My Childhood as Art

This is kind of an afterthought to my previous post about visual references.

My favorite part about working in community theatre was having to do huge musicals that required an enormous amount of props, set pieces, and costumes, but we had a budget that hardly covered half of list. Of course it would be awesome to work somewhere with an unlimited budget where you are afforded the opportunity to have the best of the best equipment, but working on small budgets forces out a new level of creativity in people. A lot of the time directors or designers would come to me with these crazy ideas. It never was a question of "Can you do this for me?"; instead, it was more of "I don't care how you do it, but this is what I want and when I want it." I was extremely intimidated by this at first, but eventually I trained myself to see things in a different light.

Figuring this all out was trial and error. I had people I could go to for help if I absolutely needed it, but everyone was busy trying to get their 'to-dos' finished. I started out on the show literally reading the props list and then looking for those items, and at the end of the show, my mindset had completely changed: I would read the list and then brainstorm on ways to create that prop out of less expensive and easier to find materials. In theatre, it is easier to get away with less-than-perfect matches than in film where everything can be seen in detail, but the idea carries over. In film, a lot can be created in creative editing & composition of shots.

Thinking creatively is not something you can really be taught. It is more of an experience. In classes on design, students are always shown the proper equipment and ways of doing things. This is incredibly important to know, but from my experience it's also important to know how to do the same things without the same resources. This 'creative thinking' isn't really even an artistic ability or a talent. Instead, it is an awareness of everything around you and an effort to look at something not for what it is, but for what it could be. For individuals like me, this becomes much more than just a necessity of a small budget or limited resources; it becomes a challenge, a puzzle, or even an art form.

I have been fascinated with light for awhile now. Working in theatre, I had a love/hate relationship with it. I often found myself in very high places dealing with very hot instruments, or tangled up in a disaster of cables someone didn't take the time to run properly. (During one show I was focusing a light in one of the booms on the sides of the theatre. It was the light on the very bottom, and I had to wiggle my way out to the light around the others. In the process of doing this and trying to avoid the other hot lights, I managed to wrap my legs and feet up in the cable around me. I had to have someone come and pull me out.) Beyond theatre, there is so much to do with light. I am a huge technology nerd, and light is one of those things that only gets more interesting as people figure out new ways to manipulate it. Sometimes though, people find new ways to manipulate old technology, and the results can be great. Maybe it's pointless, or excessive, but art doesn't always have to have a point beyond being really, really awesome.

I'm including this in my visual references for several reasons: it utilizes one of my favorite childhood toys, it's incredibly nerdy, it's incredibly whimsical, but also very thought-out, and it has unicorns and pink lions. Awesome.

If you haven't figured out what this is yet, click on the picture. I stumbled on it browsing through Gizmodo .