Like moving stuff in an attic

In the past I've compared hanging lights in a theater to moving stuff around in an old attic. It is cramped, dusty, and hot.

After four days of lighting hang I think I can improve on the analogy. Lighting instruments range from 20 pounds up, but as bad as the weight is that they are awkward. They are weird shapes that are hard to get a good hold on, have lots of parts (and sharp edges) that stick out, and have a nasty habit of unfolding or swiveling on you as you are trying to move them. Lighting cable is similar; it is remarkably heavy, stiff, long, and just slippery enough that when you have half of it where you want it it will suddenly slip down the other side of the pipe and yank at you with the weight of forty, fifty pounds in sudden free-fall.

So it is like trying to store bicycles in a dusty attic.

Lots of bicycles. More than will comfortably fit. So when you are trying to carry a bicycle up the ladder and stuff it into the hatch, there are already a bunch of bicycles in the way. And if you aren't careful some of the older ones start to slip and move on you as you are trying to wriggle your way through them.

And the ladder to the attic is thirty feet tall and rickety as hell and there are no handrails.

And the bicycles are hot to the touch; parts of them hot enough to burn you!



It is hard to explain just how the geometry conspires in a theater to make the work exhausting. The places where you can stick a ladder or even a manlift are afterthoughts to the primary purpose of having lights where they need to be to paint the stage picture. So in the vast majority of cases, it isn't like going up one of those bookcase ladders with the book you want in front of you and in comfortable reach of your arm. Instead you have to twist around on the ladder like a yoga exercise and stretch out as far as you can and then shove twenty to forty pounds of metal against rusty fasteners to get it in the right direction.

Your arms are all at bad angles for trying to apply leverage, the focus target is usually behind your head where you can barely see out of the corner of your eye if you twist around uncomfortably, your knees and elbows are in the way, and because your feet are still on the ladder your whole body is twisted around painfully. And all of this conspires against your strong desire to keep at least one foot on the ladder which is saving you from a potentially fatal fall. In practical terms, you often end up with only the friction of your forearm against a piece of gouged-up metal somewhere keeping your body from sliding off the top of the ladder, only your fingertips supporting the full weight of the lighting instrument, and your non-dominant hand turned the wrong way to try to jam a wrench into position to force a rusted, damaged fastener to where it will take the malevolently swiveling load off your fingers.

Repeat this over and over. In the dark. In sweltering heat. Covered in dust. With live wires that sometimes give you nasty shocks and of course the aforementioned bits that are hot enough to burn you in a fraction of a second (one of the gobos I took out last night was orange-hot; glowing so hot you could see the light it was casting projected on to the stage through the optics.


The base rate for lighting technicians in the Bay Area is $15 an hour. Some theaters still offer $10.

Blinded Me With Science

Just figured out why my cast acrylic eye pieces are so hard to see through, even when I do get a decent surface.

Cast acrylic has an index of refraction higher than that of air!

The outer surface of the helmet is curved, therefor the front surface of the eye pieces describes an arc. And because they were cast in an open mold, the rear is flat. That makes them a lens.

It is always sort of cool when some of the basic physics of the universe pops up in the middle of a construction project like this.

I've been having a lot of trouble getting a good surface anyhow. Went progressively up to wet-sanding with 2000 grit, and followed with Novus #2, but it still leaves a cloudy surface. I don't think the casting resin is quite compatible with the resin polish. (I'd previously tried using a Dremel polishing wheel at low speed but it still gouged holes in the plastic).

This is all surface effect, which is why flame polishing and MEK softening methods (sort of) work for this sort of thing. Which means the surface is a lot more clear when wet. And, as it turns out, when OILED. A little drop of sewing machine oil brought it...well, far from optical quality, but enough to confirm there was a major lensing issue that made it impossible to see anything clearly through the eyepieces.

So I guess I'm back to trying to carve, bend, and shape 1/8" to 1/4" cast acrylic sheet. Which I'll have to do at TechShop because it will be a messy bit of grinding and filing and sanding.

Less Foam

It is hard to let go of a method (and a skill) that you have been using for years. But I'm coming to realize that foam, at least how I'm using it, is a poor fit for the props I am doing today.

I met foam back in high school theater. It is still a great match for theatrical props, and that's what made it so hard to take a step back and see it in proper context. You see, theater props are meant to be seen from a distance. Forty feet, we usually say. And they don't have to last long or stand up perfectly to rough handling; many is the prop on many a show that finishes more tape and hot glue and hastily spray-painted touch-ups than original surface.

At the heart of most of the prop-making processes is a central paradox; you want a final surface that is hard and durable, but you want a material which is soft and malleable during the process of shaping that surface. Hardwood, metal; they both look great, but need power tools and excessive time to carve. Foam allows you to rough in a shape very, very quickly -- sometimes with nothing more than bare hands.

This flexibility can be a huge drawback, though. Foam is not quite durable enough for the kind of close-up hand props I'm making now. And it can't stand up to the rigors of vacuum forming, either. Yes, you can take a mold off it, and cast either a durable resin copy or make a better vacuum form buck from that. But even then foam is problematic for achieving a good final surface.

It beads, it cracks, it squishes. All those qualities that make it excellent for quick shaping, work against getting the final smooth surface and details you are after. There is a partial way around this; hold the foam back significantly from the final outlines, and coat it with Bondo. Then you can shape that more durable material with more confidence that it won't collapse.

Except you are basically trading away the advantage of foam being there at all. Bondo is further along the graph from "easy to carve" to "solid in the hand," enough that you are back into shaping with power tools. The foam is present in so rough a shape, it might as well be swapped out for cheaper and more durable MDF -- there's no loss in carving time since all the important shaping is taking place on the Bondo surface now.

I had a similar issue with FIMO, but the generally workable solution was to bake progressively; retaining the shapes that were finished so they didn't squash, distort, or get accidentally dented or otherwise mangled while you were sculpting the next element. (As an aside, Sculpey has this problem even worse; it is self-skinning, which is probably great for beads but makes it difficult to properly refine a surface without baking it then resorting to sand paper).

The ultimate along this line, to my mind, is that gift from the prop-making gods; Apoxie Sculpt. Apoxie fits well with my impatient approach and generally iterative workflow; it starts off soft enough to roughly prod into shape, like sticky clay. Then it sets up over about forty-five minutes in a balsa-like state that is generally too stiff to accidentally squish out of shape, but soft enough you can quickly whittle more refined details into. Then, in eight to twelve hours more, it sets to a durable solid like tight-grained wood, that can be drilled and sanded.

There are downsides to the stuff, but, really, the trade-off you get for materials like this, that are both easily malleable during primary shaping and tough and stable during the final detailing, is the cost of the stuff.

None of these "translation" materials are cheap, from Apoxie Sculpt to the silicone rubber used to make a decent mold. Which is why theater often doesn't translate -- it uses the primary carving materials (foam, balsa, foam-core, cardboard) as the final form. And, yes, people get excellent results with hand props and costume pieces with these materials, and similar. But it just isn't the kind of surface and durability I want for my own.

Well, there's a couple places where I can push closer to center. More expensive foams that carve tighter and better support surface finishing, for one. But I may have to give up on expanded styrene foam for all but massive, rough-shaped props.

Another annoying day

I knew I couldn't finish the Space Helmet today. But I was hoping to get down to the point where little but the oxygen canister (which will require a TechShop visit) was left to do.

Set up my beloved but sadly under-utilized Bernina and put on all the straps. The pack is a little tight, and the mask straps look a little weird. Works, though. The hose is quite uncomfortable, though, and it only barely fits under the helmet, and all in all I think it may be a better solution to add a hose connection to the helmet instead.

I also may run out for more webbing and re-do the pack. But other than that and the canister, it is just detail painting left. Unfortunately I'm going into a show in the City followed immediately by a load-in in town followed immediately by another show in the City. Busy times.

In fact, it looks like I might actually make rent not just this month, but the next. Each month, heck, each bill, I've been surprised to make. And made only through last-minute work, loans, and outright gifts. Every now and then I think if I could just get my head a little further above water, the props business would start to pick up serious slack. Which is why I've been pushing so hard with the holocrons. But the rest of the time, I am not so certain.

Times like today, when nothing quite fit or looked right. And even the lentils I put on the stove never quite decided to thaw out into soup.

(And, yeah, doesn't help that I'm only ten bucks shy of making the upcoming TechShop membership. Drat them for raising it $25 this month! There's an equipment rental past due, and a guy I'll be seeing at the next gig who owes me fifty bucks...but I don't see him until the day after my membership is due!)

The exercise nobody does

I like reading fanfic. For all the usual reasons; for more stories about characters I've already been introduced to, for stories that never got to happen in the original, and for a certain amount of snark and deconstruction.

But also as an exercise in writing. I am fascinated in watching how all writers, no matter what the media, take on the challenges of telling the story. Setting up the situations, setting the moods, explaining the back-story, establishing the characters, the whole lot.

And this is why there is one habit in fan fiction I find really annoying. Sure, these are established characters, and an established world. You aren't faced with having to get the audience up to speed with who is who and what they are up to before that audience gets bored waiting for something to happen and wanders off in search of some other story.

Except you should still have to do it.

Here's a little tidbit from a product of the pulp era:

The journalist took a full breath and began to spread enlightenment. 

"Listen, old chap, this bronze man is known as one of the greatest surgeons. As a chemist, he has made discoveries that your children will some day read about. The bronze man is rated a wizard in the field of electricity. Furthermore, he - " 

The thin man in the coveralls put a bony finger against the scribe's chest. "How many blokes are you tellin' me about? 

"One."

The above occurs a few pages into "The Thousand-Headed Man," and is introducing, of course, Doc Savage, the Man of Bronze, the leading protagonist whose name occurs on the cover of the magazine. Except the above is from the 17th Doc Savage story, only one of what was over 181 stories in all.

And every single one of them introduced Doc to the reader.

Other serials did the same, though not always with Lester Dent's cleverness (the thin man had donned said coveralls as a disguise in a previous scene, and in fact already knew full well who Doc was, having come to gain his aid.) The Hardy Boys, for instance, made do with a drab recap of who Frank and Joe were in terse and omniscient narrative voice.

Contrast this to fan fiction. In the vast majority, all that you will see of any character is, "Harry was there, and Luna." In a smaller number (and all of the better written ones), there will be a few signifiers here and there; Luna will mention her father and The Quibbler, show off a few bits of her peculiar lunacy, and even possibly get a "...her blond hair" here or there. Extra points if none of these are either plot-important, or the pro-forma Stations of the Cross.

(To explain the above; there are things that are expected by the fandom. Jack O'Neill is going to have to say "For crying out loud" at least once, someone is going to have to mention Buffy Summers dying -- she got better -- and no possible Picard will ever get through a day without his Earl Grey, Hot.)

Point being, few writers attempt explaining who each of these people are in the same way they would have to if those characters were original. Sometimes they will do this for settings and situation, but this is more likely to be navigational aids towards when in the series this particular book is picking up. Or as part of the background of truly new or original characters; the description of Hogwarts, then, is not meant for us, it is meant to inform us of just what this outsider character knows as of that moment.

So, sure, there's reason to dislike this on purely practical grounds. Not all readers will have read all the sources, especially for a massive multi-universe cross-over. Not all readers will remember all the minor character from Harry Potter (there are a lot of characters in Harry Potter), and not all readers will figure out whether you mean movie version, book version, or some version that only shows up in the computer game.

But it is also a loss to the story, and to the writer. For the latter, you are skipping a chance to learn and practice how to slip in all of those details that describe a character. For the former, each story is a unique take, and implicitly will end up with a unique portrayal. By leaving off any attempt to describe anyone, you take away the best lens for seeing this characters afresh and making them your own.

A depressing lack of progress

The second attempt at an acrylic cast for the eyepieces was better, but still not clear enough. I don't know enough of what went wrong to know what to change, so I just went ahead with a third cast. At least the second mold is holding together well.

I chickened out on dropping forty bucks on a proper tubing bender...and destroyed ten bucks of tubing trying to get a smooth bend without.

The laser-cut side pieces for the mask sort of worked. I did have one clever moment; I cut the final set of paper templates out of graph paper, and by setting a grid in InkScape at the same spacing, I could do a point-by-point translation of the shape into software for the laser. Bending turned out to be a huge pain, although it did work. Except for one bend, which snapped and I had to fill it.

Plus, I decided the lumps and cracks on the PETG from the damaged buck were not really acceptable, so I used filler primer and Bondo spot putty to try to clean up the shape a little. And the primer crackled up when sprayed over the Krylon Fusion for Plastic undercoat. Sigh.

I start each day thinking there's so little left I should be able to finish before sunset. And that's been going on for a week now. Depressing the difference between what I think I should be able to accomplish, and what I actually accomplish.

And in the above, my estimation of what will work is obviously also off. I mean; I expect not everything to work. That is a given. But my expectation is towards a certain percentage of things working the first time, and that percentage has not born out at all recently.

Really, those, these are both facets of a basic problem. See if I can put it simply. If I can do something, I undervalue it. Things I know I can do (or think I can do) I don't give myself a lot of credit for, or ask enough money for, or allow enough time for. If I can do them, then they are too simple, too trivial for much excitement.

I reserve that for the things I can't do yet. Which, of course, as soon as I successfully do one (even in the most limited fashion) become translated instantly to the space of "things I already do." Lather, rinse, repeat.

Well, at least the holocron is moving forward again. I have some hope the Academy will actually order a few before the month is out. Not that I have made much of a breakthrough in the designs I mean to put up at the RPF. There, I am still caught on basically that same dilemma; the shapes I know how to realize, I don't feel are worth doing. The shapes that interest me are the ones that remain an unsolved challenge. And so it goes.

Random thoughts about cross-over fiction

People have been writing cross-overs since, well, before writing. There's something about having your favorite fictional characters meet that has interested story tellers all the way back to the oral tradition.