I finally watched Mad Men on Sunday. I know, I know, as a tragically trendy urbanist, I should’ve been all over this show. The production values are excellent, from production design to props to wardrobe, hair, make-up, lighting and cinematography. But I wasn’t. Why? You ask? Well, it is, as I say to my relentlessly [...]
Your house looks like a set! exclaimed Mark Kruger as he stepped into the foyer of our home, a Mid Century Modern designed and built by Arthur Rigolo, a renowned schools architect, as his private home in 1952. When I first walked into the double height entrance gallery, I knew this would be my home, [...]
Set Design is an assemblage of many different talents and skills. One of those required is the use of typography and calligraphy. Hats off to set and lighting designer Cris Dopher for calling attention to this blog post about type designer and calligrapher Richard Lipton. I had not heard of the publicity shy Richard Lipton, [...]
Although I saw a great many terrific things at the ETC; portfolios, Shadyside, the space and projects, I was there to lecture. If I have the schedule correctly, the ETC invites a prominent speaker to visit each week and address the students on Wednesday afternoons. The sessions are scheduled for two hours including Q&A. In [...]
Not for us, but for our client; PPI. We’ll take as much credit as possible, though. We learned recently that PPI has been cited by the Broadcast Engineering Excellence Awards for their work on new studios and control for The Transportation Security Administration division of the Department of Homeland Security. KLAD, of course, provided the [...]
This is a follow-up to yesterday’s post about Vectorworks Layers. Now as then, I’ll put most of the nitty gritty after a break. If you’re interested in Vectorworks and speak the lingo, click through. If not, scroll down, there are (we like to think) lots of other interesting things to read and comment on, especially [...]
This post is based on a currently ongoing discussion on the Vectorworks Theatre Discussion e-Mailing List. I’m going to put most everything ‘below the fold’ here as if you’re not a Vectorworks user, the rest of the post might as well be written in an Alien language. Tweet
As Set Designers, we do a lot of research. It is and has to be something that we love. Learning is good. We do research for specific projects and we do general research everyday. It makes the morning reading more interesting and positive. We look for trends and ideas. We look for the next big [...]
In these challenging economic times the cost of new sets or virtual sets can be intimidating. An alternate approach, like with one’s home, can be a simple face lift. We have done renovations for stations in good times as well as bad. Here are a few suggestions. 1. Repaint or refinish. Again, to use the [...]
Ok, I’m a nerd, and always excited about new software, especially if I’ve been playing with the new toys, ah, ahem, testing the software for many months. I am especially looking forward to discussing/illustrating; Unified 3D views Decal Textures and improved texture mapping Blur Reflectivity Shaders for more realistic rendering Dimension Constraint Management Planar Graphics [...]