Progress

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 my project to be a hands on experience and eventhough I didn’t have a lot of resources, my real resources is the knowledge base and guidance of Mr. Pinto and Mr. Hirschfelt. When we finished this set we had a physical object that was made and that’s what I wanted in my project, a real, material project that everyone could see and if you saw the fall play, musical, or even short plays you saw my work live. If you didn’t then you missed out. I also wanted to learn skills that were practical rather than just found answers to a question I have. One thing I love about building and especially with a team is the constant stream of ideas running back and forth during a build. Questions are brought up discussed and solved at a quick pace. Unlike teaching where you can’t really see the progress you make every day with your students, I saw what I did everyday and I was glad to be involved in such a big way.

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 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.

Once we figured out the boat we realized we needed 3 state rooms and a jail the way I figured this one out is by making one 3^rd class room and then allowing the 1^st class room to have double duty with the objects being moved around to represent each characters room. The back side of this room was also made into a jail.

One of the things that bothered me is that this is a cruise ship and there really isn’t a technical jail on a cruise line so after watching the Broadway performance I realized that this would be a storage room with a locking gated door. That’s where we drew our inspiration for this.

These rooms were an L shaped moving platform with the bed acting as a structural member and the top being reinforced with a triangle cut from 3/4^th ply.

I left the artistic touch of the room up to my good friend Meghan and she did an amazing job. She made a template for a patern for the walls and it was totally baroque and fit the time period to a point.  

We drew manythings from the broadway performance. I saw the lights of the ship with where a gated notical light and they were controlled by a dimer and where in time with the music.

Once I saw this we needed them. Luckily, in class I did some research and found some outdoor lights that were perfect the only problem was price which was anywhere from $80-20 per unit. Hirsch went out to Home depo just to see what he could find and we found the last 4 in stock for $12 a piece. When all was said and done we got 2 more in a different color. Although we had both satin black and white versions I had plans for these to be brass, just like naval brass which was the allow of choice on ships until the late 40’s early 50’s. Which then everything switched over to stainless. This was fixed with a quick disassembly and paint job.

When I saw the droadway set it was actually a crème color with brass rivets(which would have never happened in real life but it was beautiful so who cares?) I loved everything about this set and the way the coloreds lights hit it.

At first pinto though it would be stupid to paint the rivets of our boat gold. And at first we were going to just paint these one. But once we noticed that our fender washers we used to hold the luon actually looked like rivets. After some test runs it was too hard to just accent the rivets with spray paint so I had Leo paint them all brass. It didn’t look silly at all and it actually made them visible from the audience

When making a ship, there are always port holes, ours had to be the diameter of 10’’ to be functional. They were used in the blocking. There actually is a tool for cutting out perfect holes but we couldn’t get one big enough for the job. Hirsch brought in a dremmle and we screwed into the center of the panel where we wanted the hole and attached a sharpy with a string and used it to get a circle. After the holes were cut out I made a new template of a circle 13’’ and sprayed the pirimiter to make a brass rim around each port hole.

At first we were going to smoke some plexiglass to get windows but Pinto Turned us on to a much cheaper option, wax paper.

After another meeting between Gargus and Pinto it was understood that we actually couldn’t make the set white anyway because much like my skin tone it would be washed out with the stage lighting. At this point I thought for sure we’d have a crème boat but after some persuation we desided on grey.

Our school colors are blue and grey anyway.

For a railing we needed obviously some curved sections. For the entrance stairs I took a sheet of partical board and drew out my dementions then I mapped out when every pillar was and I thought about how I was going to make my angle and what I should do. Hirschfeld gave this to me because he was tired of thinking about it and writefully so. I ended up just feehanding it and hoping for the best. It came out great and I made the mirror image for the other side. The biggest issue was the top because it was such an enormous curved piece and it just wouldn’t fit on one sheet so I had to approach this one differently. In sections.

So I started by finding my angles that my railing would have to be to meet up with the existing 45* angle on the railing. I believe it was 55*…  Because the partical board is so hard to manage I made my prototype out of luon, which we had a lot of. I mapped out the pillars for the railing and then cut the luon to be a ruff railing I made each of the three sections and whent back to the top of the set to makesure that itfit properly. These luon sections were straight and not curved but they gave me the ruff idea. So I taped every piece together, carefully brought it down and drew it on the partical board, it was 2 pieces after I had the correct sizing I freehanded the curve like before. It fit like a glove and the 2 pieces curve seamlessly came together.

This was just the top of the rail and our original design called for a rope as well. And Hirsh and I agreed on a cheap way to go about attaching this with nails but we desided at the end to bore a hole through each pillar to run a rope through. We put some of our workers on braiding duty and soon we had our rope.

From the very beginning one of the ways we would distinguish our set and hide some waviness was with a navy stripe on the top of the ship. I thought this looked grand and really set the ship off. But Pinto had a great idea and painted the entrance stairs with a navy stripe as well.

The set was almost done but it needed some more stuff. I took a trip to Columbus to buy some stuff, I got a bell and an anchor. The anchor wasn’t actually used for anything but I put the bell on the top level with a bracket that I bet to hold the bell.

As a finishing touch we put red lettering on the stairs for watch your step and on the door of the ship which had the name s. s. American. And a spray painted anchor. This was made with a template cut out of cardboard and if you look closely my initials are hidden inside the insignia.

After this musical was over one would think my job was done but that was only slightly true.

It took several months to build and just a few days to take down. I first built this thing with the idea of it being a modular set but because of storage issues this was not possible. We were going to save the front fascia to show you in this project but it was ruined during transportation.

What took the most time was transporting everything from the barn of the middle school to the high school and this involved bringing back all the set pieces, the stairs, state rooms, and tool boxes.

Then short plays came along and I used some of these panels for the ship because we use them for everything. Unfortunately I didn’t think this trough and we needed them for short plays. We always build the same general set but we needed these walls to finish. I built 4 of these walls to use on the set. And this had a dead line of 2 days and I took advantage of 8^th period lunch and 9^th period SRS to finish on time. Then when the short plays were over the band concert was in a few days after so we had to take this down quickly as well. I used my lunch period once again to finish on time. And I’d like to thank Tyler Berger for always helping with the build and demolition process.