Digital Techniques

Digital Techniques for Theatre Designers

Sarah Lewis

Getting to grips with Photoshop This was the first time I had used Power

Point and so at first I had a difficult time with even the simplest of instructions. After a while however, I was able to get my head around the necessary procedures.

In this exercise, I learned how costume designs can be easily created in a way that specific fabrics and colours can be shown in a way perhaps a painting or a sketch could not.

Here, I simply cut and pasted ready saved fabrics, made them less opaque over the images and cut away the excess fabric.

“Oh What a Lovely War” mood board… This is the mood board I

developed using techniques after thinking about the imagery appropriate for the play

I used various techniques including overlapping, making images less opaque, changing the colour scheme and smoothing edges off.

3D Studio Max

This is my first attempt at a room environment, in the image you can see that I experimented with different lighting

I worked out how to position the spot light in an effective manner, how to change the colour of the light, and how to created shadow.

3D Studio Max - Cloning This image

demonstrates how I used the clone tool to very quickly make many identical objects.

3D Max – adding to the room I experimented a little further and

created furniture for my room – adding pictures on the walls by using the box tool to make very thin flat shapes and then inserting the image on top

I also created “an ornament” by draying a shape with the line tool and using lathe to make it 3D.

Autocad – beginning stage This was my initial attempt

at creating a shape with Autocad.

I learned how to set the length of the line of a shape and how to ensure the line you drew would head in either a vertical or horizontal direction.

Autocad - Progression At this point, I learned how to

make more complicated shapes. I used tools which enabled me

to cut across and round off corners to make variations of squares.

I also learned hot to add different layers so that I could use different colours to show the dimensions and angles of the shapes.

Floppy Disk This is the beginning of the floppy

disk I created using autocad, and finding my own way of creating the shapes using the techniques we had been shown

I found I used the tool which allowed me to quickly draw shapes and then crop unnecessary lines.