Monday, September 30, 2013

"Hell week(s)"

In theater, we have an affectionate term for the week just prior to opening. We call it "hell week" because it means long hours, lots of details, and stressful times as we put everything together.  But for scenic and tech staff, hell week really begins at load-in. Our "hell week" lasts more like THREE weeks.  

Last week, I wrote about set load-in.  With everything pre-built, two reasonably full days and we had a working set that the cast could rehearse on.  Wednesday evening, with no rehearsal, I had a quiet theater to myself and I worked on details and base painted the floor. Friday, my architecture partner Gary Karasek, Patrick and I did artistic touches and painted the floor like hardwood.  

While the set load-in was pretty smooth and easy, after base painting the floor on Wednesday and then wood graining the whole thing on Friday afternoon, we were hurting...that was nearly three hours on our hands and knees.  A little taste of hell... ;)  

Friday late afternoon, we picked up lights and began hang and focus.  I decided to start in the hard places first...get that out of the way.  The hardest lights to hang and focus are always the ones that you have to get above and around the set.  Of course, the set doesn't HAVE to be there to hang and focus, but it sure helps to be able to point at the real thing instead of assuming that it will be where you expect it to be.  The trade off is you are climbing an extension ladder 20 feet in the air and nearly straight up, hanging on with one hand, leaning over the set and adjusting a light with the other.  And it is hot as "hell" at the ceiling of a theater with the lights on...

Some facilities have really nice accommodations for their lighting staff like catwalks that you can walk right out on to or at the very least built in ladders.  Once you are up there, you may have to duck and crouch, but you have a flat surface to stand on. 

Other facilities are a bit rougher...you have to hang each light from below on a ladder. That means at least one trip up and down the ladder for each instrument you hang. And if you have to stretch a cable because the receptacle is not within reach of the hang point, it can be many more trips.

For Night of the Living Dead, we used 48 instruments. It is a modest but reasonable light plot for a stage the size of ours. With all of the refocusing and adjusting, I am quite sure that we made well over 100 trips up and down the ladders Friday night and and Saturday. Now, we are REALLY starting to feel the "hell"... ;D

After everything was hung Saturday at about 7PM, we start going channel by channel, testing and discover that 8 of the 48 dimmers will not dim. They stay at full brilliance until they reach 5% and then drop out.  We tried everything we could think of. Finally, after a 14 hour day on Friday and a 12 1/2 hour day on Saturday, we decided to clean up our mess and go.  Scott recommended that I talk with Ken Zinkl to see if he had any ideas. But by the time I got home at 10:30PM (after a well-deserved beer and burger for Patrick, Melanie and myself) it was too late to call Saturday. A little bit of respite from the "hell"...

Sunday morning, I have a conversation with Ken and he doesn't like what he is hearing. Sounds like the electronic control board for the one dimmer pack has gone out. He suggested that I talk to our lighting rental company to see if they have something we can swap in. I finally return to the theater Sunday evening (I needed some downtime to rest my aching muscles) and get a hold of Mark Shilling at the rental company who really knows his shit about lighting equipment. He talked me through resetting the dimmer racks and behold...everything works! WOW! Stress relieved.  

So I spent Sunday evening building some "looks" for the stage and just taking my light plot for a test drive to see what I could do with it.  Overall, I am pretty pleased.





So, after two long weekends and a lot of sore muscles, a little stress and frustration, confusion and dismay, and ultimate success, I can say that "hell week(s)" are in full-swing for the scenic and tech staff.  

God, I love doing this!!!!  :)
R

Friday, September 27, 2013

More set load-in photos...just for fun

Just for fun, here are some load in and construction photos that my wife took as the walls were going up last Saturday.  


The walls going up. (with Patrick, Larry and Melanie)

Framing the front door and kitchen. (with Patrick, Larry and me)

Ben hands a door unit to me on to the upstairs platform.

Larry, the master-carpenter!

Patrick, framing the wall for scrim.

Zak pitching in to frame the scrim wall.

Melanie spent a chunk of Saturday diagramming where the lighting circuits were on the ceiling.

Mike Dowdy getting into the black paint!

Zak Farmer...rolling mean!

Blacking out all exposed wood.

Dowdy trying out is dying spot...

or maybe we worked him to exhaustion.
This weekend, it is time to hang and focus the lights...
R

Tuesday, September 24, 2013

Loaded in

It has been a very long three days...

On Saturday morning, my trusted crew met at the scenic shop at 8 AM and loaded the set into a 5' x 10' trailer, and the back end of two hatchback vehicles.  We left the scenic shop at 8:40 for the trip across the Mississippi River and to the theater.  The group arrived at 9:15 and we began pulling in only the things we needed to get started, knowing that there would be young able-bodied teenagers to carry the bulk of it into the theater.  

Patrick, Melanie and I set about digging existing platforms out of the New Line storage room while two other carpenters, Larry and Glenn began putting legs on platforms.  Everything on this set anchors on the stair and platforms that make the upstairs.  We had to get that piece in place and right before we could go on.  

My wife, Kathleen arrived about 10:15 with reinforcements and they proceeded to empty the trailer into the theater while we finished platform legs.  We then righted the platforms and began probably the most difficult part of the day...getting the set positioned in the right place on stage.  

Normally, I will use AutoCAD to give me a few dimensions to place key elements and this makes laying out on stage an easy task.  Also, I am used to having access to the theater for a longer period and constructing in place. So I can tape the floor and the cast can move around the tape marks for a rehearsal or so before hard elements start going up.  That way I can make adjustments before we build. Didn't have that luxury here.  

Also, I have mentioned before that this stage is a little odd to work on because it is a pie wedge, not rectangular...so what do I dimension off of. Instead, we guessed. Based on my plan drawing, the stair ended at center.
So, we chose to work off of the stair.  Turns out that the stage is actually about 5 feet wider than I thought, so we pushed the set upstage about four feet. With the pie wedge shape, the wings tightened in on the set. Also gave Scott an additional 4' of playing area out front and this turned out to be beneficial.  

It took us an hour of jockeying 6' tall platforms into place to finally decide where it was going to finally go. Once I gave the OK, platforms were tied together in minutes and we were climbing on the levels.  

Walls went up fast.  Turns out that, all of the pieces that I designed and Patrick, Melanie and I built in the shop, fit together nicely. We modified NOTHING in the field.  Walls were braced, doors were set, and plumbed to operate smoothly.  

I assigned one crew to frame the opening for the scrim and a second one to construct maskings outside the front door and window.  Larry put safety railings on the bedroom platform upstairs.

Mike Dowdy and Zak Farmer came a little after noon and donned paint brushes and blacked out structure and maskings.  

Scott came about 2 to see how we were doing, and by 2:30 we were turning lights out and locking up for the day as black paint dried.


Sunday morning, Patrick, his daughter Lydia, Melanie and I loaded our vehicles with as much furniture and props as we could fit and returned about 10 AM to finish things up.  We pre-cut the pieces to make the upstairs roof and Lydia and Melanie painted those on the floor while Patrick and I started stretching scrim. That is always a challenge...and here I designed a REAL challenge.  A sloping top wall with a corner in the middle...yea, that took some finessing to get it right.  

We applied the "crown molding" (really just 1x4's painted trim color) to create a strong, clean top line to the walls.  Then we tackled putting the roof up.  This was not an easy feat.  Melanie was on the ladder 15' in the air, wrestling her end of a 10' 2x8 rafter, while Patrick and I screwed it to the flats that formed the upstairs walls. Melanie then wired it to the lighting grid pipes...three rafters hung, then a few planks on top and the ceiling was done.  
We made the boards to "board up" the door and window, hung curtains on the window, adjusted masking legs and put furnishings in place.

We pulled out around 3:30 with the set ready to rehearse on. There are still a few things to do...paint the floor, some additional black fabric maskings behind doors, etc. And then, of course, at the end of the week Gary and I will splash it with a little magic. We need to make it look "lived in". After all, a little old lady lives here...


This was my first set for this stage and I made a couple of mistakes and learned a LOT!

Melanie and I attended rehearsal last night for the cast's first time working on set to see if there were any problems and see their reaction to our work.  Two of the doors work just fine with the blocking. The upstairs door, however, should have swung the other way or better yet, swung upstage, into the "bedroom". It gets in the way in an already tight space.  Another thing that I learned is that this is a very tall space with steep seating that rises above the stage so that the audience is looking down a bit. This is a condition that I have not designed for before. My design called for only 8' walls on the living room and kitchen.  So, once you get up a few rows, you start seeing the top of the walls and over the walls. This means that we had to clean up the tops of the flats and paint them black. It also means that you see the top of the masking flats extending behind the front door and window.  Right now, a work light shines straight down on it and it makes a strong line upstage. I am hoping that when I get stage lights on, I can avoid hitting the top edge and make it less noticeable. 

Hopefully these things are not considered too bad and I get asked back again to do another show... Maybe I am being critical, and I need to be a little critical of what I do to make sure I improve. Gary says that the average person probably won't even notice. (I hope...)

Next weekend...LIGHTS!
More pictures later (sorry for the quality of these but it was the best that I could do with my iPhone and the house and work lights aren't the best for taking photos of a set.)

Rob

Saturday, September 14, 2013

One more set update before load in...

One week out, everything is ready to go for load-in and installation starting bright and early next Saturday morning. I have assembled all of the furnishings except for two end tables.  I have been posting pics of some of them as I aquire them.

Here is the next round of things that I have gotten/made.
 
couch and rocking chair. Do these look like grandma's house or what?

shelf and bench for the little girl in the cellar

chest of drawers which is going tin the upstairs hall

the floor lamp next to the radio...right out of the 1940s. My grandma had one just like it

The next time that you hear from me, I will be posting pix from installation.  It will be fun seeing it all come together.  I sure hope that it fits on the stage. :)

Rob

Monday, September 9, 2013

Part 3...Composing the stage picture

Architecture school taught me is how to develop a floor plan and 3-D form simultaneously.  It is one of the few design skills that are applicable to scenic design. Proportion, scale and composition are all three dimensional concepts and the plan relationship between entities is equally important as how each element is shaped.

Most of the bad buildings that populate our cities are the result of coming up with a brilliant solution to the planning problems with complete disregard to the building's form or even to the character of the interior spaces that it leaves. The plan is just extruded vertically into walls and it is what it is.

Likewise, some buildings are beautiful pieces of sculpture that are grossly dysfunctional for their users. Most notable of these might be Frank Lloyd Wright's Guggenheim Museum on 5th Avenue in NYC. It is an iconic form, both inside and out. But from a curator's perspective, it is a disaster. Built as a continuous downward spiral, there is no gallery with a flat floor; all of the walls slope out at the top. The guests cannot meander through the galleries and it does not foster stopping and experiencing the art. It is all about experiencing the building. But I digress...

With a crude planning concept scratched out for Night of the Living Dead, the design evolves through a looping, reiterative process. The plan is worked to scale on the stage floor plan and then immediately looked at vertically. Individual elements of the design are shaped and moved as related to each other until the stage picture is composed. As part of the planning process, I have to consider the director and staging requirements and opportunities.

In art, there are a few compositional rules that help give an image visual dynamic. When composing a painting, an artist will usually try to identify three major elements and triangulate them on the canvas, forcing the eye to move between them, creating energy.

In addition, on stage, there are four compositional quadrants to the stage. Downstage right and upstage left are strong, powerful and positive locations. Downstages left and upstage right are weak, recessive and tense quadrants. I try to compose the scenic plan to make these areas readily playable while visually triangulating the built set.

For NOLTD, the cellar is down right, the front door and window where the zombies eventually break in is upstage left…strong, powerful and dominate positions.  The upstairs area and kitchen are less dominant playing areas and are placed downstage left and upstage right.  Then, in my staging concept, the scene where the truck catches fire and our first two characters die is way downstage left…a tension location.

Night of the Living Dead requires 3 major playing areas on three different levels. We have the main floor of the farmhouse, an upstairs and a cellar. Obviously, I cannot stack all three levels on top of each other. The set would be 30 feet tall. However, it made sense to  visually “stack" a couple of levels. The majority of the action and most of the physical movement takes place on the main floor and requires the bulk of the stage. The cellar and upstairs are used a lot less and not nearly as actively. These two levels could be stacked.  They couldn't be perfectly stacked because of height because we only have 16 feet of height on the stage, so two levels had to be staggered, with the upper level constructed upstage of the cellar. Also, stacking them would create a lighting nightmare.

I worked out the heights and then switch back to plan. How much room do we need in these locations? Making the space bigger or smaller changes the proportion of the scenic elements. I triangulated the stage picture between the cellar, the upstairs and the main floor/front door area. This created a strong, tall set on stage right, visually falling to the front door on stage left.  Then the eye crosses back right and down to the cellar.  Strong compositionally… 

In my next installment, I will discuss developing the aesthetic for the set once the stage is composed.

Rob

Tuesday, September 3, 2013

Part 2...The design process

I have developed a process for beginning a new project. First, there is script analysis...yes, I really do have to do that, however my analysis is different from the actor's or director's analysis because I am looking for different information. My job is to create the world around the characters and to do that, I have to uncover the tone of the story and somehow translate that into place. That takes time for the story to gel.

I read the script once and then put it away, sometimes for weeks if I can afford the time. (Too often, I am asked to do a show the week of auditions. It is hard to do something special when I get started that late.) Putting down the script after one reading allows the story to melt from the immediacy of the plot and characters into a feeling or impression. As stated previously, my job is creating the visual character for the show. I shouldn't be worried about the specifics of dialog except to capture any specific staging needs. The director and actors are responsible for the dialog and relating the characters to the audience. 

Many stage productions grow from books, movies or TV shows...and visa versa. If it was originally a piece of written literature, I read it. Authors must do the same work that I do. Through words, they have to not only expose their characters and interactions through dialog, but they must also immerse the reader into the world in which the characters live. Reading the book is very useful, even if the play isn't entirely true to it.

I often get asked if I saw the movie. Seeing the movie is the Cliff Notes of the story. I mean, come on...you get the abridged version of the story in two hours. Now maybe you can read the book in two hours, but for most of us, we take our time with the book and really crawl into the story. You don't do that with a movie. Plus, the movie is already a visual interpretation. So, it has the potential of tainting your understanding of the story. It can form preconceived ideas that may or may not fit with the play script. So, I avoid the movie until after I have a strong concept developed. Then I might turn to it for ideas on addressing details. Film art directors are usually great with the details.

Likewise, I do not try to see every other production that has ever been done until after I have my concept formed. Just because it has "always been staged this way" doesn't mean that it works for our stage, for our director's vision, etc.  

Usually after a week or two of mulling my first impressions, I have captured the tone or feeling. Now, let me explain that mulling isn't just sitting back and "sleeping on it." I actively think about the emotions that the characters go through. I close my eyes and try to picture the action really happening. I try to identify the feelings that I had as the story unfolded for me in the reading...the FIRST impression. After all, I am trying to create that visual first impression for the audience. Most of them get to experience it once. I have to instill in the audience the same feeling that I felt when I first read the material and then capture that feeling in a built world.

Often, during mulling is when the initial ideas start to pop out. I don't talk much about the project until I get past this point. For some shows, it takes a second reading and a little more mulling. Most of the time, this is to make sure I understand and am confident in my understanding of the story and its setting. Then I share my initial thoughts with the director and discuss them. Hard decisions aren't made yet. They are only staging ideas, visual concepts, etc.  

For Night of the Living Dead, this first conversation between Scott and I took place at the theater, when he was giving me an orientation of the organizations resources. Before he arrived, I spent about an hour in the theater just sitting and looking at the stage, congealing the feeling that I had gotten from the script...trying to envision how that might play on this stage.

I realized that Night of the Living Dead demanded a realistic set when I understood the physical relationship that the audience was going to have to the storytelling. Scott confirmed my feelings when he said he wanted it to feel claustrophobic. The audience needed to feel, not like they were in the auditorium or even onstage, but instead like they were in the living room with these six people, fighting to stay alive for one night.


By the time that we had finished talking that afternoon, I did a VERY crude free-hand plan on a ruled notepad for the basic layout of the set. We agreed on the direction and I moved to the next step...