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- Category: Props
For this project, we are making giant mushrooms.
I choose to make the base of the mushroom out of OSB wood cut into 1 foot squares various sizes of PVC pipe anchored to those for the stems. The tops are a mash of various paper mache, chicken wire and hardware cloth, aluminum pans, joint compound and paints, and even a dash of expanding foam.
To get a variety of mushroom sizes, I chose to use a couple different sizes of PVC pipe, cut at various lengths and even some smaller 8 inch concrete tubes.
I started by screwing the PVC into some 1 foot square OSB wood.
and then adding joint compound to the base to give strength and to hide the hardware.
The next step was using either chicken wire or hardware clother, or roasting pans from the dollar store, to make the mushroom heads, then paper macheing over those, covering them in joint compound
To give them a little more texture, some spray foam was added to look like growths along the stems and the heads.
And then finally they were painted various colours.
Some of the heads were too heavy and flopped over during drying, which added more to the variety.
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- Category: Props
With the dark forces of the fairytale kingdom all around us, I wanted something that make the ground looked like it was cooking and smoldering.
Again, this started with some OSB.
That i sprayed black (looks very white in the picture)
Next i took some plastic beverage bottles of various sizes and shapes (2 litre, 1 litre, 20oz, etc) and cut them into different sizes
Then i randomly placed some LED halloween string lights on the OSB and randomly placed the plastic bottles over them
Then i sprayed spray foam all over the whole thing
and finally dusted it with some black
Anywhere the black is, the lights will not shine through and will give a "charcoal" kind of effect
And finally with the string lights turned on
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- Category: Props
I've always wanted my own flying saucer. So I buit one.
It was not fully functioning (maybe a future build...?) But it did have flashing lights, smoke and some sound coming out of it. It was made of all wood, with 8 sides.
I employed a fairly basic design and that repeated 8 times.
Google Sketchup was used to make the initial design and figure out the angles and cuts needed. I then had a bunch of 1x2 furring strips cut.
I then used backing board to cover the whole thing
i finished it by spraying it chrome, which i forgot to take pictures of. I also put 2 flashing strobe lights inside and topped it off with an emergency beacons on the top. There was also 900watt fog machine inside with a "boiler room" scent added to it, that would go off once in a while. And last but not least pair of speakers and a subwoofer played a low rumbling noise on a loop.
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- Category: Props
The theme for this year for our section was scarecrows. So I decided i needed platforms to put the scarecrows on. Two different styles were built. First, a smaller 2ft x 2ft square platform, or varying heights to place dummies on. Second, a larger 3ft x 3ft platform for scare actors to stand on top off.
In order to be able to reuse them for the coming years, they also had to be able to be easily taken apart for storage.
We tried to use as much "reclaimed" wood as possible, so we found a friend who let us take his discarded pallets. We first tore them apart and then cut them to uniform sizes. In addition, we had OSB laying around, and MDF which was given to us. Then a few pieces of wood had to be purchased new.
With all this in hand, we started by staining them with a rust mixture. I took steel wool and soaked it in vinegar until it rusted and broke down.
Then I brushed it over the new wood to get it looking dirty.
Since a lot of the wood was reclaimed from pallets it was pretty dirty looking already, so a coat of satin-touch spar urethane was put over all the pieces to seal in their natural grunginess.
All the square platforms were painted with a coat of grey primer
The top platforms and the sides were screwed together
To keep the legs removable, we used bolts.
Finally, the crosses were bolted to the back to hang the scarecrows from
We also added "slats" to the front and back.
Then the scarecrows were tied with rope to them
As a side note, the larger platforms were made just tall enough to hide my speakers underneath
