It started off as this really great idea. We needed a huge tree that Tarzan's parents could build a "treehouse" in. We looked up alot of different ways to make prop trees but nothing we could find was conducive to what guidelines we needed to follow. We had to follow all the rules of the school, it had to fit on the side of the stage because there wasn't room for it on the stage, three people had to be able to stand in it, I needed to be able to easily build a shelter on top of it in one verse of a song, people had to climb up and down it throughout the show, etc. There were some big hurdles to overcome. One tree that we had found had this really great look but the way they had done it wouldn't work for us so we thought of a different way to make that look work. We came up with the idea of using twisted brown paper. In our heads it was a fairly simple idea...however, that was not the case. Originally we thought we would be able to buy those huge roles of brown paper that you can get at the craft store but very soon after we started building we realized that we would need way to much paper and it was way too expensive. So we figured we would get white paper and paint it. We did. Painting the paper was extremely time consuming. We had to lay out the paper on the grass in the front of the school and paint it with rollers. It was hard not to rip the paper because we had to water down the paint which in turn obviously made the paper very wet; and then there was the wind to deal with, even if we weighted down the corners the wind would still catch the middle and rip the whole thing up. And it was hard to find weights in the first place because there were no rocks or anything around. We also had to paint both sides...ugh. We got lucky though because the cast was helpful and so we didn't have to do it all ourselves, especially because if we had to that would've been the only set piece we had haha.
After the paper was all painted we had to twist it. Since the pieces were like ten feet long using two people to twist was the best way. So one person would hold it while the other person twisted and put tape around it periodically so that the whole thing didn't come undone. That also took a very long time.
While the branches were being made we also had to make the structure they would be attached to. Jewel and Jorne decided our best bet would be scaffolding instead of wood or something else because it fit in the area we needed it to fit in and they didn't have to build it from scratch. So they assembled the scaffolding and then I attached the branches. I did that by first wrapping fabric around the whole structure and then hot gluing/taping/pinning/tying/ any other way I could think of to attach it. It took me a VERY long time. The branches had to go on diagonally and they had to be touching cuz it would look stupid if there were spaces.
After the bottom was done we had to try to make it look somewhat round because scaffolding is rectangular. So a couple of the guys took a huge piece of wood, lowered it down into the tree and then angled it to try and make the whole thing look round. It pretty much worked. haha :)
Then I had to do the top. The boys made 4 sockets where I could fit a slab of wood to build the "walls" of the treehouse. Then we took chicken wire and tied real leaves and such to it and balanced it on top of the wood slabs for the "roof."
Here are some pics ( They are not the greatest pictures and some of them make it look kind of crappy but, trust me, come showtime it looked pretty awesome!):
No comments:
Post a Comment