The Montgomery Blair Players Stage Crew Pages - Make me a Forest

Into the Woods

We chose to cut out individual trees and hang them both on battens and on the curtain legs. We added a three dimensional Mother Tree and some stumps. To make the trees super realistic we took pictures of real trees, traced them and scaled them up on a Xerox machine to 8" height. This is 16 feet in 1/2" scale, the size of our theatre model. Next we transferred the copies to transparancies and projected them 16 feet tall with an overhead projector. Please don't tell the Media Staff that we hung the projector from a batten (to project onto the floor). We chose sixteen feet since it is the height of two 4 x 8' plywood sheets. After tracing the images onto the 1/8" plywood (great stuff if you can find it) we cut the branches out with portable electric jigsaws and attached them together with scrap wood and Dutchman. Then we let our scenic artists "gray" them up (three tones of gray paint), we added shadows later.

Here is the number for Custom Woodworks, our source for the wonderful 1/8" Luan plywood. If you are anywhere nearby (Laurel, MD) it's worth a trip (call ahead) to get a stockpile of this wonderful, stage appropriate (light, strong) wood. (301) 725-8120 Tell them The Blair Stage Crew sent you. If you'd like to see what else you can do with 1/8" plywood check out "How to make a real curving Staircase." Check out the finished trees here.