How to Build a Foam Prop

Video Transcript

"Hi I'm Shaun O'Rourke with Eleven Bravo Productions and we are here at EUE Screen Gems Studios. This is the largest studio complex on the East Coast in Wilmington, North Carolina. I'm here with Molly Olesky and we're going to talk about how to make a foam prop and in this case we are going to talk about how you would do like a foam castle wall. Molly - well to make a foam castle wall you would go to Lowe's and you get the blue foam. It's a very thick foam and you can sculpt anything out of that. You can do any sort of rock formations, it is really easy to work with. What you do need though is Acetone Pure, 100% Acetone. It is very dangerous, it dries out the skin. It is very harmful to get in your body just because it has harmful toxins in it but when we are working with it with foam it melts it. You have to be very liberal with it, use cheap brushes, you know any sort of cheap brush to construct the wall. What you first want to get is a serrated scraper that you would use to grind away in a stone or brick. You can also pick that up right at Lowe's and you can sculpt out the blocks of the wall, you can do bricks or if you are doing a natural rock formations, you can just sculpt it out until you have realistic rock then you carefully in between each stone you can paint the Acetone in and it eats away and it makes that concrete look that they filled old stone walls in with and from there you know you let it dry, make sure you don't use too much because it will eat right through the foam, it will eat right through the table if you are using a plastic table. So make sure you are using a wooden table or a stone table or you are working outside, also you don't want to inhale any of the Acetone and if you want to build up you get 77 adhesive and you can just spray the back of the foam and you can actually build out a stone wall even more so let's say if you had to do an arch or you had to do a keystone and you just needed it to stick out a little bit and after that when you want to paint it you can use, you know just your typical, you know, house paint to paint it. A good tool, a good tool to work with is sponges and also just chip brushes, just buy cheap brushes, they are the cheapest thing to do. You can make it look as if the stone was scraped or the natural erosions that happens to a stone wall. Alright so there you go and remember safety first, so when you are working with these materials like Acetone which is very caustic to breath in make sure you have protective masks, make sure you have protective glasses, make sure you have protective gloves because you don't want to burn the skin or hurt yourself. Safety is first when you are building a rock wall like we have just described. So there you have it we just taught you how to make a foam prop and in this case it was a stone surface on a wall."