Materials
About
Lots of productions need large flat areas of scenery to be covered quickly and economically. New materials like MDF and quad-wall polycarbonates help with this, while other materials like polystyrene are used for details like mouldings.
People featured in this video include:
Ken Rose, Deputy Head of Scenic Construction
Paul Evans, Head of Scenic Construction
Transcript
Ken Rose: Well, obviously, we use real timber for the flatage construction. We use plywoods; all different types of plywood, different thicknesses, different grades and we also use MDF. Increasingly we use MDF and that's ideal for the CNC machine.
Paul Evans: We still use traditional scenery materials, basically 3 x 1 timber. In the old days scenery or flatage used to be made flat whereas now we tend to make it ‘on edge', which speeds up the process quite dramatically.
It's very rare that we make canvas flats anymore, because that's not what is wanted anymore. Designers actually want it to be much more real than it was in the past. What that's led to is the use of plastics: we now use quad-wall, polycarbonate sheets which are about 7 metres by 2 metres wide. We can cover a much, much bigger area substantially quicker; you can actually make the items much, much faster, which of course saves a lot of money and gives a much better finish. It's also much lighter so it's one of those win, win, win situations.
Ken Rose: We also use a fair bit of polystyrene these days, [for example] for very large, elaborate mouldings. It's obviously very light, which is ideal for being on stage. We use Perspex; mostly we use polycarbonate, which is a fire-proof, shatter-proof perspex. We also use a product called vac-form, which can be made, as the name says, in any form and that will give you [for instance,] an imitation brick wall. Once it's painted you'd never know.
Paul Evans: When it comes to new ideas and things like that, we could be working with anything; we've worked with aircraft materials in the past ... anything, it could literally be anything.
