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[dbuckley]

Come on folks! Let's have some other people posting some interesting projects! I feel very selfish hogging this whole thread for my own stuff - it wasn't the intention!

 

Although I do the odd bit of odd stuff [example], frankly, you make me feel inadequate :)

 

My electronics may be well passable, but mechanically I'm inept.

[Smiffy]

Cedd:

 

Have you considered prop and special building things for a living? The Rose is great!

 

With my directorial / critical hat on however (and I hope you don't mind, it is in no means intended to belittle the work you have done thus far, consider it food for thought for a more rentable Mk V perhaps :) )

 

My only reservation is the speed with which the petals fall, obviously choice of materials is a key factor here, however could I suggest a tracked mechanism for the petals?

 

If you were to go down that route you could do two things;

 

1. Control the speed at which the petals fall. (I'm thinking that the petals are tracked and that a fishing line type 'invisible string' controls their rate of descent), if patched in a console as an HTP Dimmer channel where say 0% is UP and 100% is down, then a nice timed cue could be programmed for the petals.

 

2. Rebuild the Rose with the transformation of the Beast back into the Prince. (again, with the tracked petals, they can be pulled back into position). This also helps in providing a little mis-direction if required for the sequence where the beast needs to do a VERY quick costume change.

 

I suggest speed controlled descent of the petals as from a directors perspective, the impact of the falling petals is potentially lost in the speed at which it happens (blink and you'll miss it) and there may be occasion where the petal drop might need to time nicely with a bit of orchestral vamping or voice over, perhaps to cover a scene change or just pad out for time.

 

From an LD's perspective, about three MR16 sized LED Colour Changing RGB lamps in the base (individual control for all three of the 'lamps') would allow some nice in-set lighting and sculpting.

 

Certainly a very, very rentable item, that I would see no issue in paying £100.00 per week, if not more for, on a larger scale production.

 

Anyway. Apologies if that seems at all over critical. Merely wishing to offer some thoughts on what is already an excellent example of the dying art of good quality prop making

 

 

Good luck with it

 

Cheers

 

Smiffy

[boatman]

Come on folks! Let's have some other people posting some interesting projects! I feel very selfish hogging this whole thread for my own stuff - it wasn't the intention!

 

.

.

 

In true Blue Peter style: "Here's one I made earlier ...".

[cedd]

Nice job on the hats! When I last did WWRY they had bought trendy kitchen colander's and decorated with LED's and various other bits of wire and pipe I seem to recall. All in all they looked quite good. I prefer these though.

As an aside, when I saw the national tour in Manchester, they had issues turning one of the hats off - it just wouldn't! A tab came in after that scene and all you could see around the edge of it and into the wings was this flashing as it lit the stage up. It lasted ages and I never sussed why nobody just threw a coat around it!

I've found hard hats to be a decent base on which to build quite a few things in the past. Most notably my spring-loaded-eared dog from Our House. They can be securely fastened to the head, are a nice material to work with and have plenty of space inside for hiding stuff. A bit of creative covering and you'd never have know what lies beneath.

 

I did wonder about lowering the petals, and it may be a route I go down in the future. You're right in that it would help to "milk" the visual gag of the petals falling off. I'd need a winch rather than a servo (sail winches are available) and I think I'd need to switch back to the heavy brass petals. I'd need plenty of weight to pull the wire through the tubes.

I'd also need to rethink the leaves halfway down the stem. They're currently brass and the falling petals just bounce off them if they happen to hit. I think a slower moving petal would get stuck on one.

 

The only thing I'd have to think about - currently any petals lowered by winch would just slide down the stem as the line will just come out of the top and straight down. Ideally they'd fall through "mid air" an inch or so away from the stem to give the impression of them properly falling and fluttering down. They'd also catch the light better.

Perhaps instead, there could be 2 lines involved - one running down the stem, but connected to a weight or spring. Then another could be connected to the petal top and would pull down away from the stem towards the base. If the line was thin enough it would be invisible. This line would be connected to the winch. Reeling the winch in would pull the petal away, and lift the weight/shorten the spring. Releasing the winch would allow the petal to "float" back to the top of the flower so it rebuilds itself. If the pulling lines went through the base far enough away from the stem, the petals would float through mid air on their way down.

[Smiffy]

The only thing I'd have to think about - currently any petals lowered by winch would just slide down the stem as the line will just come out of the top and straight down. Ideally they'd fall through "mid air" an inch or so away from the stem to give the impression of them properly falling and fluttering down. They'd also catch the light better.

Perhaps instead, there could be 2 lines involved - one running down the stem, but connected to a weight or spring. Then another could be connected to the petal top and would pull down away from the stem towards the base. If the line was thin enough it would be invisible. This line would be connected to the winch. Reeling the winch in would pull the petal away, and lift the weight/shorten the spring. Releasing the winch would allow the petal to "float" back to the top of the flower so it rebuilds itself. If the pulling lines went through the base far enough away from the stem, the petals would float through mid air on their way down.

 

And that is why I'm merely a thinker, rather than a doer when it comes to such things; happy to spout out what I would like, no idea what it would require to make it work... :)

 

I'm always extremely envious of you guys that are sufficiently mechanical and electronically minded to be able to create such things :)

 

Cheers

 

Smiffy

[cedd]

Well, I haven't gone as far as Smiffy's suggestions about slowing the descent rate of the petals (can you tell I work in an airport???), but I've built a base, installed a PSU, fitted the DMX card and also got some LED lights on the thing.

 

Please bear in mind that I haven't fitted the nice thin green foam I bought for the base yet (which should get rid of those nasty clunks) and the perspex cover is filthy still.

 

But still have a look

[cedd]

Well, our run of The Producers has just finished. The Pigeons got a really good laugh every night and all "performed" properly. The only hassle was when the LD managed to un-patch half of the generic lighting in trying to patch the pigeons. Finger trouble, but it caused a lot of swearing about those #$£~% pigeons!

 

They're now all sat in my garage.

No photos from the show itself yet, but this is them during the get-out this morning in their coop. The top middle one is missing as it was made to be removeable so Franz could hold it. Just has a rod sticking up from the motor base which goes into a socket in the Pigeon's....... well, yes.

 

Pigeons

[Smallsy]

Here's a project I've been working on:

 

DMX Flip Down Clock

 

Although it's currently in a show I intend on remaking it to iron out a few of the flaws and make it easier to programme.

[pritch]

DMX Flip Down Clock

 

I rather like that. How does the control work? Do you use DMX to advance it to a certain figure (e.g. DMX 0 = 00 minutes, DMX 255 = 59 minutes), or does DMX control the speed at which things change?

 

Also, what happens if you get some sort of DMX 'belch' during the show? Will it start to advance, or does it wait for a couple of frames before it decides to start changing?

[Smallsy]

DMX Flip Down Clock

 

I rather like that. How does the control work? Do you use DMX to advance it to a certain figure (e.g. DMX 0 = 00 minutes, DMX 255 = 59 minutes), or does DMX control the speed at which things change?

 

Also, what happens if you get some sort of DMX 'belch' during the show? Will it start to advance, or does it wait for a couple of frames before it decides to start changing?

 

Unfortunately I didn't have the time for it to have a little micro-controller to establish DMX 0 = 00 minutes etc etc. That was the plan but by the time I got the clock, programming on something like an Arduino was out of the question.

Its ran by 5 Servo motors. Each controls the 5 flip displays Day of the week, Date, Month, Hour, Minute. Control is established by, in a simple routine, a single effect on the Ion doing a single step effect, All the effects are step based and essentially make the servo pull and then push back to default position. There are roughly 200 odd effects that are used. Ranging from a single step cycle effect to a 60 step cycle effect, which would flip the minutes a full hour round. These effects can differ in speed so reliably I found I could just about have an Effect Step Time of 0.3 seconds before the servos started tripping up over themselves. Changing the Step time would allow you control over the speed of the clock.

 

If you had a DMX 'Belch' during a show you'd be screwed. It won't wait for a couple of frames. The clock doesn't know where it is, it just gets told to flip by the desk. Meaning cues can't be missed as it doesn't index to any positions. All cues have to be run in sequence as there's a large amount of maths from the effects that tell it to move the correct amount of times to get to the next position.

 

One of the main things I'll be doing when the show is finished will be installing some sort of indexing system. Also an easier way of programming it e.g Channel 1 @ 12 = Hour at 12. Channel 2 @ 49 = Minutes at 49

[dbuckley]

Not strictly proppy, but clocky...

 

A while back I did a show (name forgotten) which required to have a clock on the wall that advanced in ways directed by the script. The clock was a "standard" clock, a Gents Pulsynetic slave, which you've all seen and heard; they are the clocks that click every 30 seconds that are in buildings, used to be in railway stations etc. Picture of some typical slaves [here] and a whole website about the pulsynetic system [here]

 

So I had one of these clocks, a 12V power supply, a DMX relay, and used PCStage commanded by a bit of software to drive the clock any which way

 

http://davidbuckley.name/pix/pulsynetic.jpg

 

The software could accept three commnands from PCStage, RUN, STOP, and FASTSET TO hh:mm, so the clock was tied into the cuelist and thus did what was required automatically.

 

Worked really nicely.

[kerry davies]

Thanks for that David, nostalgia isn't what it used to be and if you told the young folk today that I used to work on those master clocks....they wouldn't believe you.

[cedd]

Here's my latest project for the musical Crazy For You. The script calls for a Cuckoo Clock to be shot off of the wall by a stray bullet. The recipe for this project was simplicity. It's built from MDF, a few steel pins and a lick of paint. I think it's my favourite project I've done to date - it's simple, I was able to get a little "arty" with the finish, and it works well.

 

I've decided to start a YouTube channel with videos of my projects, so might add a few of my other ones soon. I'm yet to properly video my life-size R2D2.

 

 

Next project - an enchanted spinning wheel for next year's panto. It'll spin on its' own and have about a hundred WS2811 LED's hidden in it so it can get all magical when needed. All DMX controlled.

[cedd]

Just finished this one yesterday.

This year's panto (Sleeping Beauty) requires the evil Carabosse to have an assistant - a raven. The script calls for this to be a puppet, but in our particular staging we'd like it to be able to stand alone and be moved away from places where a puppet might work well.

With that in mind, I produced Robbie the Raven. He's made up of 3 servos and a 7 channel RC system. His innards are mainly plasticard, and everything slides inside a plastic tube which stops his fabric from fouling things.

 

Next time I have his innards out I'll take some pics, but for the time being here's him sat on mum and dad's bird table (and yes they arrived home to find him sat here!).

http://vid513.photobucket.com/albums/t335/ceddison/Web%20images/C54C95AB-2A52-43EB-A024-D21FD52853DD_zps3wddjv1o.mp4

[kerry davies]

You are one sick puppy, Cedd.

Not talking about your poor parents' feelings but now someone has to counsel your local birdlife. Excellent machine, thanks.