Please help me out with a very brief survey

Now that this blog is entering its third full year of operation (and that I’m getting the hang of blogging), I’d like to learn more about who you are and what topics you find useful and interesting. Therefore, I put together two short surveys in order to get some feedback. Both are similar, but one is tailored specifically for high schools and the other is geared towards community, regional, and other types of theaters.

The high school survey has nine questions and the general survey has ten, and the survey site estimates it “should” only take about three to four minutes to complete each one.

If you’re involved in high school theater, please use this one: High School Survey

Or, if you’re involved in community, regional, or another type of theater, please use this one: General Theater Survey

Or, you can just drop me a note by using the form below.

BTW, this blog had 934 views in ’15 (it was only a partial year), 5,161 in ’16, and 10,941 in ’17. With your interest and your help, those numbers will continue to increase.

Thanks very much.

Name (optional)

Email (optional)

Comment(required)

Submit

Δ

Don’t put the cart before the horse

Every now and then, at a first production meeting, I hear something that reminds me of this:

https://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/put-the-cart-before-the-horse.html

I’m sure you’ve heard it too: “Let’s get (or build) a revolve.” “We have a cart we used last year.” “We have that staircase from [name a show].” “We can use periaktoi.” And similar comments.

Granted these ideas are all intended to be helpful, but it’s so easy to home in on one of them and let a piece of scenery drive the set design. I’ve mentioned this one before: a couple of years ago I was at a first meeting for Les Miz at a large community theater, and of course the barricade came up right away. Someone immediately suggested borrowing a 12′ revolve from another company, and several heads nodded in agreement. At which point I brought up two things: one, a 12′ barricade on a 40′ wide stage would not have looked very impressive, and, two, we didn’t need a revolve just because the barricade turns around. So they looked at me and asked what I would do instead, to which I replied “I don’t know yet; this is our first meeting and I haven’t started on the design.” Not what they wanted to hear at that moment, but it had to be my answer.

In the end, they had a much more impressive barricade that turned just fine, and they didn’t have to deal with a revolve. You can read about here, at The barricade in Les Miz.

It’s fine to keep stock pieces in mind, and they can certainly help with the budget or the schedule. However, it’s so much better — in terms of the audience experience — to create a solid, compelling design first, thinking about the story and the characters, and then (and only then) look for stock pieces that fit into the design. A staircase, for instance, built for one show may not work for another show due to size, style, or some other consideration. Ditto for doors, windows, and lots of other items, and the same holds true for furniture and accessories.

By the same token, popular and frequently built scenery pieces — like periaktoi — are not always the best solution to a design problem. What I’ve seen happen often (too often) is that these items become a construction project that drives everything else. You can end up deciding to build three or four periaktoi right up front, before considering the overall set, and then find yourself painted into a corner: “Okay we have them, now what do we do with them?”

If you want to consider periaktoi as problem-solvers (which they are), and not as short-cuts to designing a set (which they are not), you may want to check out my post on them, at Periaktoi: an ancient solution that still works.

Take your time. Study the script, the characters, the period, and all those other things that make up the story, and come up with a physical environment that supports it in the most creative, theatrical manner possible. Then feel free to see what pieces you have that fit in perfectly or that can be modified.

---

I love that photo above, BTW. It’s like the horse is breaking the fourth wall to ask us, “What’s wrong with this picture?”

When a pencil meets technology

Back in 2007 I designed a production of To Kill a Mockingbird for a local theatre. At our first meeting, the director and I agreed that it would be really simple to just say, okay, we need a few houses and a tree, and call it a day — and immediately decided that that was exactly what we didn’t want to do. After some discussion, we agreed to borrow an idea from the novel, and that’s how I came to combine a pencil, a scanner, and SketchUp.

In the novel, the narration is pretty much provided by a grown-up Scout (Jean Louise Finch), based on her recollections of “the old days.” So the director and I said, what if Jean Louise had done some pencil sketches of her old town and we saw the play through those sketches. We liked that, so the houses, the tree, and other elements would all be large pencil sketches. We deviated from this for the trial scene, but that’s a different story.

The first step here was to research period houses in Alabama, and there was plenty of material available online. I also bought a book, A Field Guide to American Houses, by Virginia and Lee McAlester, which was great not just for the photos but for the drawings and descriptions. It was a huge help.

As usual for me, I then did a number of rough pencil sketches sketches to get an idea of what the set would look like. This was also how I sold the concept to the director:

Once we were in agreement, I fired up SketchUp. Another set designer had been trying to talk me into using it, and this time I decided to give it a go and see whether I liked it. I already had an idea as to what the houses might look like, so now I developed them some more, in 3D, based on each character’s personality. The houses were mostly facades and roofs, since that’s all I would need. Here are four of them:

Then, going back to my original concept sketch, I turned each house (in SketchUp) to get just the angle and view I wanted:

Now I printed each one out, placed a sheet of colored tracing paper over it, and traced it in pencil to get a “pencil sketch” look:

This took a few tries, since I was also working on the drawing style I thought Jean Louise would have used. I could have sketched out the houses in pencil to begin with, but SketchUp gave me the ability to turn them until they were “just so,” instead of having to re-draw them several times.

Once I was happy, I scanned each sketch, did a bit of work on it with Paint Shop Pro (a product similar to Photoshop), and imported them into SketchUp for the final “assembly” into the town:

Two of the houses needed a real porch, so we added them while still keeping to the pencil-sketch look.

The tree worked out the same way. I looked at numerous live oaks online, found one I liked, modified it some, sketched it, and imported it into SketchUp. I was also careful to place the knot hole at just the right height for Scout and her brother:

Unfortunately, I don’t have a good photo of the set, but here’s one under work lights:

To create the actual scenery units, I printed out each house for the scenic artists, and they then gridded the printouts and transferred the designs to the full-size pieces. They also mixed a background paint exactly the color of aged newsprint (from an actual sample) and then a lining color that looked just like pencil graphite.

You can see a few photos of this project on my web site, at To Kill a Mockingbird, and more on how I use SketchUp right here on the blog at I love SketchUp and A set design from start to finish.

I’ve used this same technique a number of times by now, and I really like it. It gives me the ability to draw something freehand just the way I want it and then import it into SketchUp to develop the set design and the renderings. Once the designs are in the computer, I can transfer them directly into the shop drawings and even home in on some of the details, since they’re already there. It’s a creative solution and a time-saver at the same time.