Wednesday, March 14, 2007

STAGE DESIGN


This is too big a subject to cover in one post but I can still put up some pretty pictures. My interest in stage design comes from being blown away by the sets (or the influence of sets) in cartoons like "What's Opera, Doc?" and animated features like "Fantasia" and "Alice in Wonderland." The backdrop above is from "Guys and Dolls" (1950) but it also looks a lot like the street outside the stadium in "Baseball Bugs." Animation is full of theatrical influence.


Guys and Dolls was famous for its backdrops. Here's (above) a moody sketch of the sewer where the crap game took place. The designer made it seem immense, important and mysterious, like the interior of a cathedral.


I also like the sketches generated by theatrical costume designers. I say "sketches" because the real clothing seldom looks as good as the sketch it was derived from.


Set design went through a lot of drastic changes in the last 100 years. Here's a Russian design from the years immediately after the revolution. The chair in the middle gives us the scale. Russian modernists were incredibly inventive but their efforts came to an end almost overnight when Lenin decided that he preferred realism.


I'm not a fan of Hockney's swimming pool paintings but his stage design is interesting. Forget the simplistic vertical curtains in the design above. Look instead at the way he uses the orchestra pit as a set design element. He paints the floor white so the standing musicians in black look like sticks or spikes. In another picture (unseen) he blackens the floor so the black musicians are invisible then he puts bright red caps on them. In yet another one he underlights the musicians so they look like zombies. Nifty, huh?


9 comments:

  1. I'd like to get into theatrical stages a lot more too. It kinda relates to one of John's recent posts about reusing shots. Plays are forced to use a BG for a long time, so they seem to be very economically designed. Cool post Eddie, I like the top painting a lot!

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  3. I love the first one you put up- beautiful!!!!!

    I fixed my typo this time- Mike will never know what I almost wrote- HA!

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  4. Another great post Eddie, it's interesting how theatrical stage design relates to animation. I had never really been into theater, but my fiancée's little sister got really into it (she actually wants to be a set/costume designer for a career) and because of that I've been starting to take notice of things like this much more often. Also, I really enjoyed that Russian stage, Russian Modernists had a really great style, it's a shame that it was basically squashed like you said.

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  5. Yes, I find a lot of Hockney's paintings frankly... well, he's not so much a painter as a boistrous form manipulator... his drawings are more to the point...

    All this stuff is relevent even to those of us simply looking to paint pictures in which there are both backdrops and figures. It never hurts to look at things from a new angle; thank you for another helpful post.

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  6. Anonymous3:38 PM

    Hockney + swimming pool= yuck in my book too.

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  7. Anonymous3:40 PM

    Actually, the heyday of the avant-garde in Russia was during the NEP period, roughly the last 3-4 years of Lenin's rule, and the first year or two of Stalin's rule, when the state's grip relaxed, and there was a sharp upswing in the creativity found in the Russian arts. Eisenstein, for example, did some great stuff during this period, and the satirists Ilf and Petrov were at their peak. The gradually increasing repression from Stalin's regime, starting about 1928 (when the first of the Five Year Plans came in) and reaching a real fugue pitch with Kirov's assassination in December of '34, was what snuffed out a lot of creativity, and ushered in the deathly dull era of "Socialist Realism"

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  8. Eric: Wow! I stand corrected. What an interesting era!

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  9. Anonymous12:47 AM

    I don't have big positive vibes for Hockney either, but I don't mind him, and am repeatedly fascinated when folks take such pleasure in kicking him around, the hockney puck.

    Isn't it a bit like saying Grandma Moses sure is no Rembrandt?

    Sometimes Stage and costume design appear so Badly Drafted, I am surprised that they even make it to a finished product at all. Maybe its a psychological trick to get the final craftsmen to do the actual work.

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