Not a Review - Becky's New Car

Well, Becky's New Car opened last night to a full house and an enthusiastic audience.  (Always nice when folks like the show.)  As an added bonus, Charlie and Benita Staadecker, who commissioned this play, were in the audience - they try to make it to every opening.  What a great idea!  To commission a play, then to travel around the country watching it open.  Coolest hobby ever!

Come see what the fuss is about at Circle Theatre, Fort Worth.

Set Designer's Life - Changes

Nice to think that as a designer you could sit at your board (drafting board: archaic technology for the hand drafting of construction documents on paper)...

Where was I?  Ahem.  ...sit at your board, dreaming up design ideas to be realized in the real world exactly as you imagine.

Wake up!  It'll never happen.

Sometimes, as I found with my recent photo mural problem, there will be a technical glitch that makes your idea impossible.  Sometimes it will be budget or logistics.  Sometimes someone else has an idea to improve yours.  There will always be changes between what you first envision and what ultimately gets built.

And this is okay.  Designs can grow stronger as they travel from your board to the stage.

In the photo to hand-painted mural change forced upon this particular design of mine...  Well, it went from Not-Working to Working which, I suppose, has to be considered "stronger."  My actual painting, though not as lovely as I'd wish, seems effective.  So I hope!  Let me know what you think.

Becky's New Car opens Saturday.

Incoming! "Becky's New Car" Opens Next Week

Circle Theatre.  Fort Worth.  Saturday.
Just sayin'

(My car is filled with automobile dealership desk.  Could be worse, I'm not holding the sofa on my hood.)

Set Design Life

For the next show at Circle Theatre, Becky's New Car, I need a big photo mural... a view of sky, pine trees, road, and a car.

Naturally, it's impossible to find a public domain Use-Me-Free! photo that's perfect, so I've been scrounging the internet, messing with possible photos, trying to digitally add cars etc. etc.  Since I'm a novice digital manipulator... You can imagine the electronic mess.  Yesterday I so overloaded my faithful laptop that it completely froze.

Solid.  Icy.  Frozen.  For loooong arctic minutes.

Scared me.  I called my on-line IT staff.  Waited.

Eventually the machine unfroze.  Who knows why?

Finally I spliced my images convincingly.  After other electronic trials I got email transmission of them to transmiss - abandoning only one email because it wouldn't "attach" and after only one "failure to deliver".  Got the (gulp) printer's price.  Talked with the producer...

And here's where the flexibility needed to set design comes in - in that discussion I discovered the producer was reluctant about the cost mainly because the car made this background less usable for future shows.  Seein' as how he'd be spending so much on it.  Understandable. So we kicked ideas around and decided the car could be a separate image, mounted on board, standing in front of the background all super-hero-cut-out-like.  Plausible for an auto dealership.  This lets the mural get printed faster (important).  And makes the mural a more flexible to re-use investment.  And the free-standing car offers some theatrical possibilities... hmmmm.  Must talk to director...

Flexibility - the designer's friend.

Becky's New Car opening soon!