Hey! I haven't written for awhile but I'm planning on posting regularly this summer in order to keep my activities as props artisan intern at PCPA recorded. So this week this is what happened:
Overview:
There are 5 other prop interns in addition to me - they all are really cool, and it's fun hanging out with them.
I work from 8:30 to 5:30 Monday thru Friday, and sometimes I'll work on the weekends too, but it depends on the shows and the tech schedules.
Wednesday June 3rd:
I started off going to two production meetings with AJ (the props manager, or the assistant to the prop master). She's great and basically my boss. I went to a production meeting for Spitfire Grill and then for The Music Man. I am the intern in charge of The Music Man along with another intern because it's such a prop heavy show. There are 3 pages of prop lists for the show and it opens in mid-july, but all the rehearsal props are to be in place this coming Tuesday! Luckily, the props for the show are about 85% done already because PCPA has put on The Music Man before. But the production meeting was cool. Much like the ones we have at school but with more people around the table. The production manager of the theatre ran all the meetings instead of the stage manager, but that was the second person in charge. Other people that were there that was different from just the normal designers and directors, and t.d. and what not was the company manager. Even though I had just arrived at PCPA, everyone was so nice! I felt very welcomed and supported from the first moments with the company.
After the production meetings I was sent to the paint shop, because there wasn't anything to do in props that was a little job that the interns could do without supervision in the shop. The paint shop was pretty cool, a place that I'd like to go back because painting is way fun and I think I'm pretty alright with it. In the paint shop I traced out a banner for The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee. I would have liked to have painted it to finish it, but I AJ came and took me out of the paint shop to give me a tour of the spaces at PCPA in Santa Maria before the lunch break.
After lunch all the prop interns (there are 6 of us) met AJ back at the prop shop which is located within the scene shop. There were just a couple of jobs that could be accomplished on Wednesday because we were waiting for materials to come in on Thursday (the prop master Tim Hogan was in LA picking stuff up). So I tried to become acquainted with where things are located in the prop shop, and then I read the play The Music Man since I was working on it. Then it was 5:30pm so I went home.
Thursday June 4th:
All the prop people met in the prop shop in the morning. And that's where I met the prop master, the guy who hired me, for the first time. He is really great and uber nice, and funny. He reminded me of Ty a little bit when he was explaining to me how to upholster furniture.
That was going to be my first job on Thursday, to reupholster 8 "train benches" for Music Man. However, while measuring out the material, we figured that we didn't have enough to cover the benches. So we will reupholster next week instead.
My job then became to take a toy gun - one that looked really fake with an orange tip on the end, and really plain brown paint - and turn it into a real-looking gun. I actually did a really great job and I'm really proud of how it turned out. This gun will be used next week in the show Les Miserables. Hurray!
Next I helped to exchange glass in lanters for plexi-glass because these lanterns will later be mounted on sticks and danced with in Music Man, and we all know actors cannot be trusted to not break glass.
After lunch all the interns took balls (soccerballs, kickballs, basketballs) and went outside and played with them in the shop yard to get them a little dirty, like they are at an elementary school. This was for Spelling Bee. While I was playing 4 square with the others, I was thinking, this is the perfect job! After that, my job was to sew a banner that was 2' by 14'. This was a big job since 14 feet is really really long, and after I finished it, I returned to the plexi-glass insertion.
That night we all had to meet back at the prop shop at 10:30pm, because we were doing prop load-out of Les Mis because the following day we would be moving the props to the festival summer outdoor theatre in Solvang. So we moved props from the rehearsal space into a big budget truck. We had to wait until 10:45pm to get to the space though, because we had to wait for rehearsal to be over. There are so many props for Les Mis, and a lot of them are REALLY BIG AND HEAVY props. We FILLED the budget truck with props, from back to front, with everything tightly packed in and stacked on top of each other. It was shocking how much stuff we were able to put into the truck. We only had a couple things break on us on the move, but we were just to fix them the following day. The prop load-out took about an hour and a wee bit, so I was driving the 30 miles home at midnight.
Friday June 5th:
I got to sleep in! This was because we were working at the Solvang festival theatre and since I live about 5 miles from Solvang, they didn't make me drive up to Santa Maria just to come back down. So I met them all in Solvang at 10:00am because it took them a long time to drive the truck down. We all had to wear hard hats because the scenic people were attempting to install the set for Les Mis and the Lighting people were all in the catwalks so things potentially could have fallen on our heads.
Basically in Solvang we unloaded all the props, organized the props, fixed the stuff that had broken, made prop tables, preset props to one side of the stage to the other, and installed prop dressings on some of the set pieces. We even ended early so I got to leave work at 4pm which was just nice. It was an easy day at work, but still really fun.
We got the weekend off which was amazing! Since I only had one day off before starting work. So I still hadn't unpacked all the way.
Looking forward to another week of props starting tomorrow. Yea!
