Cassandra Phillips: Scenic Artist
 
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This week, The Unfortunates goes into tech rehearsal.   The drops, scrims  and rear projection screens are hung, the bird is lit, the final rust has been added to the metal and char added to the wooden floor.  As we finish touching it up, Thayne and I head out the the warehouse to begin work on an enormous and highly detailed plexiglass window.   

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This awesome version of A Streetcar Named Desire is designed by our very own Associate Artistic Director, Christopher Acebo.  The set has an ultimately masculine feel, employing harsh angles and lighting effects, black rubber mats and expanded steel mesh. The featured element is a giant ornate window.  

The finished window will be 40' by 17' and is made up of ten individual panels connected together to create a huge window running from the top of the Kowalski's residence to the top of the procenium. The window will be decorated with the ornate design pictured right.  It provides partial privacy and partial translucency to the upstairs neighbors' residence as well as alludes to the high density of other people's homes and windows.  

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In order to achieve this effect, we used a video projector and laptop to project each panel's design on the plexiglass and trace the design on the paper covers with permanent markers. 



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Tracing the projection on the paper.  

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Next we cut out the designs with exacto knives.

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Leaving the negative space attached to the plexi, we can use it as a masking frisket.  

Next week, we will spray the windows with pneumatic sprayers.  When we are done, we'll remove the rest of the paper, leaving the painted design.  


Check back next week to see the completed window!


 
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The return of Thayne! 

This week, we continued the painting of our architectural "double" translucency.  I'm still calling it a double, because the audience will see two different things when lit two different ways, even though all of the painting was done on the front.  I developed this "front only" painting technique to save us the time it would take to flip the drop and starch multiple times.  




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In our last episode, we left our characters after stage one, where they put the translucent black and opaque black layers down on the drop.  This week, we had to go back over the entire thing to paint in our opaque whites.  Remember that anything that was going opaque white had to be painted opaque black first.  Finally, this drop is starting to look like the elevation.  

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The final stage of this drop was to age and contour the white.  It was very mind-boggling to keep in mind that anything that read as grey on the rendering had to be painted out opaque black, then opaque white, then grey last and on top, whereas anything reading as red on the elevation would be painted translucent black.  We really had to use our imaginations on this one and had to paint from TWO elevations simultaneously instead of just one.   Usually a scenic artist is asked to paint a the drop to look like the picture.  In this case, we needed to imagine what the drop WILL look like.  



In this video, you can see how we used a kitchen broom and some garden sprayers to create a drippy look to bring this drop together.  
The slideshow at right shows our drop hung in the space along with some shots showing how it interacts with the scrims we painted earlier.  It's been very exciting to see our work coming together.   

 We completed this doosy from layout to pickup in 10 days with only three scenics per day.  

 We rocked. it. out.  Nice work, guys!
 
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The final and the most labor intensive layer to the back wall of the Unfortunates set is a full-stage translucent drop.   The fun part is that it is slightly more complicated than a traditional translucency.



The drop will be lit from the front with white light and lit from behind with red light.  When lit from the front, the picture needs to be in greyscale and when lit from behind with the red light, only some parts are red, while others need to stay in greyscale.  This means that there need to be both translucent and opaque parts to the drop that transition softly into each other.  On top of all that, it is a very architectural piece- lots of windows, doors, chair rail, et cetera.  What an adventure!

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In this picture of Scenic Designer Sibyl Wickersheimer's elevations, we see how the drop will appear when lit from behind and in front, respectively, and we see how in the red elevation, some parts need to remain opaque white.  

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Measuring 65 by 17 feet, this drop took four people and two days to starch both sides and an extra day to cartoon.  


Right, our intern, Erin Young, does some scenic math to divide these windows perfectly.  

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The next step was to paint the entire drop in translucent greyscale.  
As you can see in this picture, we had to paint from the rendering showing us wich parts would be translucent, and thus showing up as red when lit from behind.  On top of that, in order to make the white step as opaque as it needs to be in the next step, everything that is going opaque white needed to go opaque black first. SO.... So what we are doing is painting everything we see as red on the rendering as variances in the black's translucency, and everything we see as white we are painting straight black.

Confused yet?

So far  we have completed the translucent layer.  Next week we will put the opaque white layer on top to complete the drop- more pictures to come!

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I'm really proud of how far we've gotten in only a few days.  It's a real testament to the industriousness of our crew.  Good work, scenic artists Amanda Haverick and  Kira Nehmer and intern Erin Young!

 
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This week has been full of fulfillment as we check pieces of Unfortunates off of our to do list.  'Manders, Erin and Kira finish the burn/singe  treatment to the edge of the elevator platform.  Next, the tile will be sealed with satin and a flat will be blocked on to give a worn and uneven finish.  



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Meanwhile, Pat finishes up the plaster beams for the bar

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...and Gabriel finishes the 
King Jesse's Kingdom signs.  

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Out at the warehouse, Kira and I faux stain the wood planked floor.  

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...and add some charring effects around the trap holes.  These holes are where the elevator platforms are and will be covered with the tiles.  



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It has been really exciting to watch the carpenters stretch the scrims we painted on the hard scenery it will be attached to for the show.


Nice to get a little taste of what the show will look like!

 
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The youngest of our three theatres, what we call "The New Theatre," (left) opened 10 years ago and has waited as long to get a name.  But, thanks to a generous $4.5 million donation near the end of last season by a group of big-money contributors, it will soon be known as the "Thomas Theatre." 



Marty Hughley of the Oregonian writes:

"A decade ago, Jo Lynn Allen, co-founder and president of the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation, opted not to name the theater, even though the foundation had been the lead donor behind construction of the facility.

The group includes the Goatie Foundation, Roberta and David Elliott, and Helen and Peter Bing. According to an OSF press release, it was someone from the Goatie Foundation who sought out the other donors in order to be able to name the theater after Peter D. Thomas, who worked at the festival for decades, and served as development director from 1997 until his death in 2010.

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The money donated will be used for the OSF artistic opportunity fund (a pool of money established through donations in 2009, intended to supplement the regular artistic budget) and for the planned renovation of the festival’s current First Street production building into a rehearsal space.

The latter project --  to be named the Hay Patton Rehearsal Center, after longtime designer Richard Hay and former executive director William Patton -- is contingent on the finding of a new home for the production departments."   
The Oregonian

This donation has been exciting news to us in the production department.  It means a brand new production building, designed and built just for us.  Our recently retired Executive Director, Paul Nicholson, has made it his goal to head up the fundraising and overseeing of this project before fully retiring.  

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Our property has been purchased, and blueprints have been passed around, edited and approved, and in this picture, you can see they are already breaking ground!  



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The site of our future home as viewed from the West.  



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Mr. Nicholson has continued to keep us in the loop sending us pictures like these and happy progress reports.  

We are so lucky to have this opportunity and I can't explain our excitement and anticipation.  Speaking for the paint department alone, we will more than quadruple the space of our current shop, we will have a paint frame, a huge mixing area, two sinks, and more!   

I can't wait to walk into that brand new clean shop- AND GET PAINT EVERYWHERE!!!


Cassandra Phillips: Scenic Artist