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How many of you are on Pinterest?
If you are a visual person, you sure can fall down a rabbit hole on there and before you know it, hours have passed! However, beyond the idle amusement of surfing through, say, hundreds of pix of cool Airstream campers or delicious-l;ooking birthday cakes, Pinterest is fast becoming an invaluable tool for the kinds of visual communication and image organization that we engage in a lot in the theatre.
For example, I'm designing our holiday show this coming season at PlayMakers, It's a Wonderful Life - The Radio Play. Our creative team on this project, as is often the case in professional regional theatre, is geographically far-flung--our director and lighting designer are based in NYC, while our set designer, sound designer, and myself are all local artists. We vitally need to be able not just to communicate with words--emails, phone calls, skype, etc--but with imagery, and Pinterest is one way I've found effective to do that.
I began with two boards: a General Research Board and a Color Palette Board. Everything i found that might remotely be relevant, i pinned to general research. The play takes place on Christmas Eve, 1946, so I pinned everything from magazine covers from that winter, random people's Christmas snapshots, stills from the Frank Capra film, holiday cards and swag of the period, fashion photography, you name it. And, when I began thinking about color, I sorted color-specific references into that board--what popular colors were for that holiday season, color-printed lobby cards for Christmas movies made in the late 1940s, color catalogue pages and fabric swatch books and so forth. In this way, our team members could load those boards from anywhere in the world and see right up to the minute what images I'd been considering as design inspiration.
After our initial meeting among the entire creative team, I then began to set up new boards for each specific character, like this board for Lana Sherwood, a Hollywood bombshell who voices "Violet Bick" in the radio-play-within-a-play.
I also created boards with relevant information for the costume shop, like Hair and Makeup Research, Print and Texture Research, and everyone's favorite, Underpinning Research. It's fantastic how easy this makes communicating about the show with the dozens of people who need access to image collections like these at any given moment.
I'm using Pinterest to augment my classes as well. This semester I'm teaching graduate level millinery, as well as leading an independent study in advanced millinery for a particularly skilled student. I've made a Millinery board onto which i can pin any number of fantastic hats and headdresses for students' possible project inspiration.
What sorts of methods do you use for visual communication online?
If you are a visual person, you sure can fall down a rabbit hole on there and before you know it, hours have passed! However, beyond the idle amusement of surfing through, say, hundreds of pix of cool Airstream campers or delicious-l;ooking birthday cakes, Pinterest is fast becoming an invaluable tool for the kinds of visual communication and image organization that we engage in a lot in the theatre.
For example, I'm designing our holiday show this coming season at PlayMakers, It's a Wonderful Life - The Radio Play. Our creative team on this project, as is often the case in professional regional theatre, is geographically far-flung--our director and lighting designer are based in NYC, while our set designer, sound designer, and myself are all local artists. We vitally need to be able not just to communicate with words--emails, phone calls, skype, etc--but with imagery, and Pinterest is one way I've found effective to do that.
I began with two boards: a General Research Board and a Color Palette Board. Everything i found that might remotely be relevant, i pinned to general research. The play takes place on Christmas Eve, 1946, so I pinned everything from magazine covers from that winter, random people's Christmas snapshots, stills from the Frank Capra film, holiday cards and swag of the period, fashion photography, you name it. And, when I began thinking about color, I sorted color-specific references into that board--what popular colors were for that holiday season, color-printed lobby cards for Christmas movies made in the late 1940s, color catalogue pages and fabric swatch books and so forth. In this way, our team members could load those boards from anywhere in the world and see right up to the minute what images I'd been considering as design inspiration.
After our initial meeting among the entire creative team, I then began to set up new boards for each specific character, like this board for Lana Sherwood, a Hollywood bombshell who voices "Violet Bick" in the radio-play-within-a-play.
I also created boards with relevant information for the costume shop, like Hair and Makeup Research, Print and Texture Research, and everyone's favorite, Underpinning Research. It's fantastic how easy this makes communicating about the show with the dozens of people who need access to image collections like these at any given moment.
I'm using Pinterest to augment my classes as well. This semester I'm teaching graduate level millinery, as well as leading an independent study in advanced millinery for a particularly skilled student. I've made a Millinery board onto which i can pin any number of fantastic hats and headdresses for students' possible project inspiration.
What sorts of methods do you use for visual communication online?
