Scenic Design Internship: Kevin Depinet Studio
In Summer 2016 I was lucky enough to be offered an internship with the Kevin Depinet Studio in Chicago, Illinois. Kevin Depinet is a renowned scenic designer who works in regional theatre and other areas of entertainment. He’s a fairly big name in the industry. The opportunity to work for him was amazing, and is definitely my biggest professional accomplishment to date. During the month-long duration of my internship I was one of three interns at the studio, the only one without a Master’s Degree. I lived in Chicago and took the public train to work every day. I thoroughly enjoyed city living and getting around using public transportation, which was a great experience to have, as most big theatre companies are based in or around large cities, and there’s a very large chance I’ll be living in one permanently after I graduate from CCM.
As a scenic design intern, my duties at the Studio started off with model-making for regional theatre productions, but once they discovered my aptitude for computer drafting in AutoCAD (my most marketable skill as a design assistant) I was given the opportunity to do all the drafting for a show opening at a regional theatre in Los Angeles this fall. For a scenic designer, drafting is a collection of computer drawings of what all the scenery requested for a specific show looks like, as well as where it goes in the theatre and a rough idea of what it should be made of. This is sent to the Technical Director who makes sure the scene shop builds it correctly and safely. I drafted the show based on a ground plan of the theatre that the company provided and measured the scale model we made of the show to determine what size all the walls should be. I went through numerous sessions where the designer would give me “notes,” or feedback, and I would iron out all the metaphorical wrinkles of the drafting before it was sent to the Technical Director. The final period of my internship was mostly work for a corporate project that I’m not at liberty to discuss.
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 draftsman when I arrived in Chicago, but I learned so many new standards and tricks from Kevin and his assistants that took my work to a new level. I learned a lot of tricks for model making as well. I learned how to solder, or join small pieces of metal together, when making pieces for models, which is very useful when making model pieces for scenery that is made of metal. Even just cutting out model pieces over and over improved my precision and accuracy with an exacto knife.
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 didn’t learn how to solder until I came to the studio, which was obviously an issue that resolved itself. I needed to know the names of different architectural details and styles of décor, which I was hyperaware of after referring to parts of a doorframe as “the square block-y part” several times. Luckily, I’m taking a year-long class in architectural styles this year in school, which will hopefully bring me up to speed in that area as well. 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 2 years, and I thought that would prepare me for this job. My designer in Cleveland told me all about working in a studio, and several alumni of my program here at CCM work as design assistant in New York. But nothing they told me could have prepared me for some of the aspects of the job. For starters, we work on anywhere between 6 and 10 different shows at a given time. Kevin travels a lot because we work on so many different shows, so he was only at the studio about 30% of the time. The assistants and interns communicated with him while he was gone through phone calls, but so much of our work is so time-consuming that we often only needed one phone call in the morning for a task that would last the entire workday to complete.
I was most surprised by how much creative freedom I had as an intern. On my first day, Kevin told me about how we were all designers, and how important that was to the final product of the show. I didn’t really believe him until I was the one to make a large number of decisions on the placement and layout of elements he had chosen for some of the shows. It was a really good feeling to know that he entrusted me with these decisions, and I felt good knowing that I made a difference in the production by being part of the studio.
I can use virtually all of the information I learned at the studio in my career, because this is my career. After I graduate, I would love to work at a studio just like Kevin’s as a paid assistant. It was a great experience getting a peek at what my life could be in just a few short years, 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.