Take your kid to work day. I had a great take your kid to work day with my mom. My mom is a prop master in the television/movie industry, and we visited some of the laces that supply and make props for her.
What are a prop masters responsibilities? Well as the head of the props department she has to coordinate with the other departments. Let’s say as an example that a costume a character is wearing has a wrist gauntlet that shoots a dart, even if the dart is CGI sometimes they want a shot of the dart firing. It’s the prop departments job to build the wrist gauntlet and make sure it fires the dart, they also have to share plans with the costume department to make sure it all fits together. Even something small like that can take a few days to make work. Another part of her job is helping design props. If the prop is simple enough or not specialized then they can make in in-house but if it needs complex moving components or a design cut out of metal (as an example, not just that) then they go to places that do that for them. I was lucky enough to visit IRL creative witch is one of those company’s. Places like IRL creative are almost like private contractors in the industry. The process of these “private contractors” making the props is; my mom and her props team talk with the producers and directors and any other department that might be involved, next they take what the director and producers want and draw it out and map out the dimensions, after that they would take it to somewhere like IRL creative and show them the design, the “private contractors” then would use the machines they have to make the prop. A process this complicated is quite common for making props. When I visited IRL they demonstrated one of the many machine they had and it was very interesting, the machine heated up a sheep of plastic then pressed down over an object to make a mole of it, after it had been pressed down the air was sucked out from under it and it became an air tight mold so the replica was exact. As well as IRL creative I got to visit the Prop Shop. The Prop Shop is a prop wear-house that does rentals. Let’s say a show my mom is working on is filming a airport scene, instead of buying 50 suitcases she can just rent them from somewhere like the Prop Shop. This is often a much more cost effective option making it a more popular option, even if you need the suitcases for an extended amount of time you could do an extended rental witch is still cheaper than buying them. My take your kid to work day was a different experience for me because most of the times I have gone to work with my mom I’ve only gotten to see the props in action and never what goes into making/getting them. For take your kid to work day I had to make a video about my experience (YouTube link at the bottom of the page) and I used IMovie for this. To Make the video I took photos and videos at the workplaces I visited as well as interviewing my mom. I learned a lot about what my mom does for work and it gave me the understanding to follow in my moms footsteps if I wanted (I probably wont, I hear the hours suck.) I think that this was a valuable learning experience and I wish we has it two years in a row because I would love to go to work with my dad who is a on-set painter for the movie/tv industry as well.
Youtube link- https://youtu.be/3TmQRJmOJl8?feature=shared