The RPF That WasIf you're at all interested in collecting props and/or prop replicas, then you're familiar with The RPF. It's been around since 1997 and has become the largest and most well-known forum about movie/TV props and costumes. I first found them around 2000 while researching how to make proton packs and other items for a Ghostbusters fan film a friend and I were writing at the time. It was like a nerdy wonderland with the most amazing info and helpful people you could imagine. But that was 14 years ago now. And things have changed. In a big way. Back then, membership was limited. Anyone could browse the site, but you could only register during certain open periods of enrollment. I was a neophyte and still a decade away from actually replicating anything myself, so I had nothing to contribute anyway. I was happy enough just to lurk. Because, in those days, lurking at the RPF was a very rewarding experience! Here's how it would work: You have an interest in a certain prop. So you go to the site and you do a search. You're then presented with some threads. You select essentially any one of them, and you get a series of talented craftsmen and artisans with an eye for detail discussing how they replicate an item to the highest possible quality and accuracy and responding to questions from those interested in undertaking their own project. You read through the threads, see the different techniques used by different builders, see tips from others on alternate ways to achieve a particular aspect of the build. If you read that and said "Uh... yeah. That's how forums work," then you haven't been to the RPF lately. If you're like me, when a cool prop comes on screen, you're sometimes too busy trying to get a good look at it that you don't even manage to catch all the dialogue (if you're like my wife, it's the shoes that are distracting you, but she can start her own blog). In the spirit of those props that grab our attention and won't let go, I would like to introduce the first installment of my new ongoing feature here at the Propsmith blog: Top Props. Once or twice a week I will be highlighting the best props from a TV Show or movie currently gracing our screens. If we hit a period of high prop awesomeness, you'll probably see this feature a little more often. If we hit a dry spell, then I'll do some Top Props Throwback posts, and cover some awesome classic props. So I thought to myself: what better movie to kick this thing off than the best movie currently in theaters? Of course I am referring to I make it no secret at all that I absolutely love and adore this movie. Of course, so does everyone else. I'm not special.
And, of course, one of the best things about this movie are the incredible props. And there are a LOT. In fact, I found it hard to pick just a few Top Props to be my favorites. And here are the ones that came out on top: These are a couple of pictures of a quick mockup I did for an upcoming product that I will be releasing soon.
The final product will be decidedly more... verdant. We apologize, but due to liability concerns, we will not be able to ship to Metropolis. I hate to have three blog posts in a row on the same topic, but things need to be said. I've just gotten off the phone with eBay, concerning yet another takedown of my Mr. Kite poster. Despite providing documentation from the Intellectual Property Office of the UK, despite posting a video detailing how my poster is based on the original and not Peter Dean's, eBay's legal teams in the US and UK have apparently had several long and detailed discussions about this situation and decided "The posters bear a strong resemblance to one-another, so we're going to let Peter Dean pull his poster and they'll just need to work it out between themselves." Yes, the posters bear a strong resemblance, they're both fucking copies of the same image!! I don't know what kind of empty-headed morons they have in their legal department, but this is a clear-cut case of anti-competitive behavior. Any moron can see that. Further, I don't know why eBay can't adhere to the typical counter-notification process in this case. They claim it's because Dean is in the UK, but Etsy had no issue with that. For those who don't know, here's how a counter-notification usually works:
I went through this process with Etsy, who essentially told me "Don't worry, that slimy cunt had his chance to prove his claim, but now we know that he's just a douchebag with loose morals and we'll ignore him in the future." eBay, though? "Oh, he's in a different country so uh... you'll have to get his permission." Fuck you, eBay. AND FUCK YOU, PETER DEAN. You're a vile piece of rotting cock-flesh, clinging to the underbelly of a bloated and decaying whore-corpse. And a gutless, guileless coward to boot, without the common decency to have a conversation with someone you accuse of stealing from you. TO EVERYONE WHO IS NOT PETER DEAN: The most accurate Mr. Kite poster on Earth is still available on this very website: RIGHT HERE. ...And on Etsy: HERE. So, my previous post was all about my battle to be able to sell my Mr. Kite poster, but I neglected to mention WHERE it can be bought! Well, here are some options for you:
Thanks to everyone who has shown interest. There's more coming down the road, and I'll be sharing soon. Fair warning: I am prone to ranting. I guess it's only fair, then, that my first blog post on my new site be a damn rant. But I will assert to my dying breath that it is a justified rant, based on moral indignation at the sleazy dealings of a supreme douchebag. So, let me tell you a story about this picture: Up above is the best known photo of the victorian circus poster that inspired the Beatles song "Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite." For Beatles fans, the poster is a piece of history. An artifact that inspired the man by whom we are all so inspired ourselves. It was purchased in an antique shop by John Lennon. It was old and weird and it called to him, as these things tend to do to many of us. He framed it and hung it on his wall, as you do. As you can tell from the photo, the poster is mostly text. It's really a sparsely illustrated jumble of superlatives, advertising a show that took place on Feb 14th, 1843 in Town-Meadows, Rochdale. But if you're familiar with the song, "Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite," you'll notice that great chunks of the lyrics from the song are just pulled verbatim from the poster, including the very title. Given the history and mystique of the poster, Beatles collectors have always been interested in owning a copy. Until recently, the copies available were pretty bad, like these: Then, in 2012, a guy named Peter Dean got it in his head that he would recreate the poster, from scratch, using the same exact materials and methods used to create the original. The result was stunning, far more accurate and, most of all, expensive. Up to that point, replicas of the poster were usually around $15. Peter Dean's was far better but came in around $400 USD, depending on the GBP/USD exchange rate. Needless to say, I was enamored with Mr. Dean's poster. Until I got to looking more closely. After a few times watching the video of his process that was making the rounds on the Internet, I started noticing some inaccuracies. So I went and got the most High-res version of the top image of John Lennon, and started looking more closely... I'll be honest, I was never going to spend $400 on a poster. It could have been so accurate as to be indistinguishable from the original when placed next to it and $400 was going to be too much for me. But I decided that, as it was, the poster wouldn't be worth a quarter that price to me. Given the way the poster was recreated, inaccuracies are TOTALLY understandable. But, it occurred to me, this is the 21st century... and we needn't be limited to having to find or recreate accurate letterpress bits. We have Photoshop! So, I set about digitally recreating the poster in ultra high resolution. I shared my work with several others online who lent me their eyes when I had been staring at the thing too long to be able to see differences any longer. I made changes and tweaks over a series of months. And then I was satisfied. Finally, I had something of high quality that didn't sacrifice accuracy. But Peter Dean had one thing right: It couldn't be some mass-printed poster and still retain the unique, vintage artisanal quality of the original. So I decided the closest I could get to a printing press for this would be to have it screen-printed. I worked with an independent screen printing company for a few weeks, getting my files right to ensure the best results, testing several different kinds of paper for both texture and color, etc. Until finally, I sent them to press. I ordered 500 posters, making it a much smaller run than Peter Dean's limited edition run of 1,967 prints. And when I received them, they were even better that I could have hoped for. Absolutely beautiful (if I do say so myself). So, I had one for myself, a few for gifts, and one for each of the people who lent me their eyes during the tedious recreation process. And the rest? Well, those, I would just list on eBay and see if anyone was interested. I thought $50 would be a fair price, given the time and money I put into replicating and printing them. And, yeah, people were interested. I've sold the posters all over the US as well as to Canada, the UK, France, Germany, Spain, Australia, Russia and Chile. And then Peter Dean noticed that he had some competition. Now, if you'll remember, I mentioned how a video of Peter Dean's was making its way across the Internet. What I meant by that was that it had been featured on Boing Boing, Rolling Stone, Gizmodo, Fast Company, The Daily Telegraph, Smithsonian.com, and the Boston Globe, as well as dozens of others. The guy was riding on a massive wave of media attention... all the way to the bank. And then there's me. I posted the poster on eBay, Etsy, and The RPF (they get a rangy post later). And that's it. No media, no advertising. Set it up and let people find it, if they can even notice it amongst all the hype over his poster. I had them up for over a year with no issues. They weren't making me a lot of money, but it seemed that when I was low on funds, a poster or two would coincidentally sell just in time to help me pay my bills. Then, in December of 2013, right as people were starting to do their Christmas shopping, I got hit with a stream of 8 orders in a single week. To give you an idea of my financial standing, this doubled my income for that week. I ordered 25 more shipping tubes to prepare for more Christmas business... but it never came. I shrugged it off at first... they'd always sold in little bursts with long periods of inactivity in-between. Then I got an email asking if I had any more posters available for sale from someone saying that they could no longer find it on eBay. Checking my account, I saw the unthinkable: My recreation of a 170 year old poster had been pulled for Copyright violation. Needless to say, I called eBay immediately and plead my case. The guy making the complaint states on his very own website that his product is a recreation of a very old poster. There you go: proof that he's not the copyright holder. Nope, not good enough. I have to fill out a counter-notice, which gives him 10 days to prove that he's suing me, or I get to re-list. No, wait, he's in the UK and not subject to process from US courts. Sorry, eBay says, I'll have to work it out and get permission FROM PETER DEAN to re-list my item, because he said, with no proof whatsoever, that he was the rights-holder. Well, I did try. I called him and left voicemails. I tweeted his Kite account. I emailed him. Repeatedly. Never any response. Not a peep. Nothing. My listing did get pulled from Etsy in the meantime, though. So I went back to eBay and pleaded my case. Nope, they said, nothing to be done. So for months, I fight and search and toil. Until I find out that an ex-roommate who has moved out of state had gone back to school and become an attorney. And not just any old kind of attorney... he was practicing Intellectual Property law. Boom. We spent several hours on the phone and Skype discussing my options and he gave me some ideas on how to obtain hard evidence that the imagery used was in the Public Domain and also totally ineligible for copyright protection. It took several more months, but I finally obtained the documentation I needed to prove my case. I submitted to eBay, and my poster was fully re-instated! For about a week. Then it got pulled again, this time with Peter Dean claiming that his poster has several changes from the original (I call those inaccuracies), that those changes changes constitute a new work protected by copyright, and that I have copied his work and thus infringed on his copyright. It took an afternoon on the phone with eBay, and several rounds of consultation on their part with eBay legal, before it was determined that, no, some inaccuracies do not constitute new work, that the poster still falls under public domain and that I am free to list my poster with impunity. My account was given a big flag to indicate that no takedowns are to take place until all the notes have been read and that, for such a takedown to occur, Peter Dean (who is now the boy who cried IP Violation), will need to provide concrete evidence to back up his claims, both of holding copyright and that I have copied HIS work and not the original. As there's literally no way he can do that, I FUCKING WIN. I want to be very clear here: Peter Dean does not now believe, nor has he ever believed, that I infringed on his rightful Intellectual Property. He knows that the poster is public domain, he knows that my poster is based on the original, not his and, most importantly, he knows that my poster costs 1/8 the price of his. Despite his gigantic media presence, he sees my poster, its accuracy and its price, as a threat to his overpriced boutique poster. I've spoken highly of his poster in the past (because it is very nice), but now I am going to BURY him. I'm going to take away the one advantage his product has over mine, and I'm going to do it for a price that will destroy his sales. And there's not a god damn thing he can do about it. For December alone, he cost me probably several hundred dollars. In the six months that my poster was not listed, I lost search rankings both on eBay and Google, as well as all the potential sales for half a year. All because he couldn't be a man and exist in a free and open market. Well, now it's war. That's what you get for being an insufferable, slimy, non-competitive douchebag who doesn't even have the balls to communicate with me directly. Oh, and here's a video proving that I copied the original, and that I did so more accurately: |
About the AuthorMy name is Shawn McBee and I am a replica prop fabricator and collector located in Atlanta, GA. The name "The Propsmith" is more of an aspiration than a declaration at this point, but I am a perfectionist and apply my keen eye for detail to recreating props to an exacting degree. Categories
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