Test Scan

The Explorers Club - Stage West and WaterTower Theater

set design by Clare Floyd DeVries

There!  The first successful scan from my brand new large format scanner.

Ain't tech wonderful?

I love the way prices keep dropping(if in this realm only), because a few years ago an 11" x 17" (almost) scanner like this one cost over a thousand dollars and now it's less than $200 .  Finally I can afford to scan my sketches in One Piece, instead of in halfsies.

Scanning images at your desk is a help to any visual artist, but as a set designer who often works an hour or two away from the guys and gals  at the theater who need the drawing, it's a life-saver... as in my-life-wasted-one-hour-in-the-car at a time.   Sometimes one quick and quickly scanned picture really can be worth a thousand words over the phone when trying to explain a fix.

What other tech is actually really useful in this biz?

Cell phones, because of the find-you-anywhere ability.  Though I hate to admit it, texting is actually useful in a theater context because often you need to discuss an issue but can't talk because rehearsal.  Email is my preference because you can better, more fully discuss issues and Bonus! no nagging electronic bleeps.  Email is easier to ignore until you have real time to think and respond.

Copiers.  Blessed copiers.  I'm old enough to remember the early versions of photo-copiers with their damp, dirty results.  (Oh, the old toner disasters!  Filthy ook-dust everywhere!)  I remember - and can still smell - the old Diazo printers and their ammonia - a system which only worked to copy drawings on translucent materials.  (My first architecture job involved an unventilated basement tending a Diazo machine.)  In the pre-photo-copier age, if you wanted text copied you wrote it out yourself and, to copy a picture on opaque paper or from a book, you traced it.

Barbarism.

All hail the age of big cheap scanners!

Low or High Tech?

For the next show at Circle Theatre, Soccer Moms, we need to cut out a bunch of over-sized leaves.

Expecting our usual bunch-o'-guys-cutting-foam method, I prepared drawings of free-hand leaves that fit within standard 4' x 8' sheets of thin building insulation foam or 2'x4' sound insulation ceiling tiles.  (Sound may be an issue on this show.)  These sketches would be copied onto clear sheets, blown up using the overhead projector (most shops have one), then cut out by hand.  To aid all this, my drawings showed how the leaves fit on each sheet - nesting together not to waste material - and I included a 1' x 1' grid for reference, just in case a projector wasn't available and the leaves had to be enlarged by hand.  Very old school that -Michelangelo used the grid method to enlarge his sketches for his murals.

Then the Tech. Director had a bright idea: lasers!  Laser-cut foam can be very cheap and fast, because it uses little manpower.

But the foam cuttin' place can't use hand drawings because line weights are too fat to guide the thin precision of a laser.

After experimenting with scanning, photo image programs and Sketchup, it became clear that only true computer drafting would work.  So we found an AutoCAD wiz to draw them with a very fine line of .0004.

So now a zippy high-tech laser is doing a job that at many other theaters would be days of hand labor.

I wonder if Michelangelo would be miffed when told his hand drawing was useless?

The Creation of Adam (with God + Laser) by Michelangelo, hand drawn BTW 

On Reading...

There is an on-going debate on whether the our increasingly plugged-in click-the-screen world is somehow changing our brains.  And whether, for instance, we as a species are losing the ability to read Big Books.  Here's a great comment on the question from an article by Jim Holt in the London Review of Books :

‘No one reads War and Peace,’ responds Clay Shirky, a digital-media scholar at New York University. ‘The reading public has increasingly decided that Tolstoy’s sacred work isn’t actually worth the time it takes to read it.’ (Woody Allen solved that problem by taking a speed-reading course and then reading War and Peace in one sitting. ‘It was about Russia,’ he said afterwards.)