Frying pan fire on stage

ChaoticMoth

Member
Hi all,
Looking for some thoughts and ideas for an upcoming production of One Man, Two Govenors. I've been asked to do lighting and also to start a small frying pan fire on stage. I'm trying to dissuade the company from creating a real fire on stage due to H&S risks and potential costs involved but at the moment they seem quite determined on the idea. If we do have a real fire I'm thinking of using flame paste, but am not sure on the best way to ignite. Any suggestions?
 
I would suggest placing some dry ice in the pan and have the actor add water to the pan. Add some lights and it should be believable.

If you really want to know what to use, contact your local fire marshal/authority having jurisdiction and find out how to do it legally. Once the company knows what it would take to place real fire on stage, you shouldn't have too much problem convincing them of using an alternative.
 
If you do use real flame, and I can understand in an intimate space, just have a competent person or persons prepared with fire extinguisher at the ready, and explain and/or demonstrate for the authorities.

As far as ignition, I'm sure there are clever prop builders that know how to do this. I still remember some play at Stratford Festival (CA) 40+ years ago and the campfire carried on and then began to burn with real fire, and died down on cue. Or a cooking scene at Long Wharf where real sausage sizzled in a fry pan on the oldest of kitchen ranges. It's hard to have quite the effect with less than real combustion. And think about home shows in arenas and the many cooking demonstrations. Just plan and study and review and practice. Can't be as risky as a candlelight Christmas Eve service.
 
How long is this suppose to last for?

Does the pan ever get lifted off its surface?

How big of flame are you looking for?

If it doesn't leave the surface I would say cut the bottom of the frying pan out and make a silk flame and add the dry ice for the smoke effect. Put the silk flame on a foot switch where when the actor is done they can take their foot off and flame goes down. If it gets moved around your looking at real combustion and possibly making a homemade frying pan handle with a pen torch built into it. Remember anything you light on fire is going to have a smell, smoke and not last as long.
 
Hi all,
Looking for some thoughts and ideas for an upcoming production of One Man, Two Govenors. I've been asked to do lighting and also to start a small frying pan fire on stage. I'm trying to dissuade the company from creating a real fire on stage due to H&S risks and potential costs involved but at the moment they seem quite determined on the idea. If we do have a real fire I'm thinking of using flame paste, but am not sure on the best way to ignite. Any suggestions?
I understand about the rules governing pyro on here, but as a professional I can offer some basic info. Everyone seems quick to shoot down doing live pyro effects and I understand the reasons why, but its certainly not impossible. First place to start is the AHJ (Fire Marshall in most places). Most require you to have liability insurance and license (in most municipalities.) What I would do is see if there's a local pyro or special effects company that can help you out. For such a small effect many times they're willing to help out by supplying someone to be the local license and pull the permit for you. Depending on where your located its usually not feasible to try on your own no matter how simple it seems. Good Luck and don't give up.
 
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Any updates on this, I am quite curious.
 
There are ways to remotely ignite things electrically (even without modifying a grill ignitor or anything like that), but it's one of those "if you have to ask..." types of questions. I would personally see about adapting a silk flame effect. Unless the audience is looking down at the effect, it should look alright enough.

Real flame is fun, but be sure to look at the fire code for your jurisdiction and follow it to a tee. In the US, this would fall under NFPA 160, but I know you're not in the US. Might make a good reference, though.
 
My first thought was silk flame fire, a fake fire effect used to good effect. A fan under the stove burner/coil, holes in the bottom of the pan, and silk flames in the pan. When you need the fire, set the pan on the stove and turn on the fan. I've used silk flames onstage before, simulating an entire script being burnt, and people in the audience actually thought the actors had set a real fire in the can. A foot stomp switch on the side coupled with a small 12v battery inside--the original fake fire unit used household current but stepped it down to 12v for the fan motor--allowed the actor to control when the fire started up.

If you need smoke as well, perhaps initially, vaping fogger effects work well and can be made small enough to fit inside the pan. You only need the heating element and the glycerine mixture to produce the smoke.
 
If you do use real flame, and I can understand in an intimate space, just have a competent person or persons prepared with fire extinguishers at the ready, and explain and/or demonstrate for the authorities.

As far as ignition, I'm sure there are clever prop builders that know how to do this. I still remember some play at the Stratford Festival (CA) 40+ years ago and the campfire was carried on and then began to burn with real fire, and died down on cue. Or a cooking scene at Long Wharf where real sausage sizzled in a fry pan on the oldest of kitchen ranges. It's hard to have quite the effect with less than real combustion. And think about home shows in arenas and the many cooking demonstrations. Just plan, study, review and practice. Can't be as risky as a candlelight Christmas Eve service.
@BillConnerFASTC Your "40+ years ago" from your 2015 post would've put this in 1975. Any chance you could've seen this in 1977? We had several versions of this prop depending upon the specific production, its set and the era it was set in. If you can recall the production, and assuming you saw this in Stratford's main theatre, this would've been in the days when the audience swept around a full 220 degrees with 11 aisles and 22 lobby doors at each of the two levels. I believe I'm recalling at least three versions of this prop' between 1977 and approximately 1980 or '81. The earliest versions were totally self contained housing rechargeable gel cells, control electronics, various optical and touch sensors, adjustable timers, sensors which let them know when they'd been set down and / or picked up, and a variety of fuel sources. By 1980 or '81 such props became controllable from the LX board via radio control from a transmitter located in one of the 4 or 8 Tannoy Belvedere speaker enclosures hung from the balcony rail. I say 4 or 8 as there were 4 on the rail when I relocated to Stratford in 1977 and 8 by the time I left their main theatre and shifted to operating their multi-track studio in the basement of their Avon Theatre prosc' house on Downie Street in the heart of downtown. Name the production and specific season and I can likely tell you more than you ever wanted to know about the specific prop'. I believe Chris Wheeler, Stratford's primary electronics technician, is about to retire this year after having slaved in the same shop for more than 40 years.
Thanks for the romp down memory lane.
Toodleoo!
Ron Hebbard (Retired from IBEW 105, IATSE 129 and Stratford's IATSE 357)
 
IIRC, and no certainty of that, I think Lear with William Hutt and Edward Atienza. Possible?
 
Saw a show at Long Wharf Theatre many years ago. Had a range on stage - the lind with the solid cast iron top - and opening scene was cooking sausage, which sure looked raw to start and which the actors ate IIRC. I was surprised they could get the odor out for later scenes.
 
Saw a show at Long Wharf Theatre many years ago. Had a range on stage - the lind with the solid cast iron top - and opening scene was cooking sausage, which sure looked raw to start and which the actors ate IIRC. I was surprised they could get the odor out for later scenes.
Once I built a remote controlled electric hotplate into an antique cast iron gas stove, for a production of August Wilson's "Gem of the Ocean", because the director wanted the bean soup to be hot onstage. Unfortunately, the actress working with the stove had a lot of activities away from the stove (like is normal in plays but not in real life), so the hotplate and soup pot were left unattended for several minutes at a time. We were unable to rig up a heat level control with the budget at the time.

During the first performance we discovered that leaving a soup pot on heat and unattended was a terrible idea, as smoke billowed out of the pot within fifteen minutes, and the actors turned out to be really great at pretending to adore burnt soup. The actors came to us techs and begged to be allowed to eat lukewarm unburnt soup onstage. So I unhooked the electric hotplate from the power but left the internal lighting on (simulating gas fire in the stove), and the actors pretended the soup was hot enough. They acted so well that the director congratulated us on making the hotplate work after all.

So the moral of the story is that actual heat/fire onstage needs to have an actor who can watch it and never leave it unattended, or some sort of system where a stagehand can do the same thing out of sight of the audience.
 
If it was remote controlled wouldn’t you have heat control?

Or by remote do you mean you just ran it from a dimmer with the other lighting effects for the stove.


Even still if you ran it from a dimmer I would think you could run a hotplate at 50% set it at 50% and it would still heat yet not burn. Spitballing of course as far as temp wise. But a hot plate isn’t anything fancy electronic wise so it wouldn’t damage it.

Still kudos to pulling a fast one on the director. Hopefully you told him so he knows his actors/ress can pull it off.
 
If it was remote controlled wouldn’t you have heat control?

Or by remote do you mean you just ran it from a dimmer with the other lighting effects for the stove.
The hot plate and the lighting effect for the stove had to be run off the same dimmer, so the hot plate had no heat control. The joys of discovering some of your dimmer packs had burnt out with no time to get replacements.
 

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