Re: Shrinking Rosco Mirror
Last year i worked on a production of A Chorus
Line that had 8 roughly 6' x 14' mirrors with a heat shrunk
Mylar covering on it.
Looking back on it there are manly lessons that i have learned:
1-
Build the frame to hold a lot of tension, after all you have a small amount of shrink in the mirror. After the
mylar has been shrunk once you have no more room to tighten it up anymore. We built ours our of wood in a hollywood style, but now i wonder if a metal frame would have been less problematic.
2- If you do choose to use wood do not put a sheet good on its
face. When we began the
build we had the frames all faced with
luan, and a
trim going around it to hold the
mylar off of it my about 1/4" (to help the initial pre-heat stretch process). What we found is that the heat needs a place to
escape on the backside of the
mylar with airflow. We ended up cutting huge holes in the
luan to allow for this airflow.
3- Heat guns are great but take FOREVER. We rented a set of parbanks and rigged them to a batton about 4 feet in the air. Then we built a rolling table for the flats to
lay on as we slowly rolled them underneath. This allowed for an even slow heating with no burn through. (The heatguns were used after for small touchups in the corners which take longer than the middle of the
mylar)
4- The final, possibly most living saving lesson that i learned was, after all of the heating is done and you are finished with your
build the materials that you use might begin to
settle more and you can lose the tight mirror look that you achieved. What works really well is to CAREFULLY insert new cross braces into the
flat, but this time cut them about 1/8" to 1/4" long and hammer them into the places in the
flat where the
mylar has lost its tight hold. This stretching of the
flat will re-tighten the
face.
Good luck with your
build!