Vernon God Little: Bike and Podium
“Vernon God Little”
Director: Gretchen Egolf
Designer: Dallas Wexler
Stage: Webber Douglas Studio, Central, 4th - 7th December 2019
Bike and Podium
This project saw me as Head of Props for the Autumn term of 2019 for the show Vernon God Little. The bulk of this project was spent with this bike and podium. The knack about the set for this show is that the bike was to be rode by each of the characters which would power a pulley which revolves the back curtain to move the set artwork.
I was tasked to make the actual frame the bike sat on, as well as specific adaptions to the frame and the bike itself to match the designers vision. See below for more infomation and final pictures!
The bike towards the final stages of fitup
The painted frame from above
The final frame coming out the workshop
Comfy and Warm on AutoCAD
Vernon God Little (2019) relied on a bike to pedal and move a rotating screen to progress the performance. After the initial modelbox meeting, I was able to scale the relevant models up and gain the dimensions for the full size bike podium. I drafted them up to give myself easy instructions to make the podium the bike sits on.
Why can I see my breath in this workshop?
The construction of the podium saw a lot of manual cutting as I wanted to use as little CNC’ed pieces as I could. There wasn’t really any reason for this other than since I enjoy carpentry, I wanted to have an excuse to practice and do all the specific cuts myself.
I wheely liked this bit
The painting of the podium was very simple as the designer had supplied a reference image which was very simply scaled up to match the real size. With help from Molly Richards and Elisha Fern From there, it was the case of tracing and painting.
The bike in particular was very fun to adapt. Although the main portion of it was cleaning and preparing the metal for paint, seeing a quite worn down bike transform into this was incredibly satisfying