Designing Sets for Community Theater

Video Transcript

"On behalf of expertvillage.com, my name is Stan and I'm here to tell you about community theater and designing and building set for a production. Typically, a set for a production consists of a number of flats. They're pretty easy to make with 2x4s and masonite or something like that. Back behind me you can see a number of flats that have doors in them. The last production that we did was forest, which had 6 doors so we had to build quite a few door flats. The nice thing is we've got these doors for future productions and they're all modular. When we design sets we try to design them in these 4 foot wide modules to coincide with the dimensions of the standard flats that we have. We also like to tape the set design onto the floor. I still see some of the tape that we had down for this past set. We can picture where the walls are going to be before we actually put them in place. Even before the set is built, the actors can start to get used to the dimensions of the set. That's very, very helpful to start to get the feel of the set as soon as possible in production. Sometimes a set takes on some very unusual characteristics, and if you're fortunate enough to have talented people with resources who can do these things, you can really achieve some remarkable effects. One of the most unusual sets we've had here at Verde Valley theater was when we did the Ransom of Red Chief, which was a comedy about a young man who gets kidnapped by 2 bumbling criminals and take to a cave outside of town, so we had to have a cave for this production. Luckily, a local artist and his wife designed and built this cave for us. They made this cave out of cardboard and foam. A local foam installation company did the foam straying for us and did a wonderful job. We have a little diorama here of the production of the cave that we had out for our audience and they found it pretty fascinating to see how this thing was developed. It was ultimately painted and here we see what it looked like on stage. This I think was the only time we've had a production when the curtains open and the audience saw the set, they applauded. This set got an ovation. It really deserved it I thought. It looked like a real cave made out of real rocks and it was just a lot of fun to put that out in front of people. All the artistry on stage is not acting. There's artistry in every element of the production, the costumes, the makeup, and the set for sure."