Having done something rather similar when I was TD at GeVa
Theatre, a
LORT house in Rochester NY, I've got a couple of questions and a couple of observations. I do think the
face down and
roller would work if you use a 3"
roller and work on small areas at a time and don't put glue where it isn't needed, i.e. not on the open areas. It will take a lot of leaves. Our scenic used a Hudson with a flex glue mix rather than a
roller, better control she said, it worked so I believe her, YMMV.
Q. 1. How dense a coverage does the client want?
Q. 2. What is the design intent to the look, realistic, representational, impressionistic....??
Realistic means a LOT of leaves.
The production was O'Neill's "Ah Wilderness" '82-'83 season. The set was a partial
unit set with 6 real trees and two full
stage leaf borders. The trees were obtained from a construction site in late fall (that's another story, ask me sometime....'I'm a lumberjack and I'm OK....") so we didn't have to get rid of the old leaves. What the designer wanted for leaves was a very translucent look and his design was to paint leaf shapes on
mylar and cut the leaf shapes out. The end result was quite stunning with light pouring through from different angles at different times.
The execution was not as hard as it might seem, the real killer was the time and labor of attaching the leaves. To make the leaves, our
scenic artist laid out about 50 2'x4' sheets at a time, of
clear mylar, 10 mil thick IIRC,
edge to
edge and then did a Jackson Pollock paint job in translucent printer's inks and dyes with something like
acetone or some
solvent (I'm not sure exactly what she used and it's been a while) so some color went on crystal
clear and some etched the
mylar a touch. There was no intent to create leaf shapes at this
point. Next we had a tool and die company make 6 different leaf shapes and 10 dies of each. They then punched stacks of the
mylar sheets, 50 at a time into leaf shapes. We did 600 sheets and we got 60 leaves out of each sheet, do the math and that's 36,000 leaves..... it wasn't enough. The trees took almost 10,000 leaves each. Individual leaves, hot glued to small branches in groups of 25 - 30 and then the branches were attached to the trees. The crew for leaf attachment was ... Dut Da Da DAH! Girl Scout and Boy Scout troops! Also Cub Scouts and Brownies. She recruited the troops and over a period of 6-8 weeks the various troops competed to see who could glue the most leaves. It counted toward badges and she came up with other rewards, like back
stage tours for the older ones and their folks. She got about 200 kids involved which meant only 6 branches of 25 leaves apiece on an average.
Now came the borders and we figured we only had about 8,000 leaves left to use. But our
scenic artist came up with a brilliant idea. The year before I had built a vacuum form machine with a 4'x8' max
pattern deck. We got 4'x8' sheets of the same
mylar and she did the same paint job on them. Then we put then on the vacuum table with some amorphous stuff randomly laid under and turned on the heat and pulled the form. It looked a
bit like a series of 3" to 6" high sand dunes or rolling hills.
The finished borders were actually two layers thick, about 6" apart, the front layer being the leaves on net, and the rear layer being a solid silhouette of the
mylar sheets. Our borders were 45' long and 30' long respectively, they were roughly 4' high at the center and arched down about 8' to 10' at the sides. The front layer was roughly a
foot longer than the back and when light came through the
effect was like many layers of leaves.
From that experience my observations are: It takes more leaves than you think, It takes a LOT of person hours to do the leaves. It takes more leaves than you hoped. It takes more hours than planned. It takes A LOT of leaves, more than you think. Did I mention it takes a lot of leaves?
Our method of attaching leaves to the net was to make the net with the web top and attach that to a
batten in the shop and fly it. This way the net hung like it would on the
stage. We started at the top and worked down, raising the
batten as we went so the crew was always working from the floor, not ladders or such. The crew of 6 would grab leaves from a series of piles set out by the scenic in various color types. If you remember, the paint job on the plain sheets was mottled, scumble splotch
etc. so the color groups were along the lines of mostly green, mostly yellow, mostly brown or tan
etc. As you can probably guess we worked from back to front - dark to light. She also had us trade places every two or three groups so none of us started a "
pattern". The attachment method???? During the attachment
stage we had one person on each side of the net, person in front put the leaf on the net, person on the back attached a piece of
clear packing tape across at least one net
cord and pressed while the front person held a piece of 1/4" ply as a backing to push against. When that step was finished, the
border was laid
face down, on plastic, and she came back with a Hudson and did a very controlled light spray on the
border. The spray was more controlled than a
roller and did not get on the "open" areas of the net. BTW, the net was not cut to shape until the
border was on
stage and in place.
Yes, a few leaves did come off in transit, not many. However, at that time the shops and paint area were in the same building, so transit was short, but a little painful, out the window of the paint area, over the
edge of the roof and down then straight back in the rear of the
stage. Don't know how well the attachment method would work for you. The main points are to plan for a rather labor intensive project. Plan for a lot of leaves. Example, in a catalog of artificial plants, a phycus about 5' tall with a leaf ball about 18" x 30" on the top half only is listed a "500 leaf" plant. Did I mention it will take a lot of leaves?? HTH.