Shock Me Like an Electric Chair

Greetings!

I'm not sure an electric chair is the most appropriate post for this holiday...but what holiday would be?

Today I'm digging into the archives and sharing the electric chair I created for the 2008 production of Assassins at The Green Room Theatre. If you're not familiar with the show, it's a Sondheim musical that opens with a murderous carnival game played by the men and women who have attempted (and/or succeed) in assassinating a US President. So we weren't going for realism.

I believe I spent $27 on the entire scenic design for the show and remember spending exactly $2 on this chair.

Step one: Find a free chair. This chair was a school desk in a previous life. I added arm rests and extended the head rest. (The actor using the chair was 6'7".)

Step two: Find the cheapest buckles possible. I purchased two belts from the local DAV, then sanded leather and painted the metal to match.

Step three: Paint the chair. This was by far the worst smelling black paint I have ever used. It was undated and in the back corner of the basement. My nose is crinkling as I type.

Admittedly the chair looked a bit funky in the daylight. But it never appeared onstage without the actor, and the lighting was dark. So for 2 hours work and 2 dollars I was pretty happy.

Designing for The Green Room was a fabulous experience. I learned the realities of tight timeframes and minimal budgets that summer. Most of all, I realized that scenic design was my favorite area of the production process.

Happy Hunting.

Hand Castings

Apologies - between helping with a few shows and working on the design for Chicago, the last two weekends have flown by. But this week's post covers an awesome project!

To create the unique furniture pieces for this semester's production of Madwoman, the shop assembled furniture using mannequin body parts. But we soon discovered the mannequin hands are pretty uniform and uninspired. So we decided to cast hands.

Clockwise around the table - Ryan and Emma shave wax, Molly serves as our hand model, and Tim uses an air hose to remove the hand.

First, we attempted to cast  a hand using layers of wax, then fill the negative with plaster. Several problems: (1) We lacked the ability to consistently keep the wax above the melting point but below the 'Oh God that's hot!' temperature range. (2) The castings were reinforced with steel rods but still proved fragile.

 I don't have any photos of the 2nd method attempted. I was the hand model and needed to sit very still. Tony B formed a red clay reservoir around my hand, then created two plaster shells. The negative was filled with wax. This technique had some promise, but the negative cracked when Tony attempted to pry out the fingers.

Wayne donated his hand to the cause.

(Triumphant fanfare) And then we discovered Alginate molding! The powder is readily available online and easy to work with. Simply mix with water and begin casting.

Not a cake.

 The moldings were kept in the container for casting, but this gives you a sense of the consistency. 5 out of 6 shop employees agree it smells like baby aspirin.

We filled the negatives with fiberglass resin and were amazed at the level of detail in the castings. (You could see the scars on our hands!)

After the fiberglass cooled (it's an endothermic reaction) the pieces could be attached to other mannequin parts using fiberglass cloth and resin.

Once painted the details were highly visible.

Happy Casting!