Scenic Design Internship: Williamstown Theatre Festival
In Summer 2017 I was lucky enough to be offered an internship with the Williamstown Theatre Festival in Williamstown, MA. This is the only summer theatre company to have a Tony award and their productions often transfer to Broadway and Off-Broadway. I’ve applied for this internship twice before, but this summer I was ready to go. The opportunity to work here was an excellent opportunity for me to gain experience working in a real design studio, and I made many NYC-based connections which will come in handy once I graduate and move to New York City. During the summer-long duration of my internship I was one of three interns at the studio, along witht here assistant scenic designers and one design supervisor. I thoroughly enjoyed living in the Berkshires region, and the relative proximity to Boston and New York City gave me opportunities to visit both of these cities.
As a scenic design intern, my duties at the Studio started off with a brief “boot camp” model-making workshop. The assistants generally ran my day-to-day tasks, but a few weeks into the summer they discovered everyone’s strengths and weaknesses and started assigning me tasks consistent with my skill levels in different areas. I had great opportunities to assist in drafting for some of the Mainstage shows, as well as helping make scale models of the sets for two of them and undertaking a large rendering project for one. It was really interesting for me to see how the seven designers for the seven Mainstage shows worked, and to what degree their work was completed upon my arrival for the summer. Some of the shows were in the finishing stages of design when I arrived, and some were still in the rough phases.
I took this internship to learn about being a good designer as well as a good design assistant, and I learned more than I ever anticipated. I thought I was a decent model maker when I arrived in Williamstown, but I learned so many new standards and tricks from my supervisor and his assistants that took my work to a new level. I learned to have higher standards in regards to precision and accuracy when cutting out pieces and assembling them, and I got to learn about making model-scale furniture, mostly in ¼” = 1’-0” scale
When learning new things, I also learned about which areas my education has prepared me for and which areas I needed to learn more about. I wasn’t focused on precise cutting until I came to the studio, and though it was difficult at first, holding myself to the standards set by the studio trained me to be a better design assistant. As with every other industry, the entertainment industry is constantly evolving, and new technologies are allowing us to do things faster and more accurately than ever before. 3D printing and laser cutting machines are revealing themselves as the future of making extremely realistic scale models, and that’s where I want to improve. UC’s college of Design, Art, Architecture, and Planning has both 3D printers and laser cutters, and I’m making it a personal goal to learn how to use these new and interesting machines.
I’ve worked as a freelance assistant for a Cleveland-based scenic designer in my spare time for almost 3 years, in addition to the scenic design internship I completed this summer, and I thought that would prepare me for this job. When I first arrived, I was very bored with the initial training session, but the pace quickly sped up. My designer in Cleveland told me all about working in a studio, and several alumni of my program here at CCM work as design assistants in New York. But nothing they told me could have prepared me for some of the aspects of the job. For starters, we worked on not only the seven mainstage shows, but three medium-sized fellowship projects and seven small productions in the directing studio. I was lucky enough to get the opportunity to design two of these smallest shows. The opportunity to collaborate with new directors is very valuable as a young designer, because designers often get offered jobs from directors they’ve worked with before. The directors are also just starting out in their careers, and I feel that the connections I made making two tiny productions were just as valuable, if not more so, than meeting the designers I’d been indirectly doing work for all summer.
Compared to my previous internship in Chicago, I had relatively little creative freedom. Instead of being asked to draft an entire show on my own, I was now spending entire days cutting out audience silhouettes for models, doing research on cheap types of carpeting, or figuring out the placement of offstage escape stairs. The one caveat to this occurred about 4 weeks into the summer, when a designer asked for a certain image to be turned into a backdrop for his show. Nobody in the department knew how to take the image from the source website, change the colors to match a quick rendering the designer did, and recreate it in a high enough image quality to be digitally printed. I was tasked with finding other large images to substitute, but he wanted the image he found himself. I volunteered to try and repair his image, and was able to figure it out in a day. The resulting backdrop was 50 feet wide by 35 feet high, and I increased the image quality enough for printing. It felt good to exceed expectations and impress my superiors, and I held onto that feeling and that respect throughout the summer. I felt good knowing that I made a difference in the production by being part of the studio.
I can use virtually all the information I learned at the studio in my career, because this is the beginning of my career. After I graduate, I would love to work at a studio similar to this as a paid assistant. It was a great experience getting a peek at what my life could be in just a short year, and that’s why I think it’s so important to intern in the field I hope to work in. I missed the first week of classes for this internship and made a financial sacrifice, but all the knowledge and skills I acquired were valuable to my professional development and I wouldn’t trade the experience for anything.
