Digging Up Dessa Set
Go behind the scenes! Here are some photos of Metro Theater Company’s Digging Up Dessa set process including drawings, models, construction, and painting, plus notes from Erik Kuhn about how the dinosaur was created.
Technical Director: Erik Kuhn
Scenic Designer: Lou Bird
Scenic Painter: Cristie Johnston
From Erik Kuhn, Technical Director
The dinosaur has had an interesting journey from idea to implementation. From early on in the scenic design process, there was the classic hanging skeleton, like in your typical museum and we very quickly settled on a plesiosaur, as that was one of the skeletons Mary Anning is known for discovering. Very quickly, the conversation switched into discussing how to achieve the effect – we were discussing the merits of foam versus balsa wood vs other materials. Julia Flood sent me a link to the 3D puzzles, which are made of balsa wood, so we could look at it for reference as we planned how to make our dinosaur. As we were looking at the puzzle, we realized that since the rest of the set had this skeletal, approximation of locations effect going on, we could do the same with the dinosaur so why not just recreate the puzzle, on a much larger scale?
Then it fell to me to figure out how to scale it up and finalize materials. I knew I wanted to use some plywood, particularly for the spine to give us strength and stability as it hangs, at the expense of additional weight, with foam making up the rest of pieces. I started playing around with the puzzle sheets and scale rulers and realized that at a certain scale, I could trace the pieces onto a standard piece of sheet material and get a dinosaur that would be about 9’ long – on the low-end of life-size, but certainly big enough for our needs. I gridded out my drafts with all the pieces needed (thankfully we determined our model didn’t need all 30+ rib pieces!) at the two-inch scale, drew my grid on my full-size sheets of foam and plywood, and borrowed an overhead projector from SLU to project the puzzle sheets directly onto my material. Then it was a simple matter of shifting the projector around to line up the grids and tracing the projected image. Then there was A LOT of jigsawing – even with a reduced rib count, there’s still 25 pieces!
After that, I did a two-tone base paint before our scenic artist came back in to add the purple and black ombre. Finally, I just had to pick my preferred rigging system that I’ve got set up for the Grandel grid and install it on our dinosaur.
