Team ‘09

1. Team ‘09 The Stories You Tell Tim Pianta, Andi Merritt, Stephen Lander, Kaitlyn Potter, Amanda Wagner, Erik Eklund

2. Play Background • Playwright Chad Guo • Director Richard Block • Plot: Man in psych ward claims to be from the future and possesses special powers

3. Balloon Popping Effect • The balloon popping effect is used in the play to foreshadow Seven’s special powers. • Original design used a car lock motor, but final design utilized a hot wire to pop the balloon • To build the effect we simply attached screws surrounding a hole in the table and wound a hot wire above the hole in a “W” shape. • This design was very effective. During the play timing and execution were perfect.

4. Color Change Effect • Milk turns from white to blue to represent a medicine activating • 2 solenoids…donkey kick…1 solenoid • The final construction had two solenoids mounted underneath the table. One solenoid acted as a lynch pin for releasing the spring loaded solenoid that pushed dye into the glass. • Slight effectiveness. Some but not nearly enough dye was injected into the glass due to a solenoid error.

5. Rising and Turning Effect • In the play, Seven demonstrates his special powers by raising a soda can and dropping it to the floor with his armband. • We quickly decided on a winch. After a couple failed attempts we came up with our final box design. • We built a box that housed both a motor to raise the can and a hotwire to drop it to the floor. • This effect worked well in the play, and the timing was good.

6. Sleight of Hand Effect • Seven turns a magazine into a futuristic textbook with his armband after covering it with a tablecloth. • We stuck with our original design with a few modifications to mounting. • We built a turntable by mounting a motor with a spool and string on the underside of a table and attaching the string to a turntable/divider in the middle of the table. • Mechanically this effect worked perfectly, but low visibility hurt its aesthetic value.

7. Sound Effect • During the second half of the play, Seven demonstrates his abilities using a futuristic armband that beeps every time it is used. • The effect needed to be totally independent of the control box and to be controlled directly by the actor. We built everything the system needed onto the armband. • A 9V battery, a motor with LED, a piezo buzzer, and a switch were all wired and mounted onto a defaced Nalgene bottle. • The armband worked very well. To improve it we could have mounted the switch in a better position.

8. Control Box • There were two distinct stages in creating our control box. • Our first effort included a box hardwired to all of our effects. This made set up and takedown awkward. • Our second box had our switches controlling the polarity of electricity to the terminals on our box. • This allowed for all the effects to be separate and plugged in when necessary.

9. - + 12V DC Momentary Pushbutton DPDT Switch Negative terminal Positive terminal

10. The End