05/16/13

I've always been a builder and i always worked with my father as alittle boy and i've built up my technical and machanical skills. This year in senior research i really had no idea what i wanted to do but i knew i wanted to do something artistic and something that is a physical project. Then i was a sophomore a kid named Cory built the set for thoroughly modern millie and he did a great job. I desided that since I love theatre and building this would be a great way to give back.

I wanted to get my feet wet in the process of set building and designing so i worked with Hirschfelt on the fall play. We were doing a christmas charol. After my first meeting with gargus i was set oput to draw a blueprint of our stage which is a rough 25ft by 50ft. Quickly after this hirschfelt and I saw how much misalanious stuff was needed. One of the first rules to building anything is if you can use the wheel, why re-invent it? We ended up renting the majority of the peices but our main set was built by Hirschfelt and we quickly came to an agreement on a simple design.

my project was the time machine and I started with a very complicated design requiring many pullies to operate its wheels and clock. When building something it is easy to see how an idea will chanc=ge one put into reality. First I made a chassis using all independent rolling wheels, the shape was much like a wheel barro and the reasoning behind this was to make it possible for a human to push pull and drive this thing. My chassis was made out of 2x3s chosen because thats what i had to work with and 2x4s i deemed alittle bit of overkill for the project. I cross braced the sides to reenforce the cockpit and made a ladder frame, much like an original ford model T. Mrs. Gargus told me that this was set in old London, before cars. So i couldn't base my machine off a car like the delorean time machine from BTTF and i didn't want to make something like what we see in Dr. Who with the phone booth. This had to be original and accourding to the script steam powered. The way i enterpreted this was a steam locomotive, which is the main vehicle to be powered by steam so the design was heavily based off a train. Next for color. In this time period black 1 stage flat was the only color available redily and to me would be the only color to make sense on someone’s homemade time machine. In this time, brass fittings and bronze allows we used in pluming and i used this as my accent color. At first we thought we would use bicycle wheels all around on the time machine. After actually mocking up a real wheel I found that it would be hard to brace each one to my chassis. So I cut a piece of partical board using the wheels as a template and then finding center by measuring from one end to another at 2 points on the wheel and the center of the x would be center. My friend Antonia painted the wheels for me and we decided that these would be double sided so that it could have 2 different looks for the show, we put these on the butterfly nuts so they were easily removed.

After I finished the man structure Gargus gave me a news flash. Turns out that the actor would have to be on top of the time machine. Initially made the machine so that the driver would be inside. Luckily the chassis design was already strong enough without much alteration to handle the new task of a person standing on it. I also had to channel the whole body of the machine. To make our steam effect we decided on dry ice and hot water. The cool thing about this system is the boiling over of the CO2 and then the water runs down the barrel of the machine. My smoke stacks were made out of PVC pipe cut at a 45 degree angle. And a rubber plumbing stopper. I attached them with a bolt running through the bottom and an aluminum can lid as a washer inside and the whole thing was buried in silicone. Because now an actor had to ride on top of the machine no one could operate my time dial or drive the machine so I put a 2x8 on the inside as a seat for a small passenger to ride in and operate the clock. I also needed a driver and even with all this extra weight it was still relatively easy to steer.

Because I’m a hot rodder myself I thought the grill would be a nice touch. This was going to be an actual charcoal grill face but I had a great friend Craig Gallo who is my go to guy for graphics that I had help me make a grill, which I had cut out on the laser engraver. I was limited by the size of the machine.

Now about the clock. The pully system would be way to complicated and I showed the idea to my Dad. After some brain storming we thought that we could use a bike to accomplish this. So Since this will no longer be subject to a rider or the abuses of riding we started cutting up the diamond frame. I kept one arm on the rear hub because it was more than adequate for the torque demands it would have to withstand. One more modification was cutting off one side of the peddle assembly and moving it into the body of the machine so the axle could be operated from the inside of the craft. Lastly, I put on the rear hub from a kiddy bike. I’m sure everyone has had some experience with this style rear hub. When you peddle backwards it stops. This allows the what would be clock to speed up and come to abrupt stops which is the way time travel has always been depicted as. To add just one more special touch. I attached 2 zip ties to the frame of the bike with the excess protruding into the spokes of the bike, giving a ticking sound when spun. I spent at least 300 hours just building this one vehicle. When all was said and done the whole thing was square within .25 of an inch.

After accomplishing making this prop I decided I could handle doing it for my senior research and I could handle being in the musical as an actor as well.

This show was anything goes

Hirschfelt and I were use to working together and we were actually looking at designs for a set way before we even started. We came up with several ideas and pretty soon had a great set. Now in Musical there is one other guy who everyone knows as the set builder and he was my unofficial mentor, Mr. Pinto. Luckily for me, we only had 2 weeks to build the set and this put stress on the build team and allowed it to be extended to include Hirschfelt as well. Since we had such a short time to build I thought why not make it like a set house? I’ve seen tons of episodes of home improvement shows where the strike up a building in a week. And the key is collapsible panels. The whole boat was designed in 5 main pieces.

In the show anything goes the set is always more than one story. On Broadway the set was 3 stories but the theatre was also 3 stories tall. We decided on a single story set. L

Last year Pinto designed the beauty and the beast set to be 7 ft off the ground and believe it or not after he finished he had to cut it down. Which is no easy task.

This set was designed with 6ft 9in legs and we all agreed that once it was up it wouldn’t be taken down.

We also were playing around with several ideas for the walls actual material. We looked at canvas, luon, ply board, even cardboard.

We tore down the short play sets today and this is what i have so far as what i want to say.

We looked at the weaknesses of last year’s set and one of the major downfalls was the stairs. the rise run and width of the stairs was a major problem. We ended up using 2x8s for all the runners. We were just going to have straight runs of stairs to avoid problems.

Another cool feature that was thought out was the ability to open up the ship with sliding doors acting as the walls and the state rooms being inside the set.

After everything was said and done I showed my design to Gargus. After I gain new understanding of her vision I had to rework this design.

In anything goes the set is a cruise ship and usually this set is depicted with curved staircases. She wanted curved staircases so I once again had a look at these and it turned out that to actually make these properly it would take up so much space that we would only be 2 feet away from the curtain line. I also watched many videos on curved staircases and after seeing so many different methods I decided to build a few in a small scale model. All of which were very unstable and complicated to build so we trashed this Idea. To avoid the problems of making an actual curved stair case I decided that more of an L shaped staircase would be more doable in my time frame and budget. When I say L shaped I mean a straight run of stars one curved landing and then another run of stairs.

It was also known now that we needed more curve somehow, everyone was set of the curved design and I thought it was pretty cool too but I knew it was a challenge. We ditched the sliding door and then built another platform protruding 2 ft downstage of the middle section and this was given a curve. Luon was the wall material. Since luon is a flexible material that is relatively cheap and very lightweight.

My biggest road block was after I auditioned and tried out my directors bought blueprints from another company and these came with blueprints, instructions, videos, and supply lists. They said that they were sorry but there just wasn’t enough time to do this. I thought this was the end of my project but after some figuring we saw that our original design was better than this blueprint so we moved on our original course. And I was again a player in this year’s musical set.

After all this was a modular set and I could start building it almost immediately.

The only problem was that we were trying to find the best deal on materials this took a good month at least. And at the end we did local business at Seneca.  Which everyone felt good about and we saved a lot of money on just lumber initially for the set we only spent $1500. With a budget of $4000.

Then it was just building and I had a good team of band and theatre kids to help us build.