Revolt. She Said. Revolt Again.
Assistant Props Manager
Breakable Watermelon
The Breakable Watermelon used in Ball State University’s production of Revolt. She Said. Revolt Again. was designed and built to be able to realistically break for each show, with a key characteristic being that it can be put back together at the end of each night.
The melon was constructed using two hollow Styrofoam half spheres bought from Hobby Lobby, that were then glued together and carved into four distinct pieces.
In order for the pieces of the melon to be able to be put back together, neodymium magnets were added along the edge, allowing the melon to reliably and predictably break, and come back together in same way each night.
The issue we encountered when making and testing the melon was that the Styrofoam was denting after each time it was thrown.
In order to get around this structural issue, I used wood glue and muslin to coat around the outside of melon, and along the edges to protect the magnets. The wood glue was used to harden the outside, and the muslin was used so that if the Styrofoam did break there would be another layer that would keep the melon together long enough for it to be repaired
After coating it, the outside of the melon was sanded down so that there were no parts poking out, and to help paint adhere to the melon better.
The guts on inside of the melon was created by gluing foam pieces down to act as filler pieces, so that the melon could be filled but not incredibly weighted, and coating those foam pieces with a mixture of wood glue and sawdust to give the guts a messy texture.
After completing the structure, the melon was passed onto the Lead Props Manager and Designer, Johanna Bieszke, so that it could be painted.
Tongues
The tongues used in the show had two major requirements.
They needed to look as if they were cut out of the actresses mouths, and had to be delivered to their mouths relatively seamlessly.
They needed to bleed.
To make the tongues look realistic, we bought fake rubber tongues off of Amazon. They were then delivered to the actresses mouths by having them hidden in their napkins, and when they wiped their mouth they would get the tongues in their mouth.
The blood was made using a watered down fake blood, made with corn syrup. This mixture was then put into small blood packets, made using Ziploc bags, that were then added to the tongues by threading the packets tail into a slit in the tongue, so that they were one unit.