End of Year Smore
By: Cole Crawford
Set Design
- Set designers use hard work, creativity, and their best collaborative skills in order to help realize a plays' vision.
- Scenery is often the first thing that shows the audience something about the time, the setting, and even the purpose of the play.
- The scenic designer helps the audience understand and enjoy a play or musical by providing a visual reinforcement to the production concept.
- The director, set designer, and technical director study the play to determine the style, atmosphere, and color they want to create.
- A production concept is the director's vision or understanding of a play. It keeps all the creative and technical aspects of a production moving in a common direction.
Elements and Principles of Design
- The elements of design are the tools used to make art.
- Form is a three dimensional, geometric (cube, sphere, cone), or organic (people, animals, tables, chairs).
- Space is the area around, within, or between images or parts of an image. It relates to perspective and positive and negative space.
- The principles of design relate to how to use the tools to make art.
- Rhythm/movement is the use of recurring elements to direct the movement of the eye through the artwork. There are five kinds of rhythm: random, regular, alternating, progressive, and flowing. The way the elements are organized to lead the eye to the focal area. Movement can be directed for example, along edges and by means of shape and color.
Lighting Design
- The primary function of a light is to illuminate the stage and allow the audience to see the production or to hide what is not to be seen.
- The lighting designer sets the mood and the tone for a scene.
- A lighting designer also directs attention, defines form, delineates area. enhances material, colorizes, indicates time of day, reveals, and conceals.
- Different lights serve different purposes.
- Gobos are metal disks with patterns. It is inserted into an ERS to create a shadow pattern of light.
Sound Design
- Real sounds are hard to capture, record, and insert into film.
- Sound designers must find materials and experiment with differing physical and technological aspects in order to make a specific sound.
- A mixer mixes the input of a bunch of sources to be able to control them all.
- A monitor puts sound out backstage.
- The music and sound effects in a film coincide with the scenery and the plot or specific scene of the play in order to reinforce the mood or theme.
Makeup and Costume Design
- Costume and makeup have to relate to many aspects of a production. This is why there are differing genres such as fictional, fantasy, fairy tales etc.
- Different fabrics can create different textures, thus altering the appearance of a character.
- Colors influence the theme or mood. Thus by making a character wear a certain color it can serve as a purpose relating to symbolism.
- Costume and makeup is one of the first thing the audience notices about a character.
- There are people whose job is to specifically focus on the facets of costume design, and make sure the clothing is historically accurate and relates to the time and place.