Thursday, October 27, 2016
Fresh Ground Pepper Theatre Puts Sounds Designers First In Sounds Good
Live Design: Sound designers don’t always get a fair shake, but one New York City theatre put them front and center in an experiment designed to stimulate playwrights. Fresh Ground Pepper’s five founders and creative directors—three directors, a playwright, and a producer/manager—came together eight years ago after graduating from the Playwrights Horizons Theatre School at NYU. “We missed being in an educational environment and didn’t feel we had a great place to put work in development up,” says producer Karina Martins.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
3 comments:
Sound designers too often get the shortest end of the stick, sometimes even being tacked on at the end of the process without proper time or equipment to give their artform justice, so it’s great to see a production that puts the focus on the sound design upfront. As theater people who are so focused on plays and the stories and their plots and characters, it’s very rare to ever think of sound coming first in the creation of a narrative. It’s very interesting how some of the sound designers created their cues-from-thin-air while envisioning a story in their head, while others found freedom in not having to work off of a script. This article reminds me a lot of what Sarah Pickett was telling us in design for the stage class comparing aspects of sound to aspects of visual art, to get us to understand how the elements are able to work together. In particular, I found helpful what she said about tone/hue in reference to warm/cool sounds, or the openness/ closed-offness of sounds. It’s cool that one of the sound designers mentioned uses very similar language when discussing how he drew from a “pallette” of sounds around a “tone” color. It must have been a very unique experience for the playwrights to base their stories off of sounds.
I have to admit, I've always undervalued sound simply because I absorb the most information when it's presented visually. Sound design is so unique in this industry because it doesn't have that same visual quality as other specialties. Im glad this theater is showcasing sound design rather than letting it be a compliment to what is typical the attention grabber. The designers do a very good job of describing sound because it is such and auditory-only thing. It's interesting to think of it in terms of a visual design.
There are a whole lot of creative outlets for people in more tangible concentrations- scenic designers can go on to be props people, scenic painters, draftsman etc. But when it comes to the more conceptual concentrations (i.e. sound design), there's less outlets for them to apply their skills. That's why, when I see articles like these, I get really excited for sound designers to be able to have the same opportunities. Sound has been telling stories for decades, if you think way back to when people composed symphonies, there were always musical themes that strung you along and told an emotional story. In this scenario, you add a director and a design team into the mix to aid you in the story telling while you compose your own symphony. They also only got ten cues. We as designers work better when we have some kind of restraints so I think that having this set number of cues is a great way to get people thinking about how to tell a story in just 10 cues.
Post a Comment