Throwback: My first endeavor into set design

Since I showed you some pictures yesterday of what I'm currently doing in "set design adventures" with my school's drama productions, I thought you might also enjoy seeing pictures of my first steps into this realm three short years ago.

My school was doing a production of  "Godspell" and my department head approached me with the idea of putting a little bit of a contemporary spin on it by setting the story in an urban environment that called into play grafitti art and black light effects. Here is a big picture of the whole stage painted with specially ordered stage paints with illumination by strategically placed black light systems.

I was tasked with conceptualizing murals that could be "read" from left-to-right to show the way the city scene started out - decaying, torn, broken, and sad...

... and then how it eventually started to be healed brick-by-brick... (words were from the songs in the musical/play)...

Until eventually Christ redeemed it with His resurrection and deliverance...

Sot hat it was eventually renewed, reborn, and resurrected itself into something bright, wonderful, and bursting with life and light.



Their was one main student artist who did only the grafitti lettering of the murals and then I worked with the rest of the student artists on the team to add other visual designs to make it appear more as if multiple street artists added their marks. We used Roscoe stage paint in fluorescent colors to achieve the most saturated color when they would be hit by the black light and we used paper support in the way of faux brick wall covering purchased from a prom decorations company (I think we ordered from Stumps).

What you see above took a little more than two solid weeks of diligent painting and was one of the biggest set designs the school had ever seen in the way of it being the most paint that had ever needed to be done. This was my first endeavor into the world of stage and set design and I think I did pretty well consider that fact. Little did I know that this would just be the first notch in my proverbial belt in this way. And little did I also know that I would fall in love with this part of my job so much that I would look forward to it ever single year after that despite how thin such an undertaking always stretches me.