The musical play, Little Shop of Horrors, just opened at the Wimberley Player’s Theater and runs until the end of July 2018. I was involved as the Video Designer. The musical is based on a low budget 1960 SciFi film of the same name and the director, Jason Kruger, wanted to capture that the feeling of old, funky, B&W movies in the play by beginning with clips from 1950’s SciFi and horror films. So I assembled a number of clips from old films that are out of copyright and that we could legally use.

All films released before 1923 and certain films released before 1963 are no longer copyrighted and fall into the public domain. These latter films, those between 1923 and 1963, are in the public domain if the copyright was not renewed. A lot of obscure films fall into this category. It was from these rich sources of over acting and model rockets on strings that I gathered 35 minutes of really classic clips. This runs as the pre-show while the audience finds their seats. On opening night the audience really got involved in the clips and they created low key version of a Rocky Horror Picture Show atmosphere (Wimberley is after all a low key sort of place).

Still from
Plan 9 From Outer Space (1959)

At the end of the pre-show, there was a countdown clip while the public service announcement was read, then the last clip was the prologue to the play featuring a out-of-sync voiceover added to a talking head from an old SciFi film (See photo on right). It ended when the film broke and melted.

The film breaking and melting was the only part I created from scratch using some special effects and actually melting some film with a blowtorch. That little snippet is presented below.