Helfaer Theatre Scene Shop

     As a technical theatre student, I work in the scene shop at the theatre. It is a great job but it is a lot of hard work. The scene shop is in charge of building the sets for each and every theatre production. We construct, paint, mend, build, and find scenery. As a scenic emphasis, I am learning more and more about how to do things correctly in order to get the job done correct. Being a junior, I get a lot of authority in the shop. My boss, the technical director, puts a lot of trust in me to make progress while he is away.
     As we are currently working on Holy Days, it has been exciting to have designed the show and now I am building it. There are five main scenic elements in this show. They include: the kitchen of a house, a 25’x85’ back drop, a floor that looks like dry cracked earth with a lot of dirt on it, and two mounds of sand made out of foam. The design concept for this play was to make it look like a sepia photograph. That was done through the paint and texture. We also wanted to make our theatre space look very expansive. The expanse is show through a large backdrop that I, along with my scenic team, took the first week of our Holy Day build, to paint and perfect it. That was a challenge due to the fact that we do not have any space to our availability with the span of 25’x85’. We had to paint the drop in three parts. The house was made to look like a skeleton of a house. With a lot of time and research, we found old time photos of houses and recreated that look with a slightly fractured view. The family in the play was falling a part and the house shows that. The slated walls were built with 1x6. The mounds were very tricky. It took us a while to figure out how we were going to construct these. We decided to buy sheets of foam, glue them together, and carve them with hand saws and distressing tools in order to give them an organic yet realistic shape. We then painted them to look like sand. The ground was fun to recreate. we took pieces of flat material called homasote, drew cracked looking lines on them, then took a jigsaw to them in order to create the cracks. We then painted them to give them an earthy feel. What made the ground get its finished look was adding man made dirt to it. We threw different materials together to give us the right look, crunch and shape.
     It is just as exciting to build the set as it is to design it. They are two totally different jobs and they are both exciting. There are still some tweaks that we are adding to the show, but once it opens, it will be a success. The process of a theatre production is extremely rewarding.