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labricoleuseI finally have all the stuff to make my post about the parasol development for The Little Prince. Though they are technically props, parasols are frequently the responsibility of the crafts artisan, because they are often designed by the Costume Designer to match the costumes of their carriers. I've written a forthcoming book on parasol manufacture for costumers (out in January 2008, more info as soon as it's available, of course!), so when it comes to traditional parasols, it's safe to say i know my stuff.
One of the parasols in our show was a fairly straightforward traditional parasol, that carried by the character of the Rose. Here's the design rendering of her character:
costume rendering property of McKay Coble, used with permission
During the development process, the parasol design changed a bit--the dome became round instead of an oniondome, for example--but this is the gist. The final Rose parasol is fully lined in green silk dupioni, with a red and black crosswoven silk dupioni canopy and a delicate burgandy crinkle-silk overlay with a slight lettuce-edge. She had four long green ribbons from which her black rubber "thorns" hung down, and I applied a sparse scattering of Austrian crystals to the canopy, to suggest dewdrops.
Here are some stage shots of the finished parasol.
Lesley Shires as the Little Prince waters the Rose, played by Heaven Chijirae Stephens
Heaven Chijirae Stephens as the Rose
That last shot shows the lining fairly well, and it shows visual evidence of a caveat with lined parasols: if they are stored closed, the lining will have visible wrinkles. You can minimize this by steaming it in an opened position just before the show begins, in a stage context. (In real life, i guess you either need a maid staff to do this or you need to deal.)
In addition to the Rose, the play also contains "the Wall of Flowers," all of whom need to look close enough to the Rose at first glance that we can believe in the context of the play that the Prince at first does not see that they are different from the Rose he remembers. Here's the rendering for the Wall of Flowers, though in the final production there were only three instead of four:
concept rendering property of McKay Coble, used with permission
The action moves from the flowers to a grove of trees, then back to the flowers, then back to the trees, and what the director and designer wanted to theatrically indicate this shift was a reengineered parasol that would invert itself onstage in one simple movement. By this means, actresses playing flowers could transform into actresses playing apple trees by "flipping" the parasol canopy.
I could write a book on why this is a particularly complex problem to reconcile...and indeed i have. Ha! But seriously, parasols and umbrellas are tricky balances of opposing forces: the force exerted by the frame on the canopy, and the force the canopy exerts on the frame. By changing the shape of the panels of the canopy, you can change the shape of the dome, and by changing lengths of the ribs, you can change the circumference of the dome, but making the dome flip inside-out is particularly difficult without, say, a gust of wind exerting uniform force across the surface of the entire canopy. The ribs alone of a normal parasol don't apply the right amount of force in enough places. (If this paragraph makes you hungry for more info on how to change dome shapes and circumferences, wait til my book comes out--it explains everything with diagrams and patterning info and charts and formulae...and even offers shortcut ways for those who are not math-savvy.)
At the top of a typical parasol or umbrella shaft, under the canopy, is a tiny peg or wire loop. This keeps the sliding mechanism of the frame from going all the way to the top. (This peg is different from the triangular piece called a handspring which fits in a slot in the slider to keep the canopy in an opened position.) If you remove that peg, you can slide the mechanism all the way to the top of the shaft and the canopy, if it has the right shape and tension, will invert. However, this exerts a tremendous amount of force on the hinges at the center of the frame, which will eventually break.
My first batch of inverting parasols were constructed in exactly that way. We removed the stopper pegs, and we made our canopies out of spandex fabric.
Crafts assistant Miranda Morales cuts mockup parasol panels from scrap spandex
The reason for the spandex canopy is that, with a traditional parasol, the strength of the woven fabric in the canopy helps exert force to keep the parasol dome from inverting. By lowering that tension (choosing a stretch instead of a woven), we hoped to make a canopy that would more easily "flip" when the frame was extended beyond its normal range of motion.
They did, in fact, flip. The trouble was, yes, they eventually failed at the central join, and would have never stood up to a theatrical run of inverting several times a night. Had we more money and time to build new frames from scratch, with a stronger construction of that central hinged ring, that would have been fixable. However, we had to find something that would work with a commercially-available parasol frame, due to budget and time constraints.
So, back to the drawing board. I considered how i might make a parasol where the canopy would invert without exerting pressure on the central hinged ring. I thought, if the ribs had some flexibility, the canopy could be made to invert independent of the slider's motion. Traditional parasol ribs are either round rods or U-shaped in cross section, giving them a stable structure when opened. I thought, if they were replaced with flat steel pieces instead, they would *want* to move up and down in a way that would be conducive to canopy inversion, but without placing any additional force on the center hinges. So that's exactly what i did--i replaced the metal traditional ribs with lengths of 1/4" flat steel corset boning! And, look what it made the parasols do:
Caveat: I am not a videographer, so this is landscaped. Sorry!
Cool, no? Though now that i watch it, one rib failed in the video, but whatever. You can see what it does, and well, time was of the essence. It's lucky i thought to get a quick video before the parasols changed yet again...!
Ultimately, the director, Tom Quaintance, decided that the motion required to flip the parasols was too big and showy, and he wanted something more subdued, something quietly deployed without drawing focus to the transformation. McKay Coble, the costume designer, came up with the idea of a parasol canopy that folded down a central axis, like the page of a book, flipping over so that one way, it was red like the Rose, and the other it was green with appliqued leaves and apples. It could be flipped in a single subtle motion without drawing the audience's eye.
This meant I was again back to the drawing board, but with a much easier-to-reconcile task of creating what was essentially a multiple-canopied parasol. Trouble was, this decision was made on Friday of tech weekend at 5:45pm, and we had a vague goal of having three finished folding-top flower-tree parasols by Sunday afternoon! I had a great deal of help from many of the shop staff though, and we did manage to crank them out in record time. It felt a bit like the Triangle Parasol Factory for a bit there though!
Crafts assistant Miranda Morales works on the green layer of a Flower;
note the double-sided canopy in the foreground, waiting for a frame
I don't have a video of this one, but i do have a top-view of the canopy in each "incarnation."
Flower canopy--note the ribbon loop at bottom left,
which shows the performer where to grip the cover to perform the transformation
Apple canopy, flipped, before applique placement was confirmed
Flor de Liz Perez, Joy Jones, and Heaven Chijirae Stephens as the Wall of Flowers
I hope you've enjoyed reading about the Great Parasol Adventure--it sure was a challenging project and great fun to figure out. And, if you love watching parasol tricks, here are a few more i found when i put mine up on YouTube:
Japanese acrobatics using paper parasols!
Burlesque performer Lucky Penny does a cute parasol routine (SFW)
Some dude does some sleight-of-hand producing parasols from hankies and such
One of the parasols in our show was a fairly straightforward traditional parasol, that carried by the character of the Rose. Here's the design rendering of her character:
costume rendering property of McKay Coble, used with permission
During the development process, the parasol design changed a bit--the dome became round instead of an oniondome, for example--but this is the gist. The final Rose parasol is fully lined in green silk dupioni, with a red and black crosswoven silk dupioni canopy and a delicate burgandy crinkle-silk overlay with a slight lettuce-edge. She had four long green ribbons from which her black rubber "thorns" hung down, and I applied a sparse scattering of Austrian crystals to the canopy, to suggest dewdrops.
Here are some stage shots of the finished parasol.
Lesley Shires as the Little Prince waters the Rose, played by Heaven Chijirae Stephens
Heaven Chijirae Stephens as the Rose
That last shot shows the lining fairly well, and it shows visual evidence of a caveat with lined parasols: if they are stored closed, the lining will have visible wrinkles. You can minimize this by steaming it in an opened position just before the show begins, in a stage context. (In real life, i guess you either need a maid staff to do this or you need to deal.)
In addition to the Rose, the play also contains "the Wall of Flowers," all of whom need to look close enough to the Rose at first glance that we can believe in the context of the play that the Prince at first does not see that they are different from the Rose he remembers. Here's the rendering for the Wall of Flowers, though in the final production there were only three instead of four:
concept rendering property of McKay Coble, used with permission
The action moves from the flowers to a grove of trees, then back to the flowers, then back to the trees, and what the director and designer wanted to theatrically indicate this shift was a reengineered parasol that would invert itself onstage in one simple movement. By this means, actresses playing flowers could transform into actresses playing apple trees by "flipping" the parasol canopy.
I could write a book on why this is a particularly complex problem to reconcile...and indeed i have. Ha! But seriously, parasols and umbrellas are tricky balances of opposing forces: the force exerted by the frame on the canopy, and the force the canopy exerts on the frame. By changing the shape of the panels of the canopy, you can change the shape of the dome, and by changing lengths of the ribs, you can change the circumference of the dome, but making the dome flip inside-out is particularly difficult without, say, a gust of wind exerting uniform force across the surface of the entire canopy. The ribs alone of a normal parasol don't apply the right amount of force in enough places. (If this paragraph makes you hungry for more info on how to change dome shapes and circumferences, wait til my book comes out--it explains everything with diagrams and patterning info and charts and formulae...and even offers shortcut ways for those who are not math-savvy.)
At the top of a typical parasol or umbrella shaft, under the canopy, is a tiny peg or wire loop. This keeps the sliding mechanism of the frame from going all the way to the top. (This peg is different from the triangular piece called a handspring which fits in a slot in the slider to keep the canopy in an opened position.) If you remove that peg, you can slide the mechanism all the way to the top of the shaft and the canopy, if it has the right shape and tension, will invert. However, this exerts a tremendous amount of force on the hinges at the center of the frame, which will eventually break.
My first batch of inverting parasols were constructed in exactly that way. We removed the stopper pegs, and we made our canopies out of spandex fabric.
Crafts assistant Miranda Morales cuts mockup parasol panels from scrap spandex
The reason for the spandex canopy is that, with a traditional parasol, the strength of the woven fabric in the canopy helps exert force to keep the parasol dome from inverting. By lowering that tension (choosing a stretch instead of a woven), we hoped to make a canopy that would more easily "flip" when the frame was extended beyond its normal range of motion.
They did, in fact, flip. The trouble was, yes, they eventually failed at the central join, and would have never stood up to a theatrical run of inverting several times a night. Had we more money and time to build new frames from scratch, with a stronger construction of that central hinged ring, that would have been fixable. However, we had to find something that would work with a commercially-available parasol frame, due to budget and time constraints.
So, back to the drawing board. I considered how i might make a parasol where the canopy would invert without exerting pressure on the central hinged ring. I thought, if the ribs had some flexibility, the canopy could be made to invert independent of the slider's motion. Traditional parasol ribs are either round rods or U-shaped in cross section, giving them a stable structure when opened. I thought, if they were replaced with flat steel pieces instead, they would *want* to move up and down in a way that would be conducive to canopy inversion, but without placing any additional force on the center hinges. So that's exactly what i did--i replaced the metal traditional ribs with lengths of 1/4" flat steel corset boning! And, look what it made the parasols do:
Cool, no? Though now that i watch it, one rib failed in the video, but whatever. You can see what it does, and well, time was of the essence. It's lucky i thought to get a quick video before the parasols changed yet again...!
Ultimately, the director, Tom Quaintance, decided that the motion required to flip the parasols was too big and showy, and he wanted something more subdued, something quietly deployed without drawing focus to the transformation. McKay Coble, the costume designer, came up with the idea of a parasol canopy that folded down a central axis, like the page of a book, flipping over so that one way, it was red like the Rose, and the other it was green with appliqued leaves and apples. It could be flipped in a single subtle motion without drawing the audience's eye.
This meant I was again back to the drawing board, but with a much easier-to-reconcile task of creating what was essentially a multiple-canopied parasol. Trouble was, this decision was made on Friday of tech weekend at 5:45pm, and we had a vague goal of having three finished folding-top flower-tree parasols by Sunday afternoon! I had a great deal of help from many of the shop staff though, and we did manage to crank them out in record time. It felt a bit like the Triangle Parasol Factory for a bit there though!
Crafts assistant Miranda Morales works on the green layer of a Flower;
note the double-sided canopy in the foreground, waiting for a frame
I don't have a video of this one, but i do have a top-view of the canopy in each "incarnation."
Flower canopy--note the ribbon loop at bottom left,
which shows the performer where to grip the cover to perform the transformation
Apple canopy, flipped, before applique placement was confirmed
Flor de Liz Perez, Joy Jones, and Heaven Chijirae Stephens as the Wall of Flowers
I hope you've enjoyed reading about the Great Parasol Adventure--it sure was a challenging project and great fun to figure out. And, if you love watching parasol tricks, here are a few more i found when i put mine up on YouTube:
Japanese acrobatics using paper parasols!
Burlesque performer Lucky Penny does a cute parasol routine (SFW)
Some dude does some sleight-of-hand producing parasols from hankies and such
