Recent content by leastlikely

Soap the bow. Violin bows work by tiny teeth on the hairs catching the tiny grooves on the strings. Rosin makes the bow hairs sticky so they catch more easily. Rub a bar of soap on your bow and it will be close to silent. I've used this method personally. It's audible to the player but it...

Working on "Seven Guitars," and we need to kill two chickens on stage. Well, a chicken and a rooster. All the other chickens can be totally fake, hard bodies, made of foam or molded plastic. Those are easy to come by. But we need two that can look like they are alive before their heads get cut...

tl;dr: I was super involved in theatre in high school and mildly involved in college, but it was a really long process to figure out what I wanted to be doing. The single event that truly got me into what I do now was this random Fringe show I did for a friend-of-a-friend. The whole story...

I love the ghost light - I mean, yes I recognize that it's mostly just a safety thing, but I think it's a nice superstition to have as well. Leave a light on so the ghosts can roam while they're alone overnight. In fact I love it so much that I have a ghost light tattoo! :)I never thought of...

I worked on a production of Hamlet (actual title of the show: Hamlecchino: Clown Prince of Denmark - it was a Commedia dell'Arte adaptation) where Ophelia's death was staged in rain on aerial silks. The rain was the easy part! Run a hose through a PVC pipe with holes in it, and the rain falls...

We used a golf cart plated with foam. Not even carved foam, because this was in high school and we didn't have a hot foam knife (and our designers and teacher didn't think about acquiring one, I guess...). We literally just stuck full sheets of foam to the sides of the cart and painted them. Our...

--Google Drive both on my computer and on my Android phone. For my current show, I'm still in rehearsals and am still writing my backstage track... so I have a run sheet going in Google Drive, and I'm updating it on my phone as we go! When it's finally 100% set I'll print a hard copy but for...

QLab (the pro version, not the free version I'm pretty sure) can run three projectors... but you probably don't want to do it on your personal Macbook. You'll want a machine dedicated to running projections. If you have other programs running on your computer, it can cause lag/glitches in the...

Hahahaha it took me a minute to figure out what scene in Big Love would require blood... I'm a dingbat. We used red flower petals, so it's hard to think of it as gore ;)ANYWAY - I would think about installing a drain in the floor platform, and putting a basin underneath it. You could probably...

I have used scrim as a projection surface, and it works perfectly well... but it doesn't work *better* than a projection screen. If the primary purpose of what you're buying is to show movies in a "movie theater" type setup, then you want a projection screen. If the primary purpose is to be a...

OH, that is so much easier!You can put cake frosting directly on cardboard or sturdy (I think you probably don't want squishy here) foam. Build the shape of the cake with the foam/cardboard, paint it if you want, and decorate the cake with store-bought frosting! You may want to spray-seal it...

How many people need to eat it? I'd definitely suggest making several small cakes instead of one large one. You can use one batch of batter but pour it into several small pans instead of a large pan. This way you have a fresh cake for each performance (with complete, frosted edges, not cut...

Big Love by Charles Mee

I've had to be recorded singing for a show because it wasn't a musical and the cast didn't have a singing audition, and none of them could pull off the song the director wanted. I ASM'd a show where in addition to fight call we had a rappel call. Because there was actual rappelling in the play...

I use McDavid hex pads. They've got a pretty small silhouette, as they are made up of a honeycomb of tiny little soft pads, instead of one big hard plastic shield. I got mine at Modell's, but I'm guessing they carry them at other sports stores like Sports Authority, Dick's, etc. McDavidUSA |...