Fabric Conveyors and the Scrolling Panorama

The Technology Commission of OISTAT awards the Technical Invention Prize at World Stage Design every four years to technicians working in any part of the entertainment industry who make simple and smart solutions for our work. In 2017, I submitted a technical article describing my design of unique fabric carriers that could be realized by inexpensive means and materials.

I created the carriers for a production of The Three Spinners, adapted from a folk tale by Joe Brandesky, for which I designed scrolling panorama, one hundred feet long that was used as a moving backdrop and surface for shadow puppets and projections.

The design was anchored in research, in this case from the nineteenth century. In his Panorama of the Mississippi River (1846), John Banvard developed a mechanism for scrolling what was at the time the largest panorama ever exhibited¹. The drop, made of heavy canvas pieces sewn together, was spooled on either side of the stage and wound with a large mechanism of gears and cranks. To support the top edge of the drop and prevent sagging, he used a series of rollers that supported a rope sewn to the top of the drop and hidden behind an upper curtain.

I reimagined Banvard's rollers using inexpensive and widely available materials and deployed them in our production for young audiences. My article was accepted and my design was exhibited at World Stage Design where it was awarded Honorable Mention and published in the exhibit catalog.

¹ “BANVARD’S PANORAMA.” Scientific American, vol. 4, no. 13, 1848, pp. 100–100. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/26124946.