PleaseHelp Kabuki Drop?????

how's it going again guys? i have posted in the past about help with the philadelphia mummers parade. this time we are looking to do something with kabuki drops.

we are going with a storybook theme. so the idea would be to have a kabuki system which would drop down material painted/printed to look like pages of a book. have a voice read said book, and then kabuki drop it to reveal the scene.

after that scene we want to drop down another page of the book. and then in the same fashion kabuki that to reveal scene two.


now we do all of this on a tight budget and everywhere we look printed material that works with the kabuki are around 5k each. we need 4 maybe 5.size is 50 ft by 20 ft

so the question is which is the best place with the cheapest prices for the printed material? AND/OR is there a cheaper idea or material replacement?

for those of you who never saw the mummers please youtube philadelphia fancy brigade mummers from the year 2010 and on. you guys will fall in love with how crafty we are.

No one is a professional and we basically do all of it as a hobby.

sorry for wall of text. TLDR WE NEED HELP WITH KABUKI DROP MATERIAL/PRNTING
 
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Tight budget for a one time event. I'd suggest searching your community for some artists and bribing them to paint your drops. And to be clear, you want to mask, rather than reveal? meaning, you see scene 1, then scene 2 falls into view DS of scene 1? rather than, you see scene 1, then it falls to the floor, revealing scene 2 behind it?

Depending on the effect, you could get away with different materials and different techniques for making it look good on a budget...
 
Anything that big is going to be expensive, even in the cheapest fabric. You might call around to other theaters and see if they have any old drops they would either give you or let you paint and return with a new layer of paint on them.
 
where theres a will theres a way. Canvas drop cloth, $34. Stitch them together, paint the drop. Paint can hide a multitude of sins haha. Are you building some kind of rolling unit and marching this down broad st? Or are you inside? I heard fancy brigade is judged separately and doesn't march
 
Low budget option would be make a huge Venetian blind with some 1/8" lauan. Comes out to 186 roughly. Not including hardware and time to build. But it is certainly cheaper than what a drop that size with cost.
 
I think Aaron above has got the right idea of it. You could even go with really light-weight muslin - which'll be cheaper than canvas. Light-er weight fabric'll really help with, well, the WEIGHT of four or five hundred-square-foot drops.

The lighter the fabric weight, the more the material will shrink when you size the fabric with paint, so make sure you account for that. Any decent vendor should be able to give you an idea how much shrinkage to expect.

Good luck!
 

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