Vally of the Dolls

I'm not sure what production it will be for but we were asked to create 2 giant pill capsules that are needed for a photo-shoot for some of Nearly Naked Theater's marketing and promotional materials for next season.  So to make these I really plumbed the depths of my resourcefulness.

Juicy Couture had done some elaborate jewelry packaging some years back.  One had a sculpted bust of a woman from the 18th century meant to put a necklace on and then she was inside a plastic bell jar or done.  Their was a different statute under a similar jar that was used for earrings. So a friend was somewhere and they had 3 of these that had been damaged that they where tossing and she nabbed them for us.  We took 2 that where the same size to use as the translucent half for each of our two capsules.

For inside the clear dome I wanted little pellets of medication like you sometimes see but couldn't find gumballs or any other round candy.  What we had that was perfect where some paint balls.  They were in these plastic tubes that had flip lids and could be attached to a belt.  We bought them at a goodwill for the containers which I fill with nails or screws.  But hoarders that we can sometimes be we still had a tube of these that still hap paint balls in it.  There weren't enough to just fill each capsule so I used a paper towel type cardboard tube and stuck a ball pit pall on the end (doesn't everyone keep a trash bag of ball pit balls on hand just in case they are needed?).  I painted that and glued the paint balls on that and put this inside the dome.

Finally the other side of my capsules I made by doing something similar to the base I made with the tube and ball pit ball only larger.  Then to make it smooth and uniform I did a coat of joint compound which I was then able to sand down.  It still wasn't quite right but I didn't want to make it heavy with more joint compound so I took some leftover air dry clay Jay made some months ago that we had a little bit of leftover after the project he mixed it for.  That clay was made with school glue as the main base.  That left my capsule with a nice smooth look.  Blue paint and 2 layers of acrylic clear coat enamel spray and I was done.

Masks for Clive Barker's History of the Devil

For the spring season of 2015 Nearly Naked Theater did a production of Clive Barker's History of the Devil.  There are nearly 30 characters in all in the play but these are played by a cast of maybe 11 actors all together.  The author intended for masks to be used to help the audience distinguish which character an actor is portraying at any given point.  So our biggest job was to create over 20 masks.  For this we got to work with a great product for the first time.  It is called Fosshape and feels and looks like a thick felt.  You can sew it or pin it to the curves and contours you want for the final piece then apply heat with a heat gun or hair dryer.  The fibers are plastic and when heat is applied the material contracts slightly and gains a fairly rigid quality very much like molded felt hats but accomplished easily and quickly by any novice.  Below are some examples of our masks.  I have included images done for publicity purposes for the show for which I will be adding a citation and securing permission for using.

Props, set and costume elements for "Angels in America"

Nearly Naked theater is producing both parts of "Angels in America" to round of its 16th season.  We created a number of elements but by far the most exciting was to create the angel's wings.  They were to operate using a bunraku style puppetry technique with one stage hand on each wing.  Here are some pictures of  the wings in process and a video of the test run on the completed set of articulated angel wings.

Another success for this production was our angel statue that remains on the stage for the entire production and is the center piece for all scenes in central park.  It is of course meant to represent the Bethesda Fountain statue.

Pieces for Nearly Naked Theater in their production of "Eating Raul the Musical"

Sign designed for Eating Raul the Musical,  created by Ralph Roberts and Jay Templeton, 2011

There where other pieces we worked on but these stood out.  A failed effort on my part was a frying pan designed using foam coated with rubber to give it the cast iron look.  The pan was the murder weapon in the play and the hope was a non lethal version that could be brought down on actors' heads with out much caution.  Sadly the coatings I used never seemed to dry fully so in the end it was abandoned and a real pan was used.

Best Showgirl Headdress Ever

Yellow Headdress by Ralph Roberts
and Jay Templeton 2008

I came across this cropped cut out image of an early cooperative effort between Jay and I.  The show was Rocky Horror and this was what Frankfurter sported for the floor show near the end.  It is hard to see in the image but along with the scale, color, and over all to-much-i-ness still if you could see the base clearly it would show may contribution which was an intricate network of dangling, strung and fixed beads, stones, and anything I could find that dripped or sparkled, encrusted with yellow gold glitz according to an organic yet intentional and geometric design.  Sort of a Faberge egg for the head if it where to then burst apart sprouting feathers.

Articulation of a tenticle.



Prototyped articulating tentacles
Jay Templeton 2010



When working on "the Muckleman" during Nearly Naked Theater's season ending in 2010 Jay did some intense work to create tentacles capable of coiling and moving in a somewhat realistic manner.  Jay and I have many shared passions which bring us together in these creative efforts but we remain vastly foreign beings in many other areas. 



Jay Templeton 2010



I am ever annoyed by his halting start to things as he laboriously prepares a mock up, prototype or painstakingly planned pattern to follow.  By now however I have seen the benefits to his more tentative starts.  Usually he can use his planned attack and predetermined measurements to produce objects more closely modeled to recreate a given object, building, or special effects related prop.  His dancing Rats for Reefer Madness, functional and matching perfume infusers in small and large form for Rock horror, The false fronted necronomicron used to make it look as if it opened on its own and the pages then glowed and swirled with writing and pictures (Evil Dead), and of course the previously featured mouse head along with animatronic beaver also for evil dead.

However there are those efforts which brilliant they may be sadly never make it out of the Wicked Queens Rand D department.  This was the case with his tentacles.  All in all he did six mock ups.  They started with a series of disks threaded in a certain fashion but wanting a greater functionality and the ability to support themselves better as if they where moving while floating in water and so where passed over for his much more intricately made PVC tentacles.  These required filing and cutting individual segments out of PVC that would then be riveted together.  This design was inspired ignominiously by schematics for an endoscopy camera mount as would be used during a colonoscopy. 



Prototyped articulating tentacles by Jay Templeton 2010

  Unfortunately the much more promising effect they could produce was not enabling quite what we had hoped and with the opening day upon us we abandoned the prototypes all together and used some plastic channel material covered to look like the squid which wiggled a bit like they where in watter.  In the production I have to give credit to the set designer and the puppeteer for achieving something rather effective with what could have fallen so short of what was needed that it proved distracting and effectively diminished the final work which gladly they did not.

In working on a slew of Items for the first show for the 2011 year "Devil Boys from outer space" one of the fun challenges was to make an alien in a jar that looked almost like what how one might picture an alien baby that would surprise the actors and hopefully the audience when it leaps from the jay and sucks onto one of the characters faces.  I did some pre-work prototyping for once as did Jay and we tried to have a mechanism that would pop open like a yawning moth which would not be quite where you would have thought since the head would have a sort of cute and familiar look but then separate like the head was splitting open.  Both my segmented false face and Jays mechanical mouth device where fraught with problems and they where not coming together well at all.  We must of re tooled the thing four times and at last resigned to a more static creature that had no moving articulated components.

While this last planned project  may be laid to rest along with the articulated tentacles in the veritable graveyard or orphanage like closet of other half com pleated and rejected props and costume elements the death certainly is not without meaning or value.  It is that striving to challenge our work to take up a next novelty or sophistication, utilize an unfamiliar material, or in any of a number of ways to expand our knowledge and range of experience in our design work.  And that strive and drive to challenge ourselves in such ways offers a vitality, professional dedication, and quality of personal fulfillment that fuels the other work and must, I believe, result in what we do finally take to the stage possessing some of the charge and exacting attention which was aroused by those more noble if not fully realized aims.

Evil Dead

I wish that I had a version of this video with sound.   However it shows the way this puppet works.  The moose head puppet or articulated mouse head trophy was for the musical adaptation of the horror cult classic movies in the Evil Dead series.  It is not clear in this video but the moose has eyes that light up and glow red inside when he goes all "possessed by demons."  We went round and round about how to do the eyes spending most of our effort on rigging up some form of moving eyeball that could be triggered to flip from a standard eye on one side of a pivoted ball to a glowing red side.  Everything seemed doom to snag or catch.  In the end the solution was to mount red LED lights beneath the tinted eye panels to a toy Darth Vader mask or costume for kids.  So this Moose is strong in the force you could say.









The Moose was one of a variety of props that where needed for evil dead.  Keep posted for links to other cool stuff created for this show.