CMU School of Drama


Sunday, July 17, 2016

Any Way You Slice It – FoamCoat Is The Best Choice For Coating A Foam Sculpture

Rosco Spectrum: Josh Kigner, a freelance theatrical designer, was hired by Fort Point Theatre Channel to design scenery and props for a new play that was debuting at Boston Playwrights Theatre. The script called for a large Greek plaster sculpture of a man that was low on cost, could be easily carried on stage, had a rigged arm that could break on cue. This eliminated the choice of finding a rental, so Josh worked his magic with 1/4″Insulation foam and turned to Rosco for the rest.

2 comments:

Coco Huang said...

This is really a great way of creating cheap but realist prop for a show, which is often the need in high school productions. The sculpture in the article looks really good, with three layers of FoamCoat, it's hard to see the edges of different layers of foam board, and the paint gives it a further antique looking. We learned to carve out stones from foam in painting workshop, but it's by hand, not using 3D equipment. So the limitation of this kind of prop is its high-tech, I personally haven't used them (or even seen them), and maybe only professional theatre designers can afford this kind of equipment for their props. Also, I wonder if this prop is reusable, because it seems like its arm needs to be broken during the show, and there should be someway to reconnect the arm after each performance. Furthermore, I think the 3D scanning machine is really hope, and I'm looking forward to using or getting to know it more in the future if I have chance.

Haydon Alexander said...

This is interesting, I'd love to know how the foam with the FoamCoat coating overtop interacts with stage lighting as opposed to how the stone of an actual sculpture would react, from the pictures it looks like there may be some texturing problems and problems getting the sculpture the correct color. I'm curious to know if the designer intended for the sculpture to be this mottled tan color as opposed to the light grey we are used to seeing in a greek sculpture. But, I'm getting bogged down with specifics, this seems like a really cool way of getting props and set pieces that are incredibly accurate and realistic. It almost seems that the expensive technology will be wasted on high-budget theaters though, because I have to question the necessity for ultra-accurate props when the audience is far away like in big houses, where as smaller communities actually need high precision where their audiences tend to be much closer. Nonetheless, I can definitely see this technology utilized in a variety of interesting ways.