Reorganizing the Studio

One key element in efficiently designing and drawing a show - not to mention other paperwork - is having an efficient office.

For me this means finally getting a theater carpenter buddy to build custom cabinets to hold specially-sized boxes to store drawings.

The standard for theater drawings is changing now as computer or CAD drawing becomes popular.  (Earlier POST.)  It used to be that a set designer would hand draw on 24" x 36" or larger paper, a size that is easy and cheap to store rolled.  With CAD I've seen all sorts of weird sheets, many too small to roll well.  I, myself, like hand drawing on 11"x17" sheets.  These store best flat.

I've been keeping drawings in clean pizza boxes: Pizza Hut "The Big New Yorker" boxes to be precise.

These boxes are slightly less than 17" clear inches inside though, making my drawings curl at the end but, being square, wasting room at the side.  After 130+ shows (plus architectural and other projects) and 40+ boxes, wasted space becomes important in my little studio.  So now I'm replacing squashed pizza boxes with spiffy rectangular ones from IKEA and The Container Store right-sized for my drawings.

Which all means removing every stick of furniture to replace cabinets under my layout table (and that table top too), then sorting through and reboxing every single file and drawing I've ever saved.

Yeesh!

Set Designer's Life - Stuff!

I'm pretty sure all set designers and set dressers have full garages.  Where else do you store all your stuff?

My own is absolutely FULL.  I can carefully inch a car into it, but every other inch is filled with the usual garage stuff - shovels, tools, bathtubs - the rest is crammed with theater set dressing, small pieces of stage furniture, and architectural fragments that might be useful on a set.  Vital stuff!  Because when I need to do, say, an Art Deco living room or, as now, a house of the 1880s, I can't count on instantly finding and buying or borrowing the perfect, telling, period details I need.  (Not at a price I can afford.)  So I store, for instance, a wicker sewing basket, a crystal and brass chandelier, a modernist desk chair, a circle of excellent fake grass, and (bought yesterday) a small Art Deco radio.  Among a thousand other things.

A few years ago - when the car no longer fit - I had to decide whether to rent a storage unit for this clobber, or to get serious about storing it neatly.  Renting a storage unit looked like an endless drain on my meager profits, so I invested a little money and a lot of time on sturdy shelves and organizing the junk into giant Tupperware TM style containers.  It's now much easier to find things...

...though once the weather cools down (109 F again yesterday) it'll be time to reorganize.