Backstage

Experience vs Experience

So the show that shall remain nameless, but has happened before, has thrown a couple new twists at me... The design this year calls for a band of white to wrap the entire room roughly 6 feet up to almost 14 feet up... That's easy really, and I've done that before... The trick this time is they want to have control booths, and observation areas besides just the walls... So the first thought is using scrim... Scrim for those of you that don't know, is a somewhat unique mesh we use in the arts. In the case of white (or any light colored) scrim, if you light the front and not the back, you see the scrim. If you light behind the scrim, and not the front, you see right through it... Magic... But that magic works best about twenty feet and further away... Not up close and personal like a corporate meeting... But that's the road they want to travel... They even understand that it isn't going to work perfectly, and so they suggested a double layer of the stuff... This is where you can tell the corporate people from those of us that cut our teeth in theatre... Every single person that has toughed it out in a theatre scene shop has been down this road... Its an ugly road... Literally a nauseating road... One that will give you a migraine at best.... Its a little something called Moire Effect... Check out a little sample of it here... Now multiply that out to say a 40' x 20' area, and don't use something so benign as a couple circular patterns... Scrim is little rectangles, with a finer thread that cuts them on a diagonal... The scrim is never pulled evenly so the lines are straight, so the whole thing once you combine two layers will start undulating on you visually, and there isn't a damn thing you can do about it... Any little breeze (like say air conditioning), and little movement (like say breathing) will make the pattern drive you absolutely mad...

Now, you can get this using any kind of mesh in front of any kind of mesh, scrim in theatres just seems to be the worst I've run across... I don't ever do it... I don't even put insect screen in windows on stage (which works beautifully instead of glass or Plexiglas incidentally) if they are considering a scrim application... My experience is not unique... Yet somehow, a designer with 20 years more experience than I have building has specified a double layer of scrim in the control booth windows... There would certainly be no trouble with the client looking in... but since the people in the booths have to look out all the time, perhaps this isn't such a good idea... I mentioned this... I was asked to do it anyway, and we'll just have to see...

I wonder how much of a sense of humor the people paying this guy have... They're some of the people that will be stuck in the booth for entire days...

Its gonna be another long one folks...

Posted by Backstage at December 1, 2005 05:20 PM | TrackBack