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labricoleuseIt's fascinating when a subject comes up in synchronicity, among several areas of media in a field.
Remember my recent post on technical flats and digital aids for costume design? I just got my most recent issue of Theatre Design and Technology, which contains a fascinating article on exactly that topic by Catherine Bradley of McGill University in Canada.
Bradley's article discusses in-depth the Digital Costume Project, for which her university was awarded a development grant. Bradley and her colleagues have come up with a range of systematic uses for incorporating computer graphic manipulation and generation techniques into the costume design and production process, and have made many of their templates and instructions available in open-source format on that linked website.
She makes a particularly good case for her methods affording greater communication--not only between a designer and the shop production staff, but in terms of aesthetic decisions that affect other areas of production as well. The renderings her process produces are more visually accurate in terms of communicating the final stage picture of a particular design on a particular performer. For example, take a look at this image, illustrating how a garment based on a period physical ideal translates onto a specific actress' body. (The image on the right has actually been superimposed onto a photograph of the performer for whom the costume was being made and scaled to her measurements.)
Bradley also has some good points identifying specific ways in which her processes save time and money, particularly for designers working in a company context from a stable of recurring performers (such as in Equity repertory companies, or academic departments casting from a finite pool of student actors).
My one criticism of the article and the project itself is that Bradley and her colleagues have yet to address vector-based drawing software as another invaluable tool--thusfar they have only investigated scanning of analog drawings, the use of graphics tablets, and manipulation of images and photos in raster-based software like Adobe Photoshop. If a designer or design student is already going to shell out the money for a current copy of Photoshop--currently listed as $299 on Adobe's educational price list--s/he might as well go ahead and purchase the entire creative suite ($449 on Adobe's educational price list), which includes their vector-based drawing program Adobe Illustrator as well as a host of other software such as Dreamweaver and InDesign. In a short time of using Illustrator professionally, s/he'd have generated an invaluable library of vector-based design elements, such as period sleeve shapes, collars, skirt silhouettes, and custom tools like notions templates (for quickly adding buttons and zippers to a rendering). This would greatly cut down the amount of time spent sketching
One argument i can imagine against these kinds of tools is the theoretical loss of a designer's signature style. However, a designer with a truly novel personal drawing style will deploy his or her visual signature within a digital paradigm just as uniquely as with paper and paint. The rendering is such a small part of the overall design process--streamlining the generation of design renderings provides her or him with that much more time to devote to other things like shopping/sourcing, research, or even other shows' responsibilities.
As a production professional, i'm fascinated with Bradley's whole theory of CAD application and can't wait to--hopefully, some day, perhaps inevitably--work with a designer who practices it.
Remember my recent post on technical flats and digital aids for costume design? I just got my most recent issue of Theatre Design and Technology, which contains a fascinating article on exactly that topic by Catherine Bradley of McGill University in Canada.
Bradley's article discusses in-depth the Digital Costume Project, for which her university was awarded a development grant. Bradley and her colleagues have come up with a range of systematic uses for incorporating computer graphic manipulation and generation techniques into the costume design and production process, and have made many of their templates and instructions available in open-source format on that linked website.
She makes a particularly good case for her methods affording greater communication--not only between a designer and the shop production staff, but in terms of aesthetic decisions that affect other areas of production as well. The renderings her process produces are more visually accurate in terms of communicating the final stage picture of a particular design on a particular performer. For example, take a look at this image, illustrating how a garment based on a period physical ideal translates onto a specific actress' body. (The image on the right has actually been superimposed onto a photograph of the performer for whom the costume was being made and scaled to her measurements.)
Bradley also has some good points identifying specific ways in which her processes save time and money, particularly for designers working in a company context from a stable of recurring performers (such as in Equity repertory companies, or academic departments casting from a finite pool of student actors).
My one criticism of the article and the project itself is that Bradley and her colleagues have yet to address vector-based drawing software as another invaluable tool--thusfar they have only investigated scanning of analog drawings, the use of graphics tablets, and manipulation of images and photos in raster-based software like Adobe Photoshop. If a designer or design student is already going to shell out the money for a current copy of Photoshop--currently listed as $299 on Adobe's educational price list--s/he might as well go ahead and purchase the entire creative suite ($449 on Adobe's educational price list), which includes their vector-based drawing program Adobe Illustrator as well as a host of other software such as Dreamweaver and InDesign. In a short time of using Illustrator professionally, s/he'd have generated an invaluable library of vector-based design elements, such as period sleeve shapes, collars, skirt silhouettes, and custom tools like notions templates (for quickly adding buttons and zippers to a rendering). This would greatly cut down the amount of time spent sketching
One argument i can imagine against these kinds of tools is the theoretical loss of a designer's signature style. However, a designer with a truly novel personal drawing style will deploy his or her visual signature within a digital paradigm just as uniquely as with paper and paint. The rendering is such a small part of the overall design process--streamlining the generation of design renderings provides her or him with that much more time to devote to other things like shopping/sourcing, research, or even other shows' responsibilities.
As a production professional, i'm fascinated with Bradley's whole theory of CAD application and can't wait to--hopefully, some day, perhaps inevitably--work with a designer who practices it.
