another assignment i wrapped up this past weekend was the first for our model-building class. it’s my first class of the week (10AM on Monday) and the class is meant to teach us how to translate the props we draft into scale models. a perfectly valid question to ask at this point is, wait, what do scene designers do...?
i’m still learning that myself, but (and i’m gonna put this in all caps to emphasize just how deep into this theatre tech cult life i’ve descended) SCENE DESIGNERS CONCEPTUALIZE THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT OF A STORY. THE TOOLS WE USE TO COMMUNICATE OUR APPROACH INCLUDE BUT ARE NOT LIMITED TO: RESEARCH BOARDS, DRAFTS AND BLUEPRINTS, PAINT ELEVATIONS TO EXPRESS COLOR ASSIGNMENTS, AND SCALE (MINIATURE) MODELS OF ENTIRE SETS AND PROPS.
in other words, we make really little things to guide the people that make the big things, and we are present very early on in the process of making a story come to life.
we have much creative power :)
anyway, model-building with E (or shall we call him...Madame T, in honor of his favorite supermodel, Twiggy. i’ll do a full character reveal later). model-building with Madame T has so far consisted of a month-long introduction to the neurotic and intricate hazing that is using an Xacto blade. we were asked to review a draft (blueprint, basically) of a theatre portal for Fiddler on the Roof.
(a portal is something that frames the opening of a stage. check out this one from Wicked. the portal is the dragon and that metal frame surrounding it.)
this is a process video of the portal we cut for class:
okay so notice all the tiny ass windows we needed to cut. that’s what i mean by hazing. nowadays you can do this kind of work with laser cutters but as first year scene design students, we aren’t allowed to use the laser cutters until later. my school is very into teaching skills the “traditional” way as we fortify our foundations as designers, and i honestly don’t mind it at all since that’s how i prefer to learn, too. but this project...
it’s not even that we had to cut all the tiny scallops on the side or all the windows. it’s that we had to cut everything multiple times because we were ultimately building this three-dimensional theatre portal. keep in mind that portals are usually “flatter” and “thinner” in design since they are meant to be very far downstage (close to the audience) and act as a “frame” for the rest of the stage and set. but just because they are meant to be flatter and thinner, doesn’t mean that they are 2D.
and also, the point of building a model is to express in a comprehensively detailed way what the final product should look like. so we weren’t cutting these lil windows just to see how COOoooL it would be to have a mostly flat thing with slightly elevated sections. we were supposed to be cutting a mini-version of the real thing, which meant that we had to cut as many layers as needed to express the real thing.
so the cutting in the video...imagine that x 5. not every house, window, or roof shingle needed five layers. but many things needed ~3. i’d say this project took at least 25 hours worth of cutting. this is what mine looked after i had crippled myself hunching over my desk for days with an Xacto:
my green paint was inspired by this Nat Geo photojournalist’s accounts of an Arctic village. i’ve never seen Fiddler and opted to just go wild and tap into my own tiny reservoir of cool things i’ve seen over the years. all i know of Fiddler is that there’s Russian architecture so my mind went, what do I know that’s Russian? AH, yes. Evgenia. Look at how stunning:
T_T i think the color palette is a bit moody for something like Fiddler, but again, wasn’t really paying too much attention to the actual content lol. not for this one.
this is how my portal turned out:
it’s not my favorite thing i’ve done. painting is not my strong suit and in hindsight i would have neutralized the buildings a lot more (thinking more gray tones) so that the sky could pop. i think it could’ve only really been one or the other, but i realized that too late. i also wanted to take some white Pebeo and mix it with glitter to top off a lot of my buildings for that snowy effect. but i didn’t have white Pebeo and ran out of time to get it. i’m considering still doing it though, even with the project being technically over, just cuz i want to hang it up as something i’m proud of. i also finished it with this glossy spray like the glaze you paint onto ceramic pieces but i don’t know if it was the right effect. i also feel like i overdosed on the color green which is a shame cuz it was my favorite color and now i feel like i can’t even look at it >.<
learned a lot though. wish i could do it again minus all the cutting.
here are some other cool takes by my classmates!!
Nighttime Fiddler (look at the shadows on the wood T_T)
i feel like i’m learning everything by looking at other people’s work
