brick wall.

The rest of the set consists of platforms for the "studio audience" cast members. We have platforms and legs in the storage room.  Also the two large glowing windows that I made for RENT will be re-used upstage of the two guest entrances.


Today, tomorrow and Friday Gary, Sharon, Kate, Melanie and I will wrap up the pre-painting. Then Saturday morning, it all loads on to two trailers for the trip across the river.

So, I think that I am ready... this is always a stressful time for me. I will feel better when, on Sunday at the end of the day, we have a substantially complete set, ready for touch-up paint and lights.

More after load-in...
R

In the beginning...

Well, OK, so I feel guilty.  I haven't written anything yet about the set or lighting for Springer.  I have just been being lazy and not doing shit for months. Yea, right.  Actually, I have had a good amount of my energy expended trying to make a new theater space happen, and that has been a bit of a distraction.

Then there is the fact that it was 15 degrees in the scenic shop for the past two weeks.  Who in the hell wants to spend hours in sub-freezing air trying to build stuff?


I have got a design for the Springer set.  As we usually do at New Line, we are taking the show seriously and because of that, I have tried to adapt the flavor of the real Springer set to our stage.  Our stage is not nearly as tall and there is no way, with it's pie-wedge shape, to get the identical layout.




So, I captured some of the key features. I started with the center brick wall and four metal pipes. A brick wall fills between the center two, and on each side is an areaway for the "guests" to come on stage.  These are backed with a frosted industrial window upstage of the opening.


 The fan is an icon that everyone has ever watched a Springer episode would recognize, so I have to include one.  Like I said we do not have a lot of height, so instead of a full, walkable catwalk above, I am just doing a railing to suggest the catwalk.

The show calls for a few cast members to make up a "studios audience" and Scott decided that they would be mic'd using a hanging mic. So, I had to separate them from the band to avoid the band being picked up and amplified in an uncontrolled way. I split them with the band down right and the "studios audience" down left. This leaves a nice playing area in the middle for the "guests".












I plan to re-use the same brick walls that I built for Rent behind the band and the big fan behind the "studio audience".  The two big windows from Rent will make a repeat appearance in the two gangways.

So, I just have to build the center portion.




The weather has warmed up and the shop is tolerable.  This weekend is supposed to be GLORIOUS!  So, I plan to get a few long days in building before the weather turns nasty again.

I will write an update when we have fresh things to show...
Rob

It's all in and ready...mostly (sorry, no pix in this one)

It is hard to believe that I haven't written anything in three weeks.  WOW!  I feel like I have been really negligent in documenting what has been going on. But our usual process has gotten somewhat out of whack because we were able to get into the venue earlier than usual.

As of my last post, we had loaded most of the stuff in and all of the big stuff was installed.  In fact, on what would have originally been set load-in day, everything was already at the theater except for a 17' telephone pole that we brought with us that morning.

As I was deciding how to make one, I mentioned to Larry what I wanted. At his farm, he led me back behind his barn to an old mobile home and pointed by the front step.  Standing there was a power pole that used to serve the mobile home but had long been abandoned after a branch took down the line feeding it. At 8AM on load-in morning, I met him at his farm.  He pulled his backhoe next to it, wrapped a chain around the base of the pole and he yanked it out of the ground on the first pull.  The bottom 5 feet or so were filled with mud and termites, but I had my pole.  We threw it on his trailer, swung by the scenic shop to load up the cafe counter, desk for the sheriff and a bars for the jail and headed for St. Louis.

Getting the telephone pole into the building was a bit of a challenge, but it turned out to not be too terrible.  We stood it up in the fire escape, leaned it against the upper railing and then walked the base up the rest of the steps.  With a rope and ladder, it was standing in place in about 30 minutes and I was adding the cross arm and bracing.

We put the jail together and hung the two wall panels that "float" above the band.  While Patrick and I worked on other details, Kathleen and Melanie  got the bars and the scuffed up edges of the panels painted.  Patrick attached the barber pole and fished cables to the lighting channels for the practicals.  We finished with set load-in in about 4 hours!

The following week, Scott and cast were able to move into the theater and start rehearsing in the space, really adapting to the set early.

The next Thursday, I picked up lights and early Friday morning, Patrick and I began hang and focus.  Melanie came after work at about 4 and by 7, we had everything on the ceiling and mostly focused.  Saturday morning, Melanie and I went back and finished up set details and cleaned up the stage from our previous day.  By mid afternoon on Saturday, the lights were ready to go.

Last Wednesday evening, the theater was dark, so Melanie met me there around 7 and we spent a couple of hours going through the show and kind of getting the light plot "on its feet", so to say.  Sometimes, you just have to play with what you hung and build a few looks until you find things that work.  We recorded about 15 scene presets into the submasters on the board.  These represented base lighting for each of the locations in the show.

By doing these, we had a good pallet to use as we built all of the cues, since the way the show is written and staged, it is a series of interwoven vignettes and the action moves around the stage from one location to another to push the story along.

Last Friday morning, I got to the theater at 8:30 AM. Starting with the pre-show warmer, I went page by page through the script and wrote cues.  The sound folks came around 3PM, so I took a break for lunch and Melanie again arrived after work.  We ended up finishing with cues about 9PM.  12 hours seems like a long time, but compared to RENT's 22 hours, it was a piece of cake.

Probably the most interesting and challenging cues were the 3 collections that make up the gun fights.  My concept for the gun fights was to suspend a half dozen curtain strobes upstage, against the black curtains.  A curtain strobe is a small cylinder, maybe 2" in diameter and 4" long, hanging on a black cord.  They aren't super bright, but in a dark space, they provide blinding points in the audience's eyes.  Then I rented a monster DMX strobe: a Martin Atomic 3000.  Because it is DMX controlled, I can turn it on and off in cues.  This particular model has a fourth channel that controls effects.  In addition to rate, intensity and duration of flash, it has the ability to ramp up, ramp down, random flash, or do an effect that makes killer lighting.

The gun fights are a sequence of 10-15 cues that auto-follow, one after another.  Each auto-follow time is different; anywhere from 1/2 second to 2 seconds.  In the first cue, I start the curtain strobes and they stay on for the duration of the sequence.  Each flashes randomly so they are never all together, almost like muzzle flashes from 6 different guns upstage pointing at the audience.  Then in subsequent cues, I turn on and off the Atomic 3000 set to random bursts.  This gives the effect of someone with a machine gun pulling the trigger and releasing it in bursts.  The opening and closing gun bursts last about 10 seconds and the shootout in the middle of Act 2 lasts about 5 seconds.  Those three incidents account for more than 30 cues in the show.

The next effect that I discovered as I was programming is a little out of character for a New Line show.  I go back to the initial concept that this show's design pallet is all sepia tones.  This came from thinking of it as an old movie or old photographs.  As I wrote the cues for the various vignettes and ran back thru them,  the action seemed to cut instantaneously from location to location with no transition.  While we have been accustomed to this with modern TV and film editing, old movies used a lot of dissovles often through black to go from scene to scene.  This most likely came from early filmmaking's roots in old-fashioned live theater.  So, I inserted blackouts in between each cue where the action goes from one location to the next. Normally, blackouts are not part of a light plot that I would do at New Line, but this gave the show a more old movie feel. To keep it moving, I used auto-follows to go into the next cue. The result is a dissolve-thru-black, just like an old movie.

When we went through cue-to-cue on Saturday, we discovered that several of those auto-follows needed to be lengthened because the actors just needed a couple of seconds to get out of the way so that the next scene could start.  So I talked to Gabe and we decided that we would pull almost all of the auto-folllows out of the cues.  He just has to hit the GO button twice as often, but now he has control over it.

I never thought that I would use blackouts like that again in a modern show, but it really needs it to keep the audience from getting confused that the action has moved to another place and time.

All said and done, the show is a little over 200 light cues.  While not as many or as complicated as RENT was, it is still a sizeable number and probably one of the larger light plots that I have done.

Tonight is first full-tech run-thru and Gabe is at the helm.  I am anxious to see how it goes...
R

Loading in and wrapping up the set for Bonnie & Clyde

I haven't blogged in a while.  Some of it is because I have been busy on a number of fronts. Some of it is because there hasn't been to show.  Not that I haven't produced anything, but I have been making mostly little items and there weren't a lot of pictures to show.

In the shop, we fabbed a small table for the hideout, the bars for the jail cell, and the rolling piece that is the counter at the American Cafe on one side and the judge's bench on the other.

The past few days, however, a lot has changed!




Because the theater was empty since July, I was able to get started installing earlier than usual.

Last Friday, we took a trailer of parts to the theater.  Those parts included the car, a couple of sections of wood fence, and the components for the gas station.  The shop looked almost empty after those things were gone.  It hasn't been empty since right before I pulled in the Nissan truck to begin cutting it apart on April 1!

The gas station, while in the shop, didn't look like much.  It is a slightly bizarre geometry, as though I took the Barrow's original station and lopped off a corner of the canopy.  It wasn't until it went together on stage and we stepped back, that if made sense.




To get it into the theater, of course, I had to take it back apart because the freaking place has NO access for anything bigger than 3 feet wide!  That is probably the suckiest part of working on this stage...followed closely by hanging lights above the stadium seating without catwalks overhead. That's for a different discussion...

Sunday at noon, Melanie and I started by reassembling the upper portion of the station and adding the roof panels.  we then attached two legs and tilted it up. Leaning it against the wall, we could get the third leg under it and brace it into place.  I pulled the black masking legs into place and we teaked the location of the station so that it butted the maskings.  We then shot it to the floor and added braces to anchor it.  I will bring my box of black fabric and we will mask the rear two legs, so that it appears to float against black, consistent with the dreamy concept of the staging.


I placed the gas pump and a couple of old car wheels under the roof and it started to take shape as a gas station.  Finally I added an antique light fixture like used to don the old filling stations. Got it from my very good friend, eBay. The station gets a few more accents...the post that you see needs to be wrapped and painted out,  HB Barrow hand-lettered on the side, and a large Coca Cola sign on the roof.

The next thing that we tackled was the sheriff's office. I needed to base paint this section so that it could be finish painted when I bring Gary and Sharon to the theater on Thursday.  The paint had to be dry in time for Sunday evening's rehearsal, so we needed to get it done. We pulled out the brick walls that we had saved after RENT last spring.  We reassembled them far left, leaving just enough room behind them for cast to cross behind.  Since the band is going upstage, center of this wall, I needed to leave them as much room as possible. So, the masking legs on this side are actually flipped up and behind the walls.

It went together fairly easily. There was remarkably little damage after striking and storing it for 6 months. I brought the "front door" back that I had made for "Night of the Living Dead" a year ago and it becomes the sheriff's door.  Once the walls were up, we filled the Wagner paint sprayer with dark gray paint and 20 minutes later, Kathleen's wonderful graffiti from RENT was GONE!  :(

While we were spraying, we put a base coat on another brick panel that I salvaged from another show. It will get repainted into the sepia color scheme and repurposed into a representation of the front of the beauty shop.

The last thing that we needed to do was to get the car reassembled and in place.  Again, because this facility has no door wider than 3 feet nor taller than 7 feet, I had to make the car as small as possible. Resting on casters mounted to the back of the seat, it is 83 inches to the tip of the grill. So, the bumper had to be removed.  From the bottom of the legs to the top of the hood is 38 inches, so windshield and hood ornament had to come off as well to get it into the building.

With it still up on its back, we added skids to the underside of the legs to bring the height up 1 1/2". We mounted the two front wheels in the fenders, then tipped it over and slid it into place.  Then we reapplied the mirrors, windshield and bumper.

The last task for the day was to place the two sections of fence.

As simple as these seem to be, they are actually quite interesting.  One of the premises of the design is that the car faces the audience. We will be painting road on the floor that appears to run right into the center section of seats.  So, the fence sections splay as though they are running along the sides of the road. In addition, when I made them, I used "forced perspective" to make them appear to recede into the background.So, they are 48" tall nearer the audience and only 42" tall upstage.  All of this makes it look as though the road is running right into the audience.  The relationship of the road and fence to the gas station makes it look as though the road runs right long side of the station.

I will be adding a telephone pole upstage right of the right fence with "wires" stringing out toward the audience. This should finish the optical illusion and make the set feel very dynamic.

Lastly, I temporarily used an extension cord to test the  lights on the filling station.

Later this week, the painters will get in and paint the road on the floor and all of the brick work.  Next Saturday, we will hang the last two facade panels and erect the telephone pole and the set should be in good shape.  With a little luck, Sunday we begin lights!!!!

More after next weekend...R

Progress on more little things...

This past week, I have been spending more time focusing on small details for the set.

Last Thursday, I finished the gas pump for the Barrow Filling Station.  After the glue dried on the styrofoam, I smoothed off the edges and base coated it with the same deep red-brown that I used for the rims on the car.  In real life, the pump would have been bright red, but in keeping with my washed out and muted colors, this deep red-brown is much more sepia.  On Saturday,  Gary added rust and grime.  I topped it off with an original Texaco decal, a printed reproduction of the gage dial, and a plastic reproduction of the original glass globes that used to don the tops of gas pumps well into the 1950's.  The finishing touch was an original aluminum nozzle from an antique pump...an eBay find.






Then my attention turned to a prop that Scott specifically requested for the opening scene where Bonnie fantasizes about Clara Bow.  Scott requested a vintage Hollywood movie camera on a rolling tripod.  I certainly wasn't going to buy one, so to make it, I started by laying out the basic shape of the two reel canisters and the camera body on a piece of luan. I then built up the thickness of the body using 1x4s and a second piece of luan.  The reel canisters were layers of styrofoam glued up and formed into shape.  Meanwhile, Melanie fabricated the tripod. Finally the lenses and viewfinder were made of PVC plumbing fittings and pipe.  The whole camera and tripod painted in gray, with the legs of the tripod dry-brushed like wood.  Gary added a few silver accents to pop out key features.








Finally, to establish the bank facade,  Melanie and I developed an old-fashioned brass clock, like the kind that used to hang on the corner of banks as early as the turn of the century.  Using luan and 2x2s, we created two sides of what would normally be a four-sided clock cabinet.  We only need two sides facing the audience to show three-dimensionality.  After a base coat of gold paint, I created the clock faces and "stained glass" bank sign in Photoshop and printed them on the color printer.  With lights inside the cabinet, they will glow lightly and a little dusty looking, being paper and not painted glass.


This morning, Larry, Glenn Saltamachia and I picked up the panels that I made for the brownstone for Funny Girl at Stray Dog. We dropped at the theater, those panels along with the gas pump, movie camera and a vintage hair dryer that I picked up outside Hannibal on Sunday.

Gary, Sharon and I will repaint the panels along with the brick-work from RENT and repurpose them as pieces of building facades floating in our B&C dream locations.

I will wrap up the clock and whip together the bars for the jail cell and the fence for the car scenes. I am stalling on the gas station while the exact form mulls in my head.  By the weekend, I should be cranking on it.

Until next time...
R

Bonnie and Clyde set progresses...

After adding a little purchased bling, the car is mostly behind me now.

It has all of it's chrome and sparkle.  I think that I won't do anymore to it until I move it into the theater and reassemble it.  

I have to figure out a way to hold the hubcaps on after I mount the wheels on.  The hubcaps that I found are from a real 1934 Ford. The steel wheels are from a late-model trailer.  The two do not exactly fit together and snap in.  But, from off-stage, they should look cool.

For the jail, I will repurpose the brick walls from RENT with a new door and fresh "old" paint. Then add jail bars. The bank facade and another piece have been salvaged from another show that I recently did and will get reworked.  For the bank, I will add a lit bank clock.  For the other piece, a barber pole and perhaps a general store sign.  These will give me some of the character of the places that we are representing.  Fortunately, by repurposing previously built pieces, I can limit how much I have to build.

That leaves me with one fairly large component that needs to be made yet.  I need to tackle the Barrow Star Filling Station.  It was a Texaco franchise and a very typical, 1930's Route 66 type of structure; single room building with a tin-roof canopy and old-fashioned gas pump.  For my production of Grapes of Wrath in 2010, one of the cast members made an old pump but no one knows what happened to it. So, my next task was to set about building another.  

With some 12" sonotube concrete forms, it is a pretty easy task.  Tuesday evening, Melanie and I fit plywood discs into the ends of a 4' length of tube and a 16" length of tube.  A cap of 2" styrofoam on top and a 6" diameter disc of foam for the dial form the geometry of the pump.  I added a modified 2-liter soda bottle for the fuel filter and a piece of sump pump hose for the hose.  I will paint it on Thursday and then add the finishing touches.  On eBay, I found a plastic reproduction of the lit globe that used to go on top of the old pumps. I also found a self-adhesive decal for the front of the pump and an aluminum nozzle that is old enough that most people won't know the difference. 

The next part is to create the front "canopy" of the gas station.  I will spend a little time over the next day or two deciding what to build and designing the details.  Scott has already asked if we could  have the Coca Cola sign on the roof.  


I'll put together a design and then Melanie and I can tackle the gas station on Thursday and this weekend.
R

First piece done...mostly

We had quite a productive week in the scenic shop.  I decided to tackle Clyde's 1934 Ford as my first project for a couple of reasons.  First off, it is probably the most complicated piece of the set that I had to build, and second, I had the old truck from Grapes of Wrath to use as a base.  If I did the car first, then the old truck is out of my way for subsequent work.





Wednesday
My father and I built the original truck in 2010 in his garage in Beckemeyer, IL.  Since we, together, figured it out then, I thought that it might be nice to have him help me give it a significant facelift.  He got to the shop about 10AM.  We removed the old body and disassembled it into a couple of smaller pieces that would fit into the storage loft.  That way, if it ever needs to become a truck again (unlikely), the pieces are there to redo it.  The Ford Deluxe had a very narrow, sloping grille, so we started by making the grille and getting it fixed in place, between the fenders.  We then built back with luan and 2x2's to create the hood.  A sheet of chipboard formed the radiused top.

Next, we cut down the frame, making the car only 80 inches long.  That way it can stand on the back of the seat and fit through a standard door.  After re-attaching the rear legs and wheels, we constructed the seat and "doors".  Melanie got to the shop around 4 and she and I finished things up when dad headed home.

Thursday

Sharon was in the office Thursday, so after we got things caught up for U-Studios, she and I headed to the shop and painted.  First the grille and chrome accents.  Then the fenders got a warm, dark gray.  After an hour of drying time, we returned to the shop, blacked out any new wood underneath and then coated the body with a lighter, green-gray that is reminiscent of the gray that Ford used on their cars in the mid 1930's.

I reused the wheels and tires from the old Grapes truck as well.  They were trailer tires that had been scrapped by a local trailer and camper store.  I painted the metal rims a dark red and used white latex house trim paint to turn them into white-walls because every good gangster car from the 30's has white-walls.  These will bolt on to the end of the front axle after the car is in the theater and doesn't need to move around anymore.  Otherwise...too heavy.

The running greyhound hood ornament from an actual 1934 Ford came in the mail on Wednesday. So the last thing that I did was to mount it with some construction adhesive on to the radiator cap at the nose of the car... nice touch.







Saturday
I picked up a foam rubber mattress pad and grabbed an old roll of white vinyl material that has been in my basement since I reupholstered an old boat 10 years ago.

At the shop, I upholstered the "interior" of the car so that it looks like white leather.  Then focused my attention on adding mirrors and headlights.  Finally, I worked out the front bumper and the windshield and got those painted silver and installed.  The last thing on the to-do list for Saturday was to make a 1934 Texas license plate. Bonnie and Clyde were in Texas when they stole what was reported to be a brand new gray Ford Deluxe V8 because Clyde thought that it was the fastest car made at the time. It got them out of a lot of sticky situations, easily outrunning the police cars of the day. Ultimately, it would be the same car that they were ambushed in and shot to death.

There are still a few chrome pieces to to add when they get here: fog lights on the front, chrome hub caps, a self-adhesive FORD logo below the hood ornament, and a large, old-fashioned steering wheel.

I did take a little bit of artistic license with the car. First off, it is 2/3 scale...one full-size vehicle on stage this year is enough!  I stylized it a bit because Scott and I agreed that the whole show is a dream or a flash-back. So the front end slopes back a little more than a real 1934 Ford so that it looks faster and sleeker, because that was how Clyde saw it in his mind.  Finally, I made it a convertible.  The car that Clyde stole was a 4-door sedan.  But the roof on these was low and the windows narrow.  If I put a hard top on it, the audience would never see Bonnie and Clyde sitting in the car.

In the mean time, I am gearing up for the next pieces to build.  I have some old set pieces that I intend to repurpose.  I hope to move those to the theater later this week since it is empty for the month of August.  Anything that I can get out of the shop, just gives me more room.  I will just spread them out on the stage floor and paint them there before installing them.



Next to make on my agenda will be the gas station, complete with an old-time gas pump.  That should be a fun one.  Looking forward to it.  :)






Until next time, go see a show somewhere.  The artists appreciate it...
R