Okay. Suffice it to say not all of us can afford to build a real castle for filming purposes. That is the real kicker of making a medieval movie. That, and no horses… or huge landscape shots…or a really good camera and large crew… anyway. I’m going to walk you through the process of creating a “cardboard wall unit.”

Step One — Paperwork

Before any, well most, of your prop projects, draw it. Or at least measure and write down the measurements. iSundae II called for a turret set (the top of a tower on which the hero and villain fight amid thunder and lightning). So, silly me, I said we could use our cement driveway, along with these wall units, a cardboard door, and green screen to simulate a tower. I also got smart and made the units a size where we could use them for the dungeon and miscellaneous walls as well.
I went out on the driveway, did some measuring, and came up with a number of units. If I remember correctly, it was twelve 6 feet by 2 feet units and fourteen 4 feet by 2 feet units.

Step Two — Assemble Materials

Friends, that’s a whole lot of cardboard. Praise the Lord, JoAnn Etc. gave us their empty cardboard fabric bolts for free. We got a couple cartloads, plus our wonderful grandparents had some boxes from their patio furniture.

Step Three — Cut

Until your arm aches. Then cut some more. You build up great arm and finger muscles doing this. I’ve said before, I use a rotary cutter and mat. It helps to stack your pieces in piles according to unit. A top, two sides, and the front (or the pieces thereof) in one pile, etc. Although, you might run out a space. I piled all my tops together and sides together, then put the tops on the sides to conserve space. (A craftroom shrinks amazingly when you get this much stuff in it.) Please watch out for your fingers during this stage.

Step Four — Glue

This procedure does use a ton of hot glue. Trust me, by the end of this project, I could touch 380 degree glue and not blink. (Unless my finger actually plunged into the glob. Then it was painful.) This is not something you need to be proud of! It is a safety hazard. I should investigate a pair of gloves.
(Ha, I can see Ruth coming down to the craftroom. “Hey, how’s it going?”
Me: “Well, I’m on my fifth pair of gloves.”
“Where’d the others go?”
“Well, one’s glued to that wall unit over there, one’s stuck to this stalactite frame, one’s…”)

Step Five — Bring a Fish Friend

Oh, wait. Guess I’ve seen Finding Nemo a few too many times. The correct next step would be Painting. We found a great paint in the Oops Bin at Home Depot or Lowes. I can’t remember which. We went to both on the same day and got something at each. It was the neatest paint, gray with granite flecks in it so it was textured kind of like stone.
The units looked great. That is, the few we were able to do. Dry cardboard soaks up paint like you wouldn’t believe. So we had to mix up some gray paint and try to match the color. It turned out rather blue, but hey, it happens.

Step Six — Use It

Well, I ran out of patience, paint, cardboard, and storage space long before my planned quota. We ended up with eleven short units and eight tall units. You’d be surprised how much you can do with those. They are not recommended for controllable fire scenes, hot weather (the glue melts), termite areas, or people who are allergic to dust. And be aware that a large cardboard piece will blow over, given a small amount of wind. We learned this the hard way.

If you can make sense out of these rambling instructions, good for you. Have fun prop-making and watch out for cardboard cuts.

Alright, folks, step this way and watch out for loose pins. The first exhibit is the Messenger.

Yes, that’s me. This costume was very easy. The only part we had to make was the vest. Brown suede front (isn’t it a gorgeous color?) with a matching cotton back, since suede isn’t the cheapest of materials. Eyelets and leather lacing. For you costume makers out there, beware of thin suede and eyelets. They pull out. By the end of filming we had three or four at least laying around.

Next up we have the Cone Wielders. These costumes are great.

Norion, wielder of Waffle Cone, has what we call a blue puffy shirt. The original version turned out a really strange shade of blue, so we remade it using a darker blue. The ribbony things at the neck are hand-made by myself, and the cape is brown suede. (Look familiar?)

Kalath of Kiddy Cone’s outfit is a little less detailed. We were in a bit of a rush at the time. The vest and sleeves are all one piece. We punched in a couple eyelets and sewed ribbon on the sleeves. The addition of a wig aided in disguising the well-known actor who also plays Marelac. (Twenty-people casts are an unknown luxury.)

Alyah (Sugar Cone) turned out wonderful. The dress is a red, oh, I guess you could call it tapestry fabric. It weighs a ton. The white at the neck helps break up the color a bit. We all think she ended up looking rather like an elf.

And this, ladies and gentlemen, is General Public. His costume was basically put together from scratch. Cardboard epaulets and hat, covered with hot-glued fabric. (Wonderful hot glue.) A red fleece blanket safety pinned on, an eye-patch, and great acting talent and you have a seriously funny character.

Then Lydia. Ah, Lydia. I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. We needed an older character Like, really older. The costume is actually Somindeo’s robe from the first movie. We added a cord belt, a hand-knitted scarf, and a wig. Believe it or not, that’s technically a “movie star” wig.

Good, but it could be better. Call out the big guns! Enter Liquid Latex. It’s wrinkle time! For those of you who are looking at using this, either have a strong stomach or keep your nose plugged. It’s got an eye-watering, distinctive smell all of its own. Putting it on is a hassle. I’m guessing it took us half an hour to get it on and the makeup on top, plus makeup on her hands. We filmed the one scene – I repeat: ONE scene that had her in it – then started removing the latex. I think the closet thing I can compare it to is trying to take the varnish off a table. (Not that I’ve had experience in that area.) The first few pulls came off in nice two or three inch square patches. The rest of it came off in pieces the size of Tic Tacs. Maybe a jelly bean if I got lucky. That stuff took twice as long to get off as it took to put it on.

I like to think that the results looked good, and when you couple that with the actress’ great voice for the part, you have an old lady, slightly hard of hearing, who enjoys tea. (Actually, it was hot chocolate. The supporting actors didn’t like tea.)

We had thirty-plus costumes to make and about one week to do it in. So, in order to give you the feel of the frenzied rush, I’m going to be as brief as possible, without being too laconic.

The Three Wielders

I wanted to upgrade Ben’s costume from last year, so we replaced the vest with a jacket made of green suede and brown corduroy.

Kyle got a completely new outfit. Black sweatpants and a black top (and I don’t mean asphalt). Actually, the cool shirt was once a sleeveless dress. We whacked off the bottom, made sleeves, and sewed them to the sleeve holes. It was pre-lined and everything!

Emcracy stayed the same, with a new pleated belt to replace last year’s. That poor thing was so warped and stretched out of shape I had no choice but to retire it.

Plus, all the wielders got real belts for their swords. Goodbye breaking sword belt outtakes! Oh, Kyle and Ben’s boots are fake leather pieces hot glued on de-thonged flip flops.

The Badguy

Fonsuger had to be sinister. So obviously, I needed to put as much oomph into his costumes as I could. We figured Fonsuger had come from the mountainous north, so his first costume featured a fur cape. Well, almost fur. A fleece blanket and a bath towel look great when you use them right.

His second costume also had a cape, this time crushed velvet with a fake leather top. We also broke down and got a store-bought clasp instead of making one out of cardboard.

The party outfit was fun to make. Purpley velvet and some old drapes. With the addition of a cone medallion (cardboard).

Fonsuger’s duel outfit is my personal favorite of his. Black jersey material with hand-stitched embroidery and beading on the collar and cuffs.

Gwenanda

Two words. Big. Green. That’s a lot of velvet there. The belt is cardboard, the wig isn’t, and Ruth did a wonderful job on the cape. Oh, and the hat is made from cape remnants.

The Badgal

The “Becca Badguy” as we call her, turned out a little differently than I expected, but I like the results. Black fabric with staggered pieces of orange velvet around the bottom. Ruth put eyelets in the vest and arm guards. And no, she’s not part of a motorcycle gang.

Wow, I got through that faster than I thought. I’ll save the Cone wielders, General Public, Lydia, etc. for other posts. In the meantime, remember — keep your safety pins closed, your scissors sheathed, and your hot glue guns holstered.

Little did I know that a dramatic helmet was so tricky. Starting with a balloon, I covered it with paper maché, let it dry, added a second layer, and finally popped the balloon. Well, would you look at that! It only comes down to my forehead. Undaunted, I promptly ran screaming to Ruth for help. She quickly told me how to remedy the situation with a tube of cardboard. Breathing a sigh of relief, I went to glue on a cardboard tube.

Once the glue dried, I added a couple more layers of paper maché to smooth it out and strengthen it up. Then, I just had to try it on.

Okay, so it’s looking good. Except for the fact that it looks like it’s made out of paper! Paint job on the way. I rummaged around in our basement collection of spray paint, picked a few colors, and grabbed Dad to help with the job.

Dad turned out to be a natural helmet paint specialist. With a great artistic eye, he changed the paper look to a lovely battered metal look.

So, there you have it. A good looking helmet from an amateur prop fabricator. Of course, I had a lot of help. Next time, I might not be so lucky.

Step One — Structure

A very big box. I cut two sides off the box, then trimmed them to make the sidewalls, cut a few holes for door, window(s), hallway, revolving fireplace and hey presto! A cardboard box with holes in it. So far so good. Tip when you cut the holes: Keep in mind the size of the set’s occupants. Make things as close to scale as possible.

Step Two — Furniture

The couch came first. A thin cardboard base with, if I remember right, some medium thickness of cardboard too. I taped, cut, and hot-glued away until it presented a fairly good imitation of a couch. Thankfully, we had some old home décor fabric samples. We dug around through the box until we found this great blue. No sooner found, then hacked to pieces and glued to the cardboard frame. The cushions are fabric wrapped around stuffing (polyester, not turkey) and are removable. The pillows are also drapery sample fabric, backed with muslin. I followed the same process with Kitty’s chair, using what I had learned from the couch to make it a little easier.

The grandfather clock is, I think, one of the best pieces in the set. It took a substantial amount of work. You try cutting cardboard in 1/8 of an inch wide sections. It can get a little intense. The chains are actually jewelry-type chains, and the weights are aluminum foil. The pendulum is cardboard, hot glue, and silver paint. It took us awhile before we could find some plastic “glass” to use in the door of the clock. We had to wait until somebody got something packaged in smooth, see-through, non-damaged plastic. You can’t see it in the movie, but the clock hands are fully moveable, aluminum foil spikes.

At one point there was a coffee table, but it looked very cardboardy and was in the way, so we removed it.

Step Three — The Fireplace and Stairs

The fireplace is cardboard (naturally) that we coated with sand and then painted over. If I were to make another one, there are a few technical errors I would take care of. One of them being the thickness of the “brick” on both sides of the fire pit. The mantle was interesting as I had to curve some cardboard to get the shape I wanted. The staircase took a long time. That’s a lot of cardboard to glue together. Plus, I had the built-in bookcase to work around. The railing is cardboard strips ¼ of an inch wide and the banister is two straws wrapped in wood-print paper.

Step Four — Getting Rid of Brown

At this point, we have a nice, brown box with furniture. It works, but I don’t think Kitty would go for a cardboard home, especially when he’s babysitting. First stop, floors. We found some scrapbooking paper at JoAnn Etc., so we grabbed a stack of it and hurried home (after paying for it, of course). I laid the papers out on the floor and lo and behold, a really obvious pattern. Three light planks, three dark planks, three light planks, three dark planks. Hmm. Inspiration! I cut the paper apart into individual planks, grabbed a glue bottle and scissors and set to work. Squirt a pile of Kitty’s set floor, smear it around with a little piece of cardboard, and lay the planks. It took a while, and I got pretty tired of sitting on the floor, but it looks great.

Last stop, walls. Ruth did the walls and wainscot. She’ll tell you about that in another article. I’ll just say that the wainscot took a lot of cutting, and the wallpaper is more scrapbooking paper.

Step Five — Bring a Fish Friend

By this time, we have a nice room, but it’s rather bare. Bring on the wonderful dust-collectors affectionately called knick-knacks! For most of the things we raided Barbieland (which is our town of dollhouses on a level of detail few have achieved). But a few items required work on our part. Namely, the moose head, stuffed fish, and picture over the fireplace. Ruth made the moose head and fish. They turned out great. And Jordan did a little creative work with the Mona Lisa for the picture. Oh, the fireplace screen! Strips of cardboard in 1/8 to ¼ inch pieces, a little tape, and a lot of patience.

Overall, I am very pleased with the Kitty set. And even though nobody’s socks have flown off (that I am aware of) I think it’s still pretty impressive.

When faced with building a monster head there are three basic approaches:

1. Plan everything out ahead of time.
2. Dive right in, write nothing down, and go through piles of material with each revision.
3. Knock out a rough idea and start cutting cardboard.

For those of us who have never made a monster before, approach number one seems simple, but how can we plan it if we don’t know what we’re doing? Approach number two lends itself well if time, budget, and materials don’t matter. In our case, they mattered very much, so we used approach number three. It was very easy. Sketch out a quick pencil outline of what you want it to look like, mentally review what needs to be present, take a deep breath, then go hunt up a stack of cardboard.

Cardboard is, in itself, a very useful item, but a basic understanding of how to use it best is a bonus. I could probably write an entire section on cardboard, but for now, I will say to use common sense.

If your monster head is to be large and covered with heavy material(s), use thick, corrugated cardboard, not cereal or tissue box thickness.

I started with two strips of corrugated cardboard at roughly three inches wide. (Unless you need an exactly sized monster head, precision at this stage is optional.) I then bent them into two rings. Cut the cardboard so the corrugation runs across the short way – it’ll bend a lot easier. One ring was about a foot in diameter, and other was six inches in diameter. Don’t worry if they aren’t perfect circles, because they won’t stay that way for long.

Keeping in mind the basic idea of what this monster had to do, I attached the two rings together with strips of cardboard and added some braces and a hand hold, then I stuck on the horn structures made of big, empty, thread spools.

So far, so good. Then a remembered I needed a moveable lower jaw. Great. Okay, fall back and regroup.

Finally, I had to perform monster surgery. I cut the snout ring into halves and I cut off the bottom of the skull ring, then I built the jaw out of more cardboard and attached it with brads. Much better.

Next, I covered the structure with loosely woven scratch-paper strips. This gave me something to hold up the monster skin and attach it to. In an attempt to keep the monster head from looking flat, I masking taped/hot glue-gunned packing peanuts in strategic places to give the under-the-skin illusion of muscle, or just plain ol’ shape. Since I didn’t know much about the muscular anatomy of monsters, I just free-styled. It worked pretty good. (We’ll get to the eyes in a minute.)

Then I was ready to start the cosmetic side of things. I made a mistake. Let me give you a warning: When you make a monster head, do the inside mouth lining first. Then you can reach and see it without having to literally stick your head in the monster’s mouth.

Another interesting aspect was that when we suspended the monster’s upper jaw from the ceiling (so it would stay open), the plug-in for the hot glue gun was just far enough away that it didn’t reach. I had to unplug, glue as fast as I could, plug in, then wait…

Anyway, I attached the eyes first. They’re baby food jars that I painted with an odd mix of glass paint and acrylic. Hey, it worked. We used glass because we hoped to shine lights up in them and make them glow. That’s a whole ‘nother story.

Then I moved onto something simpler. I made the ears. Cardboard cut-out shapes, packing peanuts where I wanted some beef, and three kinds of fabric.

For this monster, we used a green, textured, velvet type fabric thingy. It was rather expensive. ($20 a yard. Ouch.) We used 2 to 3 yards, but we got the fabric on sale. (Thankfully.) We also used some reddish fur and muslin which I painted pink. The trick with the fur was hiding the straight cut edge so it looked a little more natural. I had to glue little chunks of fur-fuzz.

Beware: fur sheds, the fabric fuzzes and, when painting muslin, have paper towels handy. Also, hot glue is hot! (Can you believe it?) Always look before you stick your hand into the depths of the monster’s mouth, holding a piece of fabric between two fingers, aiming for a glob of hot glue of uncertain locality.

When I put the skin on his face, I started in the middle and worked my way out. It helped quite a bit. If I did something to one side, I did it to the other. For the most part, it made things simpler.

Once the skin was on, Priority Mail (so named because of the source of most of the cardboard boxes) had a very wide-eyed innocent look. Non-scary, to say the least. Big round eyes tend to do that. So I cut almond shaped pieces of thin cardboard, (now is when you use the empty cereal or tissue boxes) covered them with the green fabric and glued them around the eyes. Voila! Instant menace. Priority Mail was so scary that when my younger sister walked in, she thought it was a green cow! (Sigh.)

Now we move on to the other business end, namely the mouth and teeth. As I said before, do the mouth first. I had to fold and glue and snip and cut and trim and stretch and paint and, you get the idea. I couldn’t see very well. I did think to leave the front end loose and unglued so we could glue in the teeth without much trouble.

The teeth are Model Magic. About a package worth. Once they were shaped and dry, we glued them in. Wow, just look at those pearly, white teeth! You know something’s wrong when your monster has whiter teeth than you. So Ruth “glazed” them for me with a thin yellow paint and added lovely, charming blood streaks. Gross, but effective.

The tongue was easy. A cardboard cut-out shape and some of the red fur glued furry-side down. If you’ll notice, we even put in an epiglottis.

You can see he’s coming together nicely.

The head was done, but a head by itself isn’t all that impressive, and it’s very difficult to choreograph a fight scene when the attacker is only a head. So we made claws. A tube of muslin inside a larger tube of the green fabric, the gap filled with packing peanuts, claws made like the teeth, and a little red fuzz for sprouting between the toes. Oh, and some cardboard support at the claw end so they don’t curl up on themselves.

We were ready for one cool monster fight!

The possibilities and options are endless. Paper maché, feathers, tennis shoe soles (hmm), rubber, carpet (old throw-away, not off the floor), and whatever else you can think of. I would not recommend anything that’s alive and wiggling, or pink feather boas. It’s all up to you.

—–

When it came time to film with Priority Mail, the eyes worked great. For the first take. Then the LEDs shorted out.

In the middle of filming, I realized that making a body would have helped a ton, but it was too late. And I didn’t want to mess with it.

At the moment, Priority Mail is quietly resting upstairs on a shelf, with a tissue box in his mouth to make sure his weight doesn’t snap off his teeth. He was a one time deal. I don’t know whether we’ll use him again, but he’s still there, and I’m not going to throw him away. Maybe someday he’ll be famous and worth a ton of money. Who knows? I had a lot of fun (and difficulties) making him, and I wish you luck with your monsters!