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Post by JayUtah on Nov 10, 2005 15:46:35 GMT -4
Okay, gearing up to do some set designs for An Experiment With An Air Pump -- not the painting but the play inspired by the painting. At one point a bird has to fly offstage. I have no clue how to do this. Any suggestions?
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Post by nomuse on Nov 10, 2005 16:19:57 GMT -4
A well-trained bird. We've talked a bit about how to do a bat effect for various productions of Dracula. Most of them come down to a variation of those spring-driven flapping plastic things and a slanting guide wire. Since you got high-tech contacts, though, what's the possibility of making a fairly simple "animatronic" bird (with perhaps even the ability to back-scull...I'd truly hate to rig a bird to fold its wings, however!) and a modified flying rig so an operator can shift it around the space? (At the extreme cheap end that would be a fly-casting rod and reel with a plastic bird dangling from it!) (Puts me in mind of a lost opportunity that happened to me on a children's musical about genetic engineering, put on at San Francisco's hands-on science museum, The Exploratorium. The designer had spec'd free-standing flats on wheels, and we were in contact with robotics people -- including a judge for Robot Wars -- who were offering to install for us a whole BASIC stamp package with sonar limit sensors... Problem is, the company wouldn't spring for the motors I needed; things ended up on a cable drive, and by the time they got installed the director had advanced too far in blocking to be comfortable with having them in the show.)
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Post by JayUtah on Nov 11, 2005 14:33:49 GMT -4
Sarcos could build us an animatronic bird, but their price to do so would be about four times the budget of the entire production. (Sarcos is the current curator of Disney audio-animatronics, and a former customer of mine.)
A trained bird is not a bad idea. We have an aviary in town. And apparently doves (or rather, large white pigeons) are trainable. But you never know when the bird will decide to fly out into the house instead and poop on the patrons. The consequences of malfunction are pretty grave, unless you can train him to poop only on jaded theater critics.
The design is still in the conceptual stages so we aren't sure about the flight path.
The bird has to take flight from the stage and fly offstage, so you don't necessarily need backsculling or landing capability. Unfolding the wings is something we might be able to do. Basic wing motion is easily accomplished with the Stan Winston scuttle engine. That's the gadget he invented for Aliens to make the egg-layers' legs move as they were pulled across the floor. You drill a hole in a turning wheel and insert a rod into it so that it sticks out along the same dimension as the wheel shaft. Then a short distance away from the wheel, along the shaft centerline, you put a bearing into which the rod loosely rests. So essentially you have a rowboat oar setup. As the wheel turns, the free end of the rod turns in the opposite direction with greater radius. If you need elliptical motion, you use a slotted hole in the wheel. Then you fashion a wing around the rod.
For folding wings, you use a hollow telescoping rod for the wing spar, and put elastic cord inside it in the same way the "shock-cord" tent poles work. When the bird is preset the wings are folded back and fastened together on the bird's back with a tension release pin tied to the lifting wire. When tension is put on the lift wire, it pulls the pin that releases the wings, and the elastic cord pulls the outboard rods into the receiver of the inboard rods to create a stiff deployed wing.
I need to see the script again, but I believe we have the option of having an actor initiate the bird flight manually. So he can deploy the wings and start the flap motor.
That just leaves the question of whether to suspend the bird from above or draw him along a guide wire. I'm opting right now for suspension.
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Post by nomuse on Nov 11, 2005 15:31:40 GMT -4
Heh. After I posted I thought about possible bird scenarios the script might call for. I figured it would either be "Bird flies around the room, crashing into walls," or "Bird is released in the final scene, soaring to freedom (and is snatched by a hawk?)"
Much depends here on how intimate your space is.
BTW, ShowCon probably knows more about this, but I've been seeing mentions in a club scene trade journal about a new projection technology -- it may not be "holographic" as they claim, but the pictures and descriptions show projected entities in a small space with only vertical clearance, seemingly interacting with patrons. But then, I was recently reading about the history of limelight projections and phantasmagoria. In any case, if the bird scene has the right combination of a magical mood and dim, controlled lighting, a projection constrained to an oil-haze fountain might just do the trick.
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Post by Stout Cortez on Nov 15, 2005 18:17:59 GMT -4
My daughter is a professional puppeteer and theater techie. Me, I'm a klutz. Once when I was helping paint a flat, the flat actually toppled over, making me jerk my hands up to catch it, despite the fact that I was holding a quart of red tempra paint. The momentum of my arm movement splashed the whole quart right into my face. When we righted the flat again, I started to the bathroom to try to get some of the paint off my face, out of my hair, and off my arms (my shirt was hopeless). Our director wandered past, stared at me, and asked, "What happened to you?"
I said, "Opened an old war wound."
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Post by JayUtah on Nov 17, 2005 14:44:13 GMT -4
The design is for a theater on the outskirts of Washington D.C. It is a very intimate space. It's a reused structure; the performance space is rectangular. Audience seating is in the performing space on one short side and halfway up each long side, forming two L-shaped regions.
I spoke with the on-site designer a couple days ago. Projection is problematic because of the sightlines. They have done a lot with "ninja stagehands" recently and so they don't want a bird on a stick. The direction of flight is largely irrelevant, and we're doing some minimalist suggestions of a building structure -- rafters, etc. So it's looking like we'll do some fairly lame physical effect coupled with some creative lighting and some properly suggestive sound effects.
As for paint, I remember one of our few IATSE-qualified stagehands used to be the worst offender for stage-related mishaps. One day he was doing some painting and went to put the lid back on the can. He was doing this right next to our brand-new silk cyclorama screen. Wanting to be "professional" he got a rubber mallet from the shop to tap the lid back on instead of just standing on it like the rest of us do. The first "tap" sent a splatter of paint from the rim gutter into a gorgeous arc all across the cyc.
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