SketchUp Powers Theatre Scenic Design - Google SketchUp Workshop: Modeling, Visualizing, and Illustrating - page 154

Tools : SketchUp Pro 7; Style Builder; LayOut; Render Plus RpTools; various
Ruby Scripts, including Move to Origin and Angular Dimension; AutoCAD;
Photoshop CS; Adobe Acrobat.
In theatrical productions, the primary client is the director. It is the task
of the scenic designer to collaborate with the director to help bring the
director's vision for the production to the stage. The director relies on the
scenic designer to create and develop visual concepts. Director Michael
Butler wished to stage the classic play, Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's
Dream , in a nontraditional way. Butler says, “Midsummer has two distinct
worlds: that of the Court with all its rules and constraints, and the forest,
which is anarchic, mischievous, erotic. I thought of the play as a gleeful
and unruly rebellion of the imagination against all those forces that tell us
what we are supposed to do. I wanted also to play with strange intersec-
tions of dream world with real world, like vines invading our hair while we
sleep. So rather than keep the two worlds separate, Kim and I wanted the
world of the Court to be taken over and transformed by the forest, much
the way it might happen in a dream where the familiar can suddenly alter
in strange ways.”
Additionally, the director and scenic designer were inspired by pop-up topics.
Butler continues “Kim has an extraordinary collection of macabre pop-up
topics from all over the world and we both loved the two-dimensional (2D)
and yet weirdly convincing effect of their transformations.”
Scenic Designer Kim A. Tolman, who often uses SketchUp in her design
work, introduced Butler to the 3D modeling software, which they used as a
collaborative tool. Kim says she likes the ability of SketchUp by which she can
quickly communicate creative ideas with the software, as well as SketchUp's
ease of editing for instant manipulation of designs.
Project Context
For A Midsummer Night's Dream , I had approximately one month to
deliver my first concept sketches. I worked in collaborative sessions with
Director Butler, inputting and manipulating our ideas in SketchUp and
exporting the images to PDF with Adobe Acrobat to generate concept color
renderings.
When designing for theatre productions, the scenic designer has a standard
set of deliverables (specified in the following list). After the design is approved
by the director, the scenic designer needs to produce the drawings and
renderings from which the technical director's team of carpenters can build
the scenery and the scenic artists can paint. The scenic designer typically has
1-3 months from the approval of the design till the delivery of all drawings
and renderings. The final deliverables are as follows:
• Setconceptcolorrenderings
• 3Dcomputermodel(orto-scalephysicalmodel)