[chippyrichards]

This is the question I have formed for my Dissertation for my Degree in technical Theatre at Drama School, if anyone has any opinions, ideas, or anyone who is in the direct business of construction, or indeed machining etc, please do leave your comments here. If any comments are quoted in my final submission I attribute my sources as I see them on Blue Room. If you are a Carpenter, Production Manager, or work in an applicable area of the industry and would be willing to fill in a more extensive questionnaire in the coming weeks, please let me know.

Thanks

[musht]

Guessing hand painted backdrops are getting rare nowadays, large format printing is getting cheaper by the minute, automation in a way.

Would guess CNC sheet cutting and milling are replacing rip snorter and Marples chisel to a large extent as well. But guessing even the most mechanised scene workshops are far from the 2 men and a multimeter factories that churn out kitchen units by the thousands,almost entirely automatically.

Mebbe next revolution is additive manufacturing 3D printing is advancing very fast.

Manpower is currently still cheaper than programming machines for short run work.

[chippyrichards]

This is the question I have formed for my Dissertation for my Degree in technical Theatre at Drama School, if anyone has any opinions, ideas, or anyone who is in the direct business of construction, or indeed machining etc, please do leave your comments here.

If any comments are quoted in my final submission I attribute my sources as I see them on Blue Room. If you are a Carpenter, Production Manager, or work in an applicable area of the industry and would be willing to fill in a more extensive questionnaire in the coming weeks, please let me know.

Thanks.

[IRW]

chippyrichards, on 13 April 2012 - 08:32 PM, said:

This is the question I have formed for my Dissertation...

You do realise you posted the same question last month? Pretty much word-for-word.

If you have more to add, why not add to the previous post and keep it in the same place?

[paulears]

Moderation: It's not a good idea to republish old posts - it does tend to agitate members. I suspect that many members consider the question to be somewhat unusual. Common sense dictating that the only answer to the poll that makes sense would be 'partially'. As a totally automated process is technically possible, but almost certainly impossible to finance. Obviously some parts can be - leaving just one answer.

Perhaps for the second attempt - you could explain what you think and talk us through the point of your research and the aim, maybe we can help. As it is - the question just doesn't flash a light for people to help. I'm sure plenty of people would chip in if you expanded a bit. I'm assuming you are interested in automating scenery construction? what I can;t work out is why you'd want automation when so much scenery construction is one-offs. Anyone with expensive CNC machinery tells you that one-off projects are not cheap - and few existing CNC machines can be totally automated - the individual processes being so different.

Tell us a bit more and see if anyone gets interested?

[ramdram]

If you have a squint through the National's website, link elsewhere on forum...you will have to do some work...this very subject is covered in one of the (many) clips. You are bound to end up learning something.

BTW, if this question was suggested by a tutor one wonders what other stuff they will come up with???

Judging from the clip(s) automation is a "good thing"; repetitive work by machine, scalable, repeatable and reliable.

[kerry davies]

In response to Paulears post I would suggest that anyone interested in automated production of anything read Kurt Vonnegut's "Player Piano", the best fiction ever written about automation.

I trained as an engineer in production and mass production and there is a very limited scope for it in theatre. Nothing scenic is meant to last for longer than the run of the show, it is not going to be rolled out so that hundreds or thousands of sets are needed and re-usable stock items are far more appropriate to rock shows than theatre.

Sub assembly might just be useful but only in limited quantities and this is already done as far as it is useful. EG kits for flats, castors, IWB's etc. but that is about it mainly because the enterprise is supposedly an artistic rather than practical one. If every set had a common basis or elements that were standardised I think it would be a very short time before directors and designers would go out of their way NOT to use them.

[paulears]

A couple of years back, I needed 40 identical loudspeaker cabinets made that could fit a specific sized cavity - a repeated alcove in an old building. My idea was to produce a cabinet that would just slot into the available space and blend in, plus need no fixing to the building fabric. I found a company in Norwich with the CNC machines, but the set up cost was too much - it would have only been economic if I needed (from memory) 180 boxes or more. In the end, the project shrunk to 22 boxes, which were cut by me on the quiet in the B&Q depot with the wall saw, and then had the clever bits cut by hand in the workshop. Isn't it just one of those fairly pointless ideas? Quite a few scenic projects designed on machine and then assembled need tweaking. I spent some time at Christmas looking a one of the QDOS false pros designs. Really clever - it had been build with inbuilt perspective, so there were hardly any right angles, but each panel aligned with the next. This one was, I think, built in South Africa and I just kept thinking if I could have drawn the plan? I could have drawn the 'image' - but if each joint was displaced from 90 degrees by an exact amount to produce the perspective - I'm not sure I could handle that. Maybe with fiddling, but not quickly. Any attempt to automate this process so it could be done by machine would have been very tricky.

However - if we ever get the new 3D printing machines to work on large items this could well change things. I know blue room member andrew r has left stage stuff behind to concentrate on this area, and when he first started, producing something like a referees whistle was the biggest thing his prototype machinbes could manage, but these printers are now doing much bigger items. Once cost effective 3D printers can be made that make set style sizes, then CAD followed by print could possibly make full automation of some set pieces possible.

[Jivemaster]

The whole idea of automation is to produce large numbers of things cheaply. However theatre is usually a very limited run of performances with no mass production needed.

Where mass produced parts are used these are usually borrowed from other industries, think Hinges Castors etc.

Most scenery designers would prefer a unique look, for which mass produced parts would be inappropriate.

[ramdram]

Not necessarily so, have a look here:

http://www.nationalt...nc-machine.html

(The construction bods were quite keen on the time savings ref repetitive "works to".)

And a lot more besides on just the scenic stuff alone.

This post has been edited by ramdram: 14 April 2012 - 09:52 AM

[mac.calder]

Have a look at the demo of the FrogMill Foam CNC machine here... for creating scenic elements, this sort of thing would be perfect for set creation...

This post has been edited by mac.calder: 14 April 2012 - 10:56 AM

[musht]

With a stiff enough mill, why stop at foam...

http://www.for3d.ru/...ge=en&coID=6555

Laser scanning is so last year, Kinect and RGBD scanning ;-)

http://reconstructme.net/

This post has been edited by musht: 14 April 2012 - 01:36 PM

[mac.calder]

musht, on 14 April 2012 - 01:20 PM, said:

With a stiff enough mill, why stop at foam...

Foam is light and can be coated to be relatively sturdy... Sounds like a dream when it comes to loading in sets.

[dbuckley]

CNC technology used to be really expensive, and difficult in that the thing needed to be programmed by hand from a drawing by pressing buttons on the machine.

Now that most drawings are CADs and the cost of CNC drops every year, and there is even decent free and open source software out there, the actual investment required to do CNC cutting and milling is dropping. One thing that isn't getting any cheaper is the cost of labour. I'd think most big shops will have at least some CNC sooner or later.

Doubt we're going to see a set completely assembled by robots though