Dramatics Magazine: WHEN AUDIENCE MEMBERS walk into a theatre, the set is likely one of the first aspects of the production they’ll see. Sets help create the world envisioned by a play’s author, director, and designers. Good ones do this at first glance.
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This article provided a couple of interesting points about young and inexperienced scenic designers working outside of the formal and rigid constructs of an educational setting. Now while I do like how he admits that half of his problems being a young scenic designer were simply based off of the nature of the business and how they are asked to crunch so much into so little. The other half however was more interesting to think about how scenic designers can struggle with their process and how they fall into the same issues. I've seen a lot here at school how designers constantly want to design things that are hyper realistic or project onto a flat of some kind. They stick to tradition and putting what they know and see on stage rather than letting their imagination run wild. However the point that I find most true and interesting even from my limited design background is that of merging conflicting ideas and how a designer is supposed to take them lightly and into your own way of dealing with them.
As a technical director, I figured I’d take a look at this article because I like to always keep the scenic designer perspective on things in mind since the scenic designer is typically one of the people I collaborate with most closely. The thing that jumps out to me in this article is the not wanting to base the design process on the idea of flats or on the idea of being able to use stock. That is one thing I try to keep in mind in the budgeting process, even if it is cheaper to switch to a more standard construction, I don’t want to push the scenic designer toward a result that is more cookie cutter. I think one of the big advantages of the scenic designer and the TD being separate people in that you don’t have on person simultaneously juggling the artistic vision and creation of the world while trying to think budget and logistics. While people obviously can do that successfully, I’ve found that when the scenic designer is also the TD they might be less likely to think outside the box because they don’t want to go over budget or create a complicated build. Which I find odd in a way, because I don’t think anyone wants to be a TD to put together stock flats and call it a day, I think almost everyone gets into it because they want to problem solve and make something that hasn’t been done before.
“slow down, and let your imagination do its job.” This is the single most encouraging sentence I have read today. I believe so, and even not only applying to the work of set designing. I found the attitude works really smoothly along with anything that involves decision making. Such as scheduling or space managing, we all have times that we go over all the options and still not satisfied, but after few days of thinking(or not, it can just be somewhere on our mind), a fantastic solution that is always there at last emerges from others. Cooking ideas is essential, it allows us to exercise our mind and stretch our imagination. I also like the idea of keep working even into the build, for there is no chance we have a perfect detailed drawing from the first place, and the designers should be wanting different things when they have the chance.
It was interesting to me that so many of these points boiled down to “slow down and don’t rush through it”, which seems obvious but is a real problem for designers in general due to the fast-paced nature of the industry. When you’re hired on very close to the show date, there isn’t necessarily time to let ideas sit and work with them until they become their best versions, and no one really has a choice but to go with the first doable option. I also thought it was interesting how the article didn’t mention budgeting at all aside from the note about not feeling limited to stock flats. On one hand, it can be a great process to design freely and afterwards come in and say “how can we do this cheaper”, although this can lead to tension if the designer now feels like they need to compromise their ideas. On the other hand, when the design is made with a budget in mind, it makes that process much easier but can lead to the same sort of tension as before, except now the designer is doing it to themselves. It’s an unfortunate nature of theatrical work that there’s not enough money to do the perfect version of what everyone wants to do, and so compromises like this can be very necessary and very tricky to work through, which is something scenic designers should keep in mind during their design process.
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