How do I Source Props for a Production?

This week’s blog has been written by our wonderful prop master, Kyle, who after struggling with some props on this production wanted to make it easier for others who might be in a similar boat. With all that said I’ll hand you over to him!

While a simple set with relatively minimal prop requirements Thick as Thieves presented some very interesting challenges and some incredibly simple solutions that weren’t immediately obvious. I’m here today to tell you it’s ok if you don’t know something and it’s ok to be new to this, this is only my second time helping Cassie out with props and set. As a day job I design/improve paint, not a particularly theatrical job. I guess this is also my way of apologising if some of this stuff seems really obvious to you but, hey, I have no shame and you shouldn’t either, sharing information is how we learn and how we improve.

Firstly, Freegle, market place and offices that just want to discard supplies and furniture are your best friends. We knew that the set needed a desk, a chair, a phone and a filing cabinet. At the very least, a desk and chair. That was easy as everyone has one of those especially after “The Events.” But an office phone, more specifically something called a Voice Over IP Phone, or a filing cabinet not necessarily. Facebook marketplace seems like a great idea until everyone fails to show up or the business you’re buying from seems more fishy than Billingsgate Market on a Friday morning. For context, I’d messaged someone to arrange a meet up. I had work so I told Cassie to collect it, the seller agreed even on the day before (and yes that was a seller, this was not going to be free). I messaged Cassie at lunch to ask if she’d bought the phone only to find out that the seller had contacted her when she was half way to Whitechapel to pick it up saying ‘I got confused. I thought next week’…the day after confirming. For even more context, Whitechapel is a three hour round trip from where Cassie lives. Oh, and this was only a few days after going to pick up a filing cabinet and waiting nearly an hour in the agreed upon carpark for the guy to fail to turn up. Put simply they both made mugs of us. And I almost forgot about the woman who only told us that her husband had already sold the filing cabinet when we were already on route to pick it up after she agreed that we could have it. It was then that Cassie’s cousin said to use Freegle. Use Freegle.

I suppose that is the next thing to never be afraid to ask for help. Lennon & McCartney wrote that they “got by with a little help from [their] friends,” and it’s true this isn’t a thing you should want to do solo. Get out took 3 cars even for such a small set, with everyone making a 3-4 hour round trip. The endless back and forth moving really rather heavy items around. The waiting in the car while Cassie waited for sellers who didn’t show. The use of their work spaces for storage of props when there was nowhere else to put them. To the lady up in Scotland from Medical Props who I found through a site called Film Bang listening to me in my desperation trying to source prop tablets (more on this later). Seriously if for some reason you end up reading this, thank you for listening and thank you for your help and the respect you showed me. You are never alone and never be afraid to ask a stupid question.

But to those friends and family who were lifting items of furniture that ended up about twice as heavy as it started here why… Fight scenes can be messy. Very early on in the fight choreography (which admittedly was started a little too late), it was decided that the desk was to be the central point everything happened around. for those who didn’t get a chance to see the show, here’s an early draft of said fight.

Karen ends up on the desk, ordinarily not a major issue as desks are strong! Hardy! Like Tom! However, this desk was from Ikea! Lovely desk, it works as a desk. The issue is Ikea desks aren’t known for their robust design, they are designed to be easy to build and inoffensive to your wallet should you have to or want to replace it. They are not, and I can’t stress this enough, designed to have a human slammed against them multiple times as they make a choke look believable. So that MDF would need a bit of improvement with a hard wood, and hard wood gets heavy. We lucked out a little since the top part of the desk was a hard wood. It just needed some new framing on the sides lots of screws and an additional support beam across the back to make sure the legs couldn’t spread. The top was also screwed into the new frame and the old MDF too to make sure it wouldn’t come apart as the glue that was holding it together might have existed at some point in history, but not in the here and now. If you’re wanting to do this yourself I found B&Q to be a convenient one stop shop. If you have a plan with measurements you could even get them to cut your wood for you if you buy it from them and ask nicely. We considered painting “Improved In London” under the “Made In Denmark” stamp.

So now you have a desk with a bunch of wood attached to it, screw holes all along the top, and nothing being the same colour. The director wanted it all black and repaired but me, I thought it was ART! After all, whose office desk doesn’t have countless holes in it, weird wood framing and a Miter Box attached to it (I didn’t have a table or vice and needed a flat and stable surface). But fine I’ll make it look more stage ready. Here’s a tip if you want a nice finish - sanding it super important, roughing the surface to allow the paint to bond more easy. If this were a more click bait blog I might have titled this section “top ten tips decorators don’t want you to know! Number 4 will shock you!” Here is where my day job helps. Matt paint looks lovely, seriously it does, the issue is matt paint isn’t great at resisting burnishing from clothes. Once again our old friend The Fight Scene takes issue with this. You don’t want to go full satin black as the glare from the light would have been distracting but our actors needed to be able to brush against this desk every night, more so than normal. We used Dulux Quick Dry Eggshell it dries fast enough that if we needed to we could have repainted every night has a low sheen so didn’t glare from the lights. Then the holes were bored out using a countersink and filled using wood glue and sawdust, this gave a nice wood knot effect.

But enough about desks, on to drugs! Or rather fake drugs, the tablets taken on stage were real tablets. The staging could have been made end on to make palming the tablets possible but Cassie wanted a fly on the wall feel. In the round, no matter how Karen palms the tablet someone would have seen it so I had to find a safe way for Karen to take the tablets, all while making it look the part. First, the google search that I’m going to save you. I spent the better part of 2 months looking for an inert tablet that was sealed in a blister pack and food safe. No dice. If they exist. I even considered making my own at one point “I’ve worked in pharm” I thought “I could make the dice. And the pills” Don’t do this, not only is it prohibitively expensive but it would also be a nightmare maintaining a sterile area. No. After much searching and a lot of phone calls to prop houses all with the same “No we don’t provide that,” I found a company of Film Bang, a Scottish arts services site. On here, I found Propstars Medical Equipment Hire who had real medical experience, and a lot of it, as well as a lot of prop experience. They had this issue in the past. They worked with their actors and local pharmacies to work out a tablet that was low risk for reaction and wouldn’t interfere with their medication. If you are in this boat, we used these vitamin D supplements and had vitamin E as back up, lucky D didn’t interact with our actors, comes in plain foil blisters and was cheap. The key here is safety. Work with your actors and a pharmacist, vitamin D can have some bad reactions with medications so don’t assume what worked for us will work for you. I only mention this so you have a starting point. Also as a point of safety, the patient information leaflet inside the box was always correct in case of a reaction the paramedics would have the correct information and we used stickers on the box to ensure drugs were never mixed up and we told the actors taken them if they didn’t see these measures. Even the bottle of water was fresh each night. Some of you might read this and think it’s overkill but your actors safety is your responsibility.

Licensed from Shutterstock

Speaking of overkill, Cassie wants to get her money’s worth with the stock images after accidentally committing to a one year subscription. So the photo frame. This was going to be just a picture of some family friends but Cassie found a better one online on a stock image site. Stock image sites are great, they provide stock images for the most obscure situations you can think of but their fine print can often be a nightmare. If you want to use stock images sites to source pictures, read the licencing agreement! Read the subscription term length because you might just get tied into a contract you don’t really need.

With all that being said I’m always happy to give prop help. I can’t talk as a professional but I can walk you down the path I would take. And as I make more mistakes and more successes, I’ll check my pride at the door so you don’t have to and so we can learn together. I’m a chemist. I’m new to this and I’m learning that it’s not only ok to be new, but it’s exciting too!