A Prop Cell Phone for Comedy of Errors

When we were preparing to design a production of The Comedy of Errors for Theatre Simpson’s 2016 fall season, the Director decided to create a prologue and an epilogue to the play in order to ease our audience into the vaudevillian concept that was to guide the visual and presentational style of the production.  The prologue was to be set in the present with a young lady breaking in to a derelict theatre strewn with the detritus of long-ago productions.

Production Photo of Prologue– Photo: Luke Behaunek

She uses her cel phone’s flashlight feature to see her way around the space. While she is settling in for the night, she receives a couple of unwanted texts, texts back to the sender, and then her phone rings.  She declines the call but the caller calls back immediately and in frustration, she hurls the cellphone offstage.

In considering this challenge, I turned to my colleagues from the Stagecraft Mailing List for advice. The responses varied from suggestions to use a real phone, to telling me to decline to attempt the gag on the grounds that it was too fussy and that “directors, playwrights and auteurs expect too much and need to be reigned in” .  I decided to pursue a combination of several more practical suggestions: deconstructing and re-engineering an inexpensive LED flashlight and mounting it an inexpensive cel phone case.

24 LED Puck Style

My first step was to identify a suitable flashlight.  A trip to my local Menards (a local big box home improvement store) led me to a puck-style flashlight with 8 LEDs.  once I examined it further, it was clear that the  way the LEDs were mounted and the 2 AA-style batteries would create an impractical thickne

An additional problem with the puck-style flashlight was that the switch cycled through 3 states in 4 steps: 1 LED on the front on, Off, 14 LEDs in the face of the puck on & Off again.

1 LED Book Light

I also found a booklight that was plenty thin, using  button-style batteries but which only incorporated a single LED insufficient to light a 3″x 5″ screen.

LED Strip Puck

Further exploration yielded a second puck-style flashlight using a flat LED strip that would appear to fit in a thin cellphone profile. I dis-assembled all 3 flashlights, identifying parts from each to use in the finished prop.  Starting with the LED strip flashlight, I removed the strip and the reflector.  I had hoped to use the switch and the circuit-board from it as well, but found that they were hopelessly integrated with the front LED.  So, I used the switch from the 14 LED-array flashlight and was able to separate the portion of the circuit-board associated with the small solid-state transistor in line with the LED array (having determined that both puck-style flashlights used the same transistor).  I only used the pair of 3-volt batteries from the magnetic book light.

I created an I phone “body” from 1/2″ MDF, starting with an I-phone 6 case purchased from WalMart to get the size right (though, in truth, it ended up just a little thicker than an authentic I-phone to accommodate the depth of the flashlight reflector. I carved out the body to accommodate the various salvaged electronic components with the battery compartment simply a hole drilled in the back to the exact diameter and depth of the stacked batteries with electrical contacts of 20 gauge wire striped bare, coiled flat and fused with a dollop of solder.  The slide-on bottom portion of the cel phone case trapped the batteries and contacts in place. I soldered wires to the switch so that both “ON” positions applied current to the LED strip.   A photo of an I-phone screen printed it on acetate served as the screen.  It was held to the face of the cellphone with double-stick carpet tape

Assembled Cel Phone

The finished prop proved to be a convincing “facsimile” of an I Phone 6.  It had to be turned on and off by the actress using it in order to illuminate the screen and since it did not have an actual “flashlight” LED on the back, she had to use the screen as the flashlight in the opening sequence.   It proved plenty bright enough for our purposes and resilient enough that when the actress threw it upstage, it survived the journey. It helped that she sort of “frisbeed” it and it came to rest in a pile of ropes and drapes upstage.

Production Photo of Prologue– Photo: Luke Behaunek

That’s all for now!

SJM
Photos by Steven J McLean except as noted

 

 

Vectorworks/Renderworks Production Renderings

While I was doing some cleaning in my office recently (the reason for this may well be the subject of another post soon) I was going through my renderings and discovered that I couldn’t find the one that I created for a Winter 2016 production of an original play about Joan of Arc entitled Knowing Joan.  The action of the play was set in a present-day urban hole-in-the-wall coffee shop while flash-back scenes of the life of Joan of Arc also occur in the same space.  I recalled that I had created the rendering of the setting in Vectorworks as a 3-dimensional model and that I had labored to fully texture, color and light it. I had even taken the trouble of modeling all of the furniture that I acutally intended to use (including a coffee bar adapted from an ornate chest of drawers with some industrial pipe and fitting shelves fixed to one side)  I vaguely remember having encountering some sort of problem in rendering and printing it out, but I couldn’t recall what the impediment might have been.

Following is a discussion of some of the Vectorworks/Renderworks rendering modes that I use most frequently for demonstrating how a setting should appear to an audience member using Vectorworks/Renderworks. As a bonus, at the end, I reveal the simple adjustment that I needed to perform to permit the image to render properly.

Wireframe Rendering of Knowing Joan Set

The wireframe mode is the fastest method of rendering in Vectorworks. This mode is almost instantaneous.  This mode doesn’t discriminate between lines that define the front of the scenery and those that should be hidden.

The “Hidden Line” rendering is slower, but  shows objects defined as solid in such a way as to ignore any lines which should be hidden from view by the bulk of an object or by  elements that should appear in front of another element.

Hidden Line Rendering of Knowing Joan Setting

This is the rendering mode that I use as a basis for most of the set renderings that I create for productions.  By transferring these Hidden Line drawings onto Bristol board and working over them with watercolor and colored pencils, I achieve  results such as the rendering  for Tartuffe (fall 2017).

Watercolor & Pencil Tartuffe Rendering

Virtual “White Model” of Knowing Joan Rendering

The “Renderworks Style/Realistic Colors White” rendering mode (demonstrated in the post on the 2016  production of The Marriage Of Figaro) takes even longer to render.  This rendering of the Knowing Joan set model took my computer approximately 2 hours to render and another 2 hours to save as a JPG.

However, the full color rendering of the setting, showing colors and textures, images of some of the set dressing and including virtual lighting intended to reveal the setting in its most realistic rendering was the intended final result of hours of drawing in Vectorworks.   Once I found the file for the production and tried to render the model in the Final Renderworks rendering mode it took the computer about three hours to render it.  However, once complete, all of the symbols for the virtual lighting elements in the visible frame would overlay the rendering.  The cause of this eluded me at the time and I didn’t remember this problem until it happened at the end of the rendering process.  After trying the same thing a few times with the same results (someone once told me that this is the definition of insanity), it suddenly dawned on me that I had seen something in one of the preference windows that may have a bearing on this matter.  After some investigation I found in the Vectorworks/ Preferences/ Display tab a drop-down setting labeled “Display Light Objects:” and the options: Always, Only in Wireframe,  Never.  It was set to Always.  I do not know if this is the default or if I changed it from one of the other settings at some point in the distant past, but changing it to “Only in Wireframe” or to “Never” solved the problem.

Final Renderworks Rendering of Knowing Joan

Knowing Joan Production Photo

Once it rendered for about 3 hours, the image was free of the “Light Objects” and took another 3 or so hours to save as the JPG seen above .

 

 

I can’t even begin to estimate the time invested in this rendering considering all of the drawing involved in creating each of the elements and providing them with textures and image maps needed to present the realism that is attained in the image.  Was it worth it? Maybe not.  On the other hand, it is kind of cool!

That’s all for now!
Be safe!  But have fun!  After all, that’s why they call it a play!

SJM
All imagery used in this post by Steven J. McLean.