The Joy of Sets!
From Painted Flats to Pixels, a transition of technology over fibres.
Once upon a life time ago, if i wanted a scenic backdrop for a play, or a big fancy event, I’d call a scenic artist, and they would muster the appropriate team and they would arrive in paint covered dungarees all ready for action. The OHP would be set up, acetates ready for scribbling on and chalked up string lines prepared. The space was set and prepared for a week of getting splattered and sprayed in mood-appropriate colours. The paint of course was never confined to just the canvases as the older tools in my shed will testify even after twenty years.
On stage, you could smell the paint, the size, and feel the weight of running a flat on stage. Every brushstroke was part of the storytelling, every scenic change a Tony Hart masterpiece. I remember running 8m flats on stages and learning the cleat and line fastening of canvas flats and being part of completing the scenic vision and then watching from the wings as it came alive.
Scenic artists and carpenters toiled away, transforming flat pieces of timber and canvas into forests, cityscapes, and starry nights—sometimes all in a single weekend, often at the expense of their fingertips and sanity. It was tactile, it was hands-on, and it was beautiful, in its own tangible way.
I do have to say, however, when this creative process was going on in my workshops, I used to find the whole marking out and setting up very alarming as you watched hours tick by, budgets sucked up and at the end of the day just a load of squares on a white wall!! Watching our resident scenic artist who is in fact the photo realist artist Mike Briscoe https://mikebriscoe.co.uk/ was quite mesmerising , coming back into the workshop and seeing the creativity and the detail created by him was always a joy.
In our first workshops, I remember when I suggested to a very young and earnest theatre designer when we were building her panto for her that we could print the backdrops for the cloths on canvas and print the floor if she wanted. Her cries of alarm saying” We would lose the quality, we would lose the detail, and we would lose the design language”. If she had looked at the opportunities for speed and guaranteed quality, she may have seen options for future projects. I think the same can be said for me when I was only building LED screen surrounds instead of large sets that we dotingly created over weeks in our workshops, the end results for the show were exponentially better than before and far more dynamic for the audiences, just definitely not as artistically rewarding or financially rewarding for us as a set company.
Of course, in some parts of the industry, subsidised Theatre and Opera, budgets allowing we still paint cloths, but in the commercial theatre, legs at pantos for instance could easily be LED screens offering split second scene changing, ( a trend I believe started by the X factor).
Fast forward to the late 90’s, and the scene changed—literally. The arrival of LED screens into the corporate market at an affordable scale, revolutionized set building. There was an interim period where projection was king and that stayed until the early 2010’s as I recall. We built hundreds of large walls and the demand was such, that a specific company to corner this market IMAscreen was set up by the Harrison’s, Martin and Steve, it is now called IMA solutions and based in Burton Upon Trent, UK www.imasolutions.co.uk.
So came the digital revolution—fast, slick, and utterly rearranging the scenery. LED screens appeared like magic, and suddenly, what was once in the realm of painted artistry was a cascade of pixels, firing images directly onto huge screens that could change from a busy street to a starry sky at the push of a button. Mostly I sat in dark corners back stage listening to some drivel about how a new car was 2” bigger in the boot while predictable shots of cars whizzing by were shown on the screen but that doesn’t take away from the reality of what we were showing was still an incredible change form slide projection.
Today, the scenic background is a high-definition, pixel-perfect, an ever changeable window into another world, and I, for one, am a bit amazed as to how the change has revolutionised scenic thinking. I remember seeing the writing on the wall on motor shows in the early 2000’s when 42” screens were the largest and most cool screens on offer and then coming to site and seeing miles of boxes and seeing them reveal the awkward heavy squares being treated like new babies as they were fitted together. I vividly remember being impressed with the walls of colour being so different to projection but being less impressed with the hours of waiting while technicians climbed all over it changing panels out delaying everyone else! What a long way the product has come. Now it all arrives on dolly’s ready to click together with minimal cabling to the rear and mountable in all shapes and sizes and with most high end products starting perfectly from the case, it has certainly moved on fast.
The “scenic backdrop” no longer has to be built, painted, or hauled in. Instead, it could be pre-rendered, zoomed, manipulated, and animated in real-time.
With its ability for instant transformations, giving animation and amazing depth of field to a stage the LED screen has shifted the landscape (pun intended), but there’s still something fundamentally human about scenic design. A gorgeously painted forest has a warmth that pixels struggle to emulate. The tactile beauty of a constructed set with its textures and imperfections—reminds us of the artistry involved.
And let’s be honest: a digital mountain can be impressive, but a well-painted faux stone wall with nicks and rough edges still gives a stage character, and polly balls in your crevices you didn’t know you had for weeks after. The craft is different now, but not dead—just transformed.
The last thirty years have shown us one thing—change is inevitable, ever-shifting, and a little bit miraculous. LED screens have become the new “paint,” combining technology and artistry to create worlds that are more vivid and flexible than ever before.
But at the core of it all: the joy of creating a world, of pulling audiences into another realm—whether with brush or byte is why we do it. We’re in a golden age where old-school craftsmanship meets digital wizardry, and most of the digital wizardry is done by old-school craftsmen, and I must say, it’s an exciting world to be part of.
Here’s to the next thirty years—when perhaps our scenic backdrops will be holograms or virtual reality. Whatever the future holds, I’ll be there,(maybe not for the whole 30 years!) watching the pixels—and loving every minute of it. Having just worked on a show where cinematic worlds were beautifully created by AI under the mastery of Rich Pemberton (Remarkably) I think the whole world of stage effects and visual sumptuousness is going to thrill us even more than we thought possible, and it is in good hands. How exciting for the next adventurers in the spectacle that theatre and live events can offer!
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