In Other, Non-Theatrical, News

I've been spending a lot of time over the last few years - since covid began - working with an international group of Minecraft builders, building what started out as a single Elven city and is now more of an... entire continent.  

This is the most recent work, the start of a new city, Saelengard (with it's adjacent port).  The community is built on the edges of a vast natural salt formation, a snowflake-like geological sort of tide-flat whose delicate landscape we're trying to respect and celebrate.

Anyway, an interesting design challenge!

  Saelengard in the world of Illias by AstrophagyMC:  Foreground buildings 

are by Brainpoix, background buildings by Barthelemy_Lafon, 

amazing landscape by AstrophagyMC 

You can see more ambitious Minecraft building at Astro's Instagram or You Tube videos.

Making Trees on Stage

Hard to do well.

But watch this great tree-making video by Hey Pete! that one of my set design students found:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cTw-OdMxHYg

(I'm in love with the circle-leaf tree canopies.  Magic.)

Stonewalling

 At yesterday's student charrette (which went well!) we did a lot of talking and the question of how to make good stone or brick walls onstage came up.  

My usual technique is to hand carve the mortar joints from sheet foam, using a snap-blade knife extended out a bit too far (be careful!) so it has a bit of flexibility to it.  Then layers of paint.

Here's an example starting with white, pebbley-textured polystyrene:

Photos from Uptown Players' Vanya and Sonya and Masha and Spike

 Another show using polystyrene but the carpenter's favorite - beautiful - technique called for many very coarse layers of paint spatter, then exposure to heat so that the least painted parts of the foam - like the mortar joints - melted most.

Humble Boy at WaterTower Theater

Here's another example, using that pink sheet foam insulation you find at the big box builders' stores.  Same knife technique:

The Beauty Queen of Leenane at Kitchen Dog Theater

In the center photo you can see where I was not quite finished yet - there's still some pink showing, as well as some obvious screw heads!

For brick I use a similar technique of foam cutting.

In the Other Room: the Vibrator Play, also at Kitchen Dog Theater

More stone!  This time with stones cut out individually, then placed on the wall.  

Circle Theatre's Incorruptible

Stop!  Stop!  Mercy!

Models and Miniatures

Okay, there are the models we build to explain a theater set... and then there are Miniatures.

Which may be a whole 'nother thing.  Look at these by Mylyn Nguyen!

Images from designyoutrust.com - copyright to the artist

Wonderful detail, in observation and execution.  Amazing.

The Book is Back!

After some misadventure, I finally got my hands on the proof copy of the second edition of my theater set design book, Alice Through the Proscenium.  (Catching the FedEx guy just as he was about to leave the package on the door mat - In The Rain.)

The cover for the upcoming second edition - copyrighted, obviously

Woohoo!

It's not bad.  Of course there's something funny about the spine, several images need higher rez scans, and one needs to be redrawn to have more legible lettering, but on the whole pretty good.  It has a nice heft.  And the cover is so so glossy.

Coming soon...

Meanwhile, this Spring's Apprenticeship Program has begun at Stage West Theatre.   Yesterday we met for the first time... a very promising and accomplished group!  I'm looking forward to this program.  More to come...

Oops - It's Been How Long?

Since I last blogged?

What can I say?  It was a busy Fall and I didn't blog.  Even once.

But instead of a super-fund-sized data dump of what I did do instead, let's just jump to today as I prep for the start of Stage West Theatre's Apprenticeship Program.  Tomorrow I meet my set design students.  Pretty exciting!

Along with get-to-know-yous and handing off the script for their next day-long design charrette, we'll also visit the set for Stage West's next production, Margorie Prime.  All I know about this at the moment is that it's designed by Stage West's talented Allen Dean, who previously painted the drops for my To The Breeches!  (Which I actually DID blog about HERE.)  And I just found a cool little post showing him actually painting them HERE.

The upcoming design charrette?

Based on a darkish musical version of Little Red Riding Hood that I totally made up.

A gotta-be Public Domain image from an ancient version of the story

So... what even IS a design charrette?

Definitions on the internet mostly stress the collaborative nature it can have, when disparate members of a design team and the client all brainstorm together.  Usually there's a passing mention of the pressure-cooker ambiance of this affair: one room, a single limited chunk of time, and the creation of a real product at the end of that time.

I like that version.

But this ain't that.  Because my first architectural design professor went to the E'cole des Beaux-Artes - in an ancient age when charrettes involved a tumbril-like cart that carried away your (individual) work to its doom - I think of charrettes as the pressure-cooker part.  A short intense effort in design.  We'll certainly work on collaboration.  Theater is very collaborative!  But this day will be about learning to be fast and free-wheeling.  To learn to trust your gut.  

This first design will be developed farther - may even be discarded later - but those first reactions to the text and first design impulses are uniquely valuable.  

Not to mention the survival value of speed!

HERE is a link to a discussion of last year's Three Little Pigs charrette.