Arms ached and soreness seeped into bodies as Anastasia set build volunteers worked through the day to start creating the musical set. Carrying flats to the scene shop, screwing them together, painting them, moving them outside to dry, then moving them back inside once dried.
Every little step adds a stroke to the portrait scenic artist of the production Wes Burian is thrilled to create. He explains the abundance of flats as, “These flats are going to be forming a frame around the stage. They’re basically framing the actors and the place where everything will happen.”
“We have a whole bunch of projections for the back so there’s not a lot of scenic building to be done,” he explains further. Having worked on many WHS production sets in the past, one thing about Anstasia’s set fuels his desire to create it more.
Burian’s excitement stems from the context of what the imagery of Anastasia is, “Since this is really the only design element, what I’m excited about is that it has to be a sort of a vaguely Russian type design without being obtusely Russian. We don’t want Cyrillic on it or anything, [but] we don’t want it to be so detailed that it takes away from the actors on set.”
With additional challenges of researching Russian history and art culture to create the most accurate set, Burian has the creative liberty of attempting to, “Try to figure out if there are aspects of tapestry or aspects of architectural design that we can weave into the frame.”
Jeremy Wilhelm, the performing arts coordinator, has gone through lots of trial and error creating rough drafts and 3D models of set designs.
He explains his process as, “Once you get to an idea, they become reality through interpretation,” such as the transformation of a blueprint to an actual flat. He continues,
“You look at your original design, [and] does it still meet all the requirements? If not, you either need to remodel them, or you interpret them differently when you build them and make a bunch of mental/physical notes.”
This has brought him to experiments where, “While my measurements on here [3D renderings] are 2x4s, the actual measurements of a 2×4 are 1.5” by 3.5.” I used 2” by 4” in the technical drawings which gave me some issues and I had to go back and fix them for the actual designs.”
Anyone is welcome to attend set builds and help out! Grace Cannaday, an ensemble member in Anastasia, regularly attends them, finding joy in “seeing our show come together through set builds and through rehearsals.”
When she arrives at the scene shop, “I sign in and then I basically go talk to Jeremy and I’m like ‘What can I do to help?’ and then usually I’m screwing a lot of things into boards. It’s great.”