Let’s begin with my current project:
Mary Poppins
Why Document?
Why go through the trouble of documenting what we’re doing in terms of creating the production of Mary Poppins? Because I appreciate the work of others who have done so: the YouTube videos on how to create special effects, images of sets and costumes. I’d like to give something back in gratitude to all those folks.
Objectives
To successfully design or produce anything, you need to set clear objectives.
But even before you do that, you have to understand that anything you design or set out to produce is going to be constrained by three factors: time, quality, and cost. My whole working life I’ve heard the saying: “cheap, quick or good.” Pick any two. (The third one is going to suffer.) I’m oversimplifying, but this was the starting point for my design for the sets of NBCT’s musical Mary Poppins.
The greatest constraint we were faced with in putting on this show was budget. No question about that. Could we somehow get around that? In this case, we could. Here’s how: We have George, a top-notch engineer on the team, and Cliff, who is very clever at designing and building special effects. If you’ve ever seen the movie or the stage production, you know that Mary Poppins is chock full of special effects. So, instead of money, I could invest these volunteers’ talent in making my set designs happen.
There are two sets of objectives to consider: objectives for the production, and for the individuals working on it.
The personal objective for every volunteer involved in community theater is to create something that they can be proud of. That’s their reward for what usually amounts to a lot of hard work, and considerable stress.
OK, so now we’ve established the objective of everyone involved in the production. What about the objective for the production itself? Well, this is a very personal and subjective thing. Here’s my view. You’ll see it is very different from Cameron and Disney’s objectives for the theatrical version, even given the big difference in budget: