ART DEPARTMENT

Job Overview

The prop master is responsible for obtaining and maintaining all portable objects used in the production, such as a book, dish, glass of water, or a desktop computer.

Prop master Rick Toone points out there are added responsibilities for prop masters working in commercials. “If there is cereal in the cupboards, you set the cereal box so the brand name is seen. Whatever the product is, you're responsible for making it look good.”

Special Skills

In addition to having an understanding of camera lenses to know how a shot is framed and a knowledge of the filmmaking process, Rick Toone says, “Working in props, you have to be a jack-of-all-trades; the handyman who has a sense of style and knows what looks good in the frame and what doesn't. Nowadays you need to know a lot about graphics. You need to have a general decorating sense of color, style, and texture.”

Advice for Someone Seeking This Job

“Landing a first job is hard,” says Toone. “You have to have been on the set doing something else. You don't start out being a prop master. You assist or work in the art department. The best way to become a prop master is working your way in through the art department. Start as a PA or become a swing guy. You need to have a sense of what it takes to get the job done, as well as seeing what it is. There are a lot of things the art department does that you have to understand how to do. Once the camera rolls, the set is yours. If they've hung the drapes a certain way, you've got to understand the various ways of doing that, because invariably the director wants to lower them three inches or pull them back. You've got to solve the problem without rerigging the whole thing.”

Professional Profile: Rick Toone, Prop Master

Rick Toone planned to be a rock and roll lighting designer, until he discovered property work. The Virginia native earned a bachelor's degree in technical theater from the Virginia Commonwealth University, then found work doing lighting design with a Baltimore theatrical lighting company. After a couple of years, he decided that to further advance his career, he needed to relocate to New York or Los Angeles. He picked the latter.

Through friends working in the film industry, Toone found employment as a carpenter on a couple of movies. Connections made on set led to work as a lead man in set dressing for the television movie Love & War, and six films for Cannon. Over the next couple of years he worked on a variety of projects, eventually drifting toward props. “I realized I lifted too many refrigerators and couches and worked longer hours for less money than the prop guys.”

In conjunction with an art director who worked steadily in commercials, Toone and another man handled set dressing and props on her projects. “The three of us would kind of do everything,” affording him an opportunity to gain more set experience and make contacts.

Through a production designer he had worked with on several commercials, Toone's first job as prop master was on the film Pontiac Moon. Prop master gigs continued to come in, bringing work on such well-known commercial campaigns as the Jerry Seinfeld spots for American Express and the first series of Got Milk? “I did a lot of AT&T and Federal Express stuff.”

When the Oxygen network started up, Toone decided to try out working in television. “I was intrigued because they used the same crew to shoot six shows; I was propping all six at the same time. We did a show in the morning, one show after lunch, and one show in the late afternoon. We just moved the cameras around the stage. The quality of the work wasn't very good and the money wasn't great, but the people were nice and fun. It was a way to work eight hours a day and see my kids.” After a year, the programs went on hiatus for four months, then returned and did another short run of shows, before production moved to New York.

Toone returned to commercials, working with some of the biggest feature directors, such as Ridley Scott, on Nike and other spots. Even with contacts that would enable him to transition into feature films, Toone elected to focus on commercials.

“If you do three movies a year, two of them are out of town, so you're gone from your family. The divorce rate is very high in features. Then you can have eight or nine months off because a project gets pushed back or it falls through. To me it's more of a roller coaster ride than commercials.”