Wednesday, January 08, 2020
What's in a line?-Why good drafting is important.
www.jasonsimmsdesign.com: For centuries, designers of all kinds have been drawing their designs for the purposes of construction and communication. Today, the most common methodology of drafting, or submitting of drafting is done in a to-scale architectural style of drawing called orthographic projection. Today, this is mostly done using Computer Aided Drafting or 'CAD' software like Vectorworks or AutoCAD; however, there are still those out there who draft by hand using a pencil.
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There is nothing better than getting a good drafting. It doesn't matter if you're a Scenic Designer, Technical Director, Carpenter, Lighting Designer, Electrician, Stage Manager, and even as the article points out, a director. In my undergrad, we were first taught that learning how to draft is learning a new language, since you are trying to best convert your thoughts and ideas to someone else so they best understand it. This article does a great job explaining what happens to a drawing and how one plan or section can impact every other department, which is something I feel we all need to take a step back and think about when we sit down with our pencil or mouse. Not only do we have to take our ideas and get them out of our head, we really need to think about how we lay this information out for the receiving party. This is one reason I really like hand drafting (particularly as a designer), since you must think through and draw every line on the page instead of it being computer generated. When it comes to the impact on other departments, I know in the TD office, we take designer drawings quite literally, to the point where one squiggly line drawn without much though is now being cut out on the CNC router. On the shop floor, it should be clear not only what size everything is, but also how it gets assembled and what are the critical dimensions. Overall, it cannot be stressed how much a good or bad drawing can impact everyone down the 'line'.
Thinking of drafting a necessary tool for communication, rather than just a tedious step in the process, can change the manner in which it is approached. All information needs to be included by the designer in order to serve their design's purpose. In hand drafting we learned that the drafts from a designer are often the first impression the scene shop has of them, which could affect their work relationship for the entire process. This article presents basic information about the purposes of drafting, but I believe it is important to remind yourself the purposes of our tasks in a production, and how it could affect the entire team. Leaving an item off of a drafting is essentially the same as not telling the director a change has been made. This article also mentions the importance of an orthographic projection, which is one of the first drafting principles we were taught in Studiocraft. Learning this principle first in hand drafting rather than on the computer was critical because it allowed me to think in the visual and spatial manner that drafting requires.
It was just in my first semester review about a month ago that I said drafting was like a language to me, and I have a natural penchant for languages. Putting a design idea down onto vellum (as thus far I have only been professionally instructed in hand drafting) is like translating. For some, it's tedious work, but for me, it's calming. And you have to translate everything in order to get a message across. Leaving a line off or a dimension missing is no laughing matter, because it could be critical to the execution of the design. Another aspect a draft affects that I've always known but never consciously is the taping down of rehearsal spaces. Of course the rehearsal room has to be to scale, and where does the crew get that scale but the ground plan? A proper draft really is quintessential to any performance or project.
As we all know, theatre is a world of intense collaboration between dozens of people. No matter the department, everyone needs to be able to communicate plans clearly from the top of the design process down, and a common language we use to do this is drafting. Costumers of course have patterning, but this is simply another “dialect” of drafting. The author, Jason Simms, talks a lot about the ways that drafting, good drafting, is useful in a production process over renderings. In order for a show to be built correctly by the artisans and technicians working to create it, a designer’s ideas and plans need to be completely laid out for others to follow. Directors can follow ground plans to give stage directions, and if a ground plan isnt correct when it is taped in the rehearsal room, it can throw off all the actors’ performances. The purpose of drafting is consistant through departments, and if it is incorrect, a number of parts of the performance could be as well.
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