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Stage-magic fabrication at Rando Productions

Figure 1
Rando Productions fabricates sets for a variety of entertainment venues, including “American Idol,” “Dancing With the Stars,” and this set from “Downfall.”

Look up to the ceiling of Rando Productions’ welding and assembly area and you see how a fabricator uses stage magic. Above you one week may be a truss from which hangs all the cords and hoses for welding assembly tables. The next week, the room may be entirely cleared of welding and assembly stations, leaving room to assemble some visually fantastic creations in entertainment: backdrops for a theme park ride; stages for rock shows; sets and visual art for TV shows, commercials, tradeshows, festivals, and other events (see Figure 1).

This allows the North Hollywood, Calif., company to arrange work areas to attain the best part flow from station to station, even though every project is essentially one-and-done.

Assembling and testing entire projects has been a longtime practice at RP. The company does it in part to ensure that once a creation arrives on-site, everything works as it should. The strategy is analogous to that of many industrial fabricators: Assemble and test as much as you can in-house, a controllable environment, before erecting it in the field. At RP, the product should fulfill the customer’s artistic vision (within budget); its modular components should assemble easily; and its hydraulics, electronics, and mechanical components should work flawlessly.

The in-house assembly also helps with another aspect: It helps everyone at the company to view their creation as if they’re peering through a camera lens—and what that lens sees really matters.

Learning to See

The philosophy goes back to one of the company’s first jobs. During a commercial shoot, the director allowed RP founder Joe Rando to peek through the camera lens (see Figure 2). “When he allowed me to look through the lens, I started seeing things about how the camera was going to see things,” Rando recalled. That experience, it turned out, changed everything.

This was 1983, before computer-generated imagery, and what you saw through the lens was pretty much what you got. In an age of simulation, projection displays, and the digitization of modern entertainment, the people at RP still need to see how real structures will affect an entertainment experience.

That fact hasn’t changed since a young Rando volunteered to assemble a Rose Parade float, where he paid attention not to the flowers, but the complicated structures underneath. “I was a kid who liked to pull stuff apart. I liked to know how things worked. I remember putting on the flowers and then, within five minutes, I snuck underneath to look to see how the chassis were put together and how the engines would drive the axles. I started doing mechanical animation and electrical work while finishing up high school and college.”

After graduating as an electronics major, he continued to do large-scale animation for the Rose Parade and began to dabble in other work. In 1983 he and a friend set up shop doing hydraulics and physical effects, primarily for TV commercials. “It seemed like a natural progression,” he said. “I wasn’t the type of person who would fit into a box to work for another company. I wanted to develop things on my own.”

His breakout job—during which the director allowed him to peer through the camera lens—was a California Lottery commercial. A quiet gentleman in a recliner lawn chair scratches off a lottery ticket, finds out he won, and his chair magically reclines back and rockets across the room, with smoke coming out the back. Rando built a self-contained, battery-operated recliner chair.

That shoot taught Rando the essence of visual entertainment. What people see and how they see it—on TV, on screen, on stage, at a theme park, or anywhere else—drives everything. It also taught him the importance of safety, especially when it comes to moving platforms, propelling, lifting, or otherwise transporting the actors or guests in the scene.

Figure 2
Joe Rando launched Rando Productions in 1983.

Rando became an early user of hydraulic systems that moved large objects, including cars. He was behind many of the epic car commercials of the late 1980s, and many of the ad campaigns launched in the fall. July and August weren’t vacation time for Rando; it was car season.

“This was in the transition before green screen,” Rando recalled. “Back then it wasn’t a digital world. It was all done in camera, and we were still building a lot of the large-scale effects.”

Those early days introduced him to the unpredictability of the business. A director may want to alter something on-set, or want multiple takes. The space in a venue may change. On-set or on-stage, anything can happen. What if a motorized set component breaks? Are spares available?

Can they be fixed and maintained quickly?

“Most of our work is one-off,” Rando said. “We haven’t done it before, and time is money when you’re on-set with 60 people. You may need spare wheels, spare motors. We need to design something that can be fixed and maintained very quickly.”

RP’s production team has to be ready for everything. It has different customers with different demands requiring different production cycles, all with different start and end times.

Sound familiar?

Different Customers

Not unlike some industrial fabricators, RP takes a project-based team approach to its work. One team—including an engineer, a designer, and a job lead for the floor—carries a project through from design to production and delivery, and most of RP’s 50 employees are keenly aware of just how different the projects are.

From a purely structural sense, all of RP’s projects have some common threads: They need to be safe; they need to be modular, easily assembled and disassembled (think self-fixturing joints); and they need to fulfill the customer’s artistic vision.

Although every RP customer has such a vision, each approach it in their own way, and their own schedule. Clients for rock concerts, tradeshows, and especially TV commercials and shows often come to RP with a general concept, analogous to someone coming to a custom fabricator with a napkin sketch. They have brainstorming followed by ideas followed by design concepts, revisions, design approvals, and production. It’s intense, collaborative, creative, and fast, with a turnaround between 30 and 90 days, depending on the job’s complexity. RP may spend just a week brainstorming ideas with the customer before getting the green light to start fabrication.

At the other end of the spectrum, theme parks call on RP to fabricate components for attractions that may be in the works for six to 18 months. It’s methodical, with a lot of front-end work to ensure safety and reliability. Once the front-end work is complete, the back-end work—the actual manufacturing—occurs relatively quickly.

Besides the important safety aspect (ASTM has a standard that Rando fabricators abide by), there’s another good reason for such a methodical process. “In the theme park industry, when we build what’s called ‘show-action’ equipment, all controlled, pneumatically, hydraulically, and electromechanically, these components need to perform 16 hours a day, seven days a week,” said Rosalie Kessing, RP’s business development manager.

Figure 3
These hydraulics were designed to move components of the set used by Kanye West’s Glow in the Dark tour.

For all jobs the company now uses 3-D CAD, and when designing structures, engineers attempt to include common components, such as hydraulic actuators, quick-disconnects, and other modular components (see Figure 3). The puzzle may make a different picture every time, and each piece may look a little different, but they’re still puzzle pieces, and whenever possible, engineers try to ensure that those pieces lock together in similar ways.

Lights-out Fabrication, Meet Hollywood

Years ago RP engineers printed full-sized drawings of components, which would be laid over the steel as a cutting template. That’s old-school fabrication.

Now the company has a CNC router from MultiCam and a 6- by 12-ft. CNC waterjet from Flow International. Each allows the company to complete a mockup of certain components for prototyping, which can be critical for aiding design discussions with customers. And they, of course, use this equipment for actual part fabrication (see Figure 4).

Both the waterjet and router have cameras: one for a wide shot, another for a close-up shot, and one just above the processing heads, just above the waterjet nozzle and router bit. These cameras allow an RP technician to run the machines remotely, rather than having someone stand by the system throughout the machine cycle, particularly if he’s routing or cutting a full nest of parts.

“If it’s a very detailed, long cut, we can set everything up and leave the machines running at night,” Rando said, “and monitor the process remotely.” He added that if something goes awry, the machines automatically shut down and e-mail or text the technician.

Flexible Fabrication

Like for so many job shops, RP’s projects come and go, and each can require a different amount of work. That highly variable demand—something that job shops everywhere are all too familiar with—makes part flow a challenge. “The hardest part of running the business is keeping the flow going. It’s an extreme challenge,” Rando said.

When a major project isn’t on the floor, fabricators spend time perfecting the fabrication process, like designing common fixtures for certain components or arranging equipment like jib cranes and scissor-lift tables to ease material flow.

RP employs 45 general fabricators as well as 12 welders certified to specific standards (see Figure 5). “We might be welding stainless for a water effect one day, and then the next day welding a piece of heavy structural steel for a large piece of show-action equipment,” Rando said.

The fabrication operation is as modular as the shop’s creations. “We keep everything we can on wheels,” Rando said. He added that stations may be rearranged to handle a series of weldments for another large project, while final assembly and testing for the current project occur nearby. Other times a project is so large that it takes up the entire fabrication area—and here enters the stage magic. Within a matter of hours, the space can be transformed (see Figure 6).

“When we’re assembling something large, we may be working for a month building small weldments, and then when we have to put it together, everything has to roll out of the way,” Rando said. “That means not having cords and air lines on the floor, and dropping everything down from the ceiling. If we need to assemble something tall, all those cords have to be moved out of the way.”

Figure 4
Rando Productions has a CNC waterjet table to cut profiles in various materials. The system has integrated cameras that allow for remote monitoring.

All cords connect to an overhead truss connected to a wire-rope hoist. With the push of a button, everything moves up, opening the space overhead.

Components and subassemblies, which can entail various hydraulics, pneumatics, and electronics, are tested at different stages of fabrication, before being sent to final assembly. If, say, a metal plate’s dimensions don’t allow for the proper clearance in an assembly, a new one can be programmed and made on the waterjet in short order.

Performing testing in-house isn’t a straightforward business decision, Rando said, because in the short term, all the testing and assembly are expensive and require more space. The company recently added a separate garage space that’s 35 feet high, just to accommodate an extremely large creation that, because of secrecy agreements (the theme park business is famously secretive), couldn’t be constructed outside.

In the long run, though, going to such lengths for assembly and testing has helped build RP’s reputation, Rando said. Customers care about the final product’s look and safety, of course, but they also care about logistics. RP techs show up at the customer’s site with everything organized into sleek black boxes. They remove the components, assemble them, and everything just … works.

Supporting the Story

After delivery, it’s show time, be it for “Dancing With the Stars,” “The X Factor,” “Glee,” or a “Star Trek” convention (see Figure 7).

These days more work involves projection technology, but the screens and the structure underneath still need to be designed, planned, and fabricated, and it goes through the same cycle. It’s designed, fabricated, tested, delivered, and assembled.

The shop’s goal is similar to that of a custom fabricator, really. If a custom fabricator sends OEMs quality parts at the right time and right quantity, its work is almost invisible to those not directly involved.

Similarly at RP, Rando knows that it’s about what the audience sees, and they shouldn’t be paying attention to the set. It’s about the narrative or the product (dubbed the “hero” in TV ad lingo). It’s not about the mechanical magic underneath. When the mechanical magic supports the story, that’s a job well done.

About the Author
The Fabricator

Tim Heston

Senior Editor

2135 Point Blvd

Elgin, IL 60123

815-381-1314

Tim Heston, The Fabricator's senior editor, has covered the metal fabrication industry since 1998, starting his career at the American Welding Society's Welding Journal. Since then he has covered the full range of metal fabrication processes, from stamping, bending, and cutting to grinding and polishing. He joined The Fabricator's staff in October 2007.