CMU School of Drama


Sunday, October 15, 2017

NFTRW Weekly Top Five

Here are the top five comment generating posts of the past week:

Going to the Theatre Has Been Ruined for Me

OnStage Blog: This may be an extreme statement, but don’t worry-it’s not the actors or the directors, designers, playwrights or producers that have failed me. Imagine this scene: you’ve taken off an evening of work to go see a Broadway show. You’ve been waiting for weeks to have the time and the money to burn on a show you’ve been dying to see. You arrive at the theater a few minutes early, take time to use the restroom, chat with your date for the evening, check out the theater, or read a snippet of the playbill. At 8:00, the omnipresent voice announces to turn off all cell phones and refrain from unwrapping food or other disturbing noises. You oblige, quickly turn off your phone, sit back and eagerly anticipate the excitement that the next two hours will bring.

Beyond the Curtain: Dreaming Up the Magic with Disney Cruise Line

Disney Parks Blog: As we prepare to debut our newest stage spectacular, “Beauty and the Beast,” aboard the Disney Dream this November, I want to give you an all-access pass behind the curtain to see how we create our elaborate Broadway-style shows at sea. Let me just say, it takes a whole lot of pixie dust and some big dreamers to make these productions happen.

The Art of Blinky Business Cards

Hackaday: Business cards are stuck somewhere between antiquity and convenience. On one hand, we have very convenient paperless solutions for contact swapping including Bluetooth, NFC, and just saying, “Hey, put your number into my phone, please.” On the other hand, holding something from another person is a more personal and memorable exchange. I would liken this to the difference between an eBook and a paperback. One is supremely convenient while the other is tactile. There’s a reason business cards have survived longer than the Rolodex.

A New Study Looks at the Logic Behind Colors

Big Think: If you met someone from a few hundred years ago and started rattling off the names of colors you saw around you, odds are he or she would be baffled. Some of these would be colors the other person had never heard of. It’s not that the hues have appeared only recently — it’s just that they hadn’t been named, and thus lacked an identity.

Production Design Artists Debate Hand Versus Computer Drafting

Variety: Much is written about the enormous impact of technology in such film disciplines as cinematography and visual effects, but production design has also been hugely affected. One of the big issues these days within art departments is balancing traditional hand drafting with computer drafting.

1 comment:

APJS said...

Zoe Hewitt, makes a good point i had never considered about the speed in the process of hand drafting. He's basically saying you can make a sketch of a set on a napkin in 10-20 minutes, and if that sketch is the basis for your design it's time to put it on some real paper to show to your boss. But this is where the road splits. Do you run home to your drafting studio or open up your laptop? Hewitt implies that in the time it takes you to do a fully realized hand draft of your set design, you could have rendered the same set in 3D and shown it to you boss and made it home for dinner. He's also saying that once this set design is approved the computer assisted draft has to do a new drawling to it can be built with all he instruction details included. By this time the person hand drafting is ready to show his boss, as soon as its approved its already ready to start the build because while drafting to the standards involved in hand drafting all the work is done. As someone who pick a college that still teaches hand drafting this is an interesting look on the importance of hand drafting. But i can definitely see the benefits of knowing both. I can follow all the standards of hand drafting Abdul be faster than both drafter in this example. That is a comfort to know.