Theatre Design & Technology - Fall 2008 - 16

of illness and hospitals. "Procedure rooms are portrayed in a
surreal manner. Our hospital is very cold and stark. It looks
like the opposite of what you would want in a hospital. Patients
are not people to Dr House, but are pieces in a puzzle. We
remind you that you're scared of dying, and the patients might
live-or not." Bob Vukasovich cited one example: when blood
transfusions or tests occur on the show, the bags are lit in a
heightened way to make the red blood almost glow. The set of
an Isolation Unit shows Hazmat suits hanging in a sealed glass
chamber with a metal grid floor. That chamber looks ominous,
with big red locks on the door. The word "Decontamination" is
clearly visible. The white suits hang in isolation as a reminder
that whatever they were exposed to is life threatening. The interior is light, while the surrounding area is in shadow to draw
our attention to probable infection and death.
Costume is a major compositional element in creating
emotional response. Clothing is a primary factor in empathy-
whether the audience likes, dislikes or does not trust a character. Marcy Froehlich, the assistant costume designer for The
Road to Perdition describes one method used in that film: "We
always consider the overall mood of the piece, often without the
audience being aware of how the visuals affect them emotionally. In order to make Paul Newman look like he was losing his
power [Costume Designer] Albert Wolsky made his suits at the
end slightly bigger so it would look like he was shrinking and
getting older. Was the audience overtly aware of this? Doubtful,
but they probably felt intuitively his loss of power, not only in
his acting, but in his slightly sagging clothes."
The other component of immersion is clarity, and recorded media faces several hurdles that live performance does
not. The first is instant recognition; characters and locations
cannot be vague, even though less screen time is devoted to
verbal back story. In many cases scripts rely on the picture supplanting a thousand words about people and places. A typical
example is the archetypal cowboy brawl on a western street.
There is little exposition, yet the audience must quickly identify
where the scene takes place, what side gunmen hidden in alleyways represent, if the town folk are innocent bystanders or
sympathizers with a certain side. Without instant clarity we have
a lot of people milling about the street.
Another aspect of clarity is hidden to the audience, and is
most noted in its absence-continuity, a crucial aspect of story
logic that glues many different shooting locations and shoot
times together. One famous example of a continuity blooper
is Dorothy's (Wizard of Oz) rising and falling pigtails in the
scene where she meets the Scarecrow. As part of usual editing practice, different takes were stitched together to create the
final scene. In this case, some of the takes were later in the day
after her hair drooped in the hot lights. (An excellent comparison of this difference is available on www.moviemistakes.com/
picture8629.) Although catching minor continuity glitches is
mildly amusing, such as example does not really ruin a film.
But continuity is an absorbing full time job on a film set as
scenes are shot out of sequence. Marcy Froehlich describes the

number of duplicates used in film to establish a logical story
sequence involving characters that travel a particularly difficult
journey. "In Almost Heroes, the costume designer Durinda
Wood had at least five different versions of each actor's outfit from fresh to worn out, and In Road to Perdition Albert
Wolsky made Tom Hanks at least ten copies of his main suit
and perhaps seven more copies of his coat and hat." Each copy
represented a version from clean to more distressed for stunts
and special effects. Matching those suits when the film is shot
out of sequence is an important part of clarity.

THE FALL, "Bandits." Photo by Ged Clarke and Tarsem.

The

objective ... is to

fool the camera eye and therefore
persuade the audience this story is worthy
of total immersion.
SHOTS IN THE DARK: FOCUS AND RHYTHM
Any story requires visual shifts to maintain audience interest.
It is no accident we make fun of long activities with no visual
variations, such as watching paint dry. In live theater the audience will look back and forth and up or down as directed by
visual and verbal clues. The equivalent camera angles must be
planned in advance to create the interaction of shots that is the
heart of cinematic language, and designing for the camera requires more technical understanding than live performance.
Nicholas Hytner sums up the difference between theater
and film in an interview about directing The History Boys. He
learned cinematic language-and the importance of the close

2008

theatre

design

technology

http://www.moviemistakes.com/

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Theatre Design & Technology - Fall 2008