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ShowbizU: Scenic Design Research- Adrian Jones

Name: ShowbizU: Scenic Design Research- Adrian Jones
Uploaded: 2014-03-06T20:01:22+00:00
Duration: 1 min 32 s
Channel: Tim Kashani
Description: In this interview excerpt, scenic designer Adrian Jones explains how he uses the internet to gather visual references for his productions. He recounts…

6 Mar 2014 · 2 min

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1:32

In this interview excerpt, scenic designer Adrian Jones explains how he uses the internet to gather visual references for his productions. He recounts learning to download images during graduate school and now routinely pulls photos from real‑estate listings, house interiors, and floor plans to capture the gritty, specific architecture needed for Harold Pinter’s The Birthday Party at the Geffen Playhouse. For a more stylized, period‑driven show like Damn Yankees, he turns to advertising archives, sports magazines, baseball cards, and other mid‑20th‑century graphics to inform a bold, colorful aesthetic. Jones emphasizes that the research approach varies by the play’s narrative needs—detail‑driven realism versus era‑evoking graphic style—and highlights the ease and richness of web‑based image sourcing in contemporary scenic design.

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I just go on the web now. I mean, well, the thing is, it's funny to imagine before the web what we did, right? I mean, when I was in graduate school, we really didn't do the web. It was there, but the idea of grabbing photos— I think I learned how to pull a photo off of a, you know, off of a computer, off of a browser, you know, halfway through graduate school. I didn't actually know how to grab it and put it on my desktop. I just thought that they were there. You couldn't touch them. I mean, it varies from play to play, you know. If it's a play like The Birthday Party, this Pinter that I'm doing at the Geffen Playhouse, then it's really about real estate, you know? And in that case, I went through real estate listings in Worthing near Bristol, England, and I just looked at houses. And what's great now is you can look at all the houses that are for sale in Worthing, and you can see floor plans, you can see pictures of people's houses that aren't— some people put houses on the market and they don't even take good pictures of their house, so you can get pictures of their houses with all the junk in their kitchen too. And it's great. I think that that's, you know, so it really depends on the show. So a show like that, you know, it's all about the detail and the grit of the space. A show like Damn Yankees is much more about a feeling, about a period, about an era, and that's kind of looking at advertising, looking at different things, pulling different images from sports magazines, from baseball cards, from, you know, the imagery becomes so strong all of a sudden the colors just pop out when you start looking at baseball cards period, for example, and the way people approach the graphics. So for something like Damn Yankees, it has a more graphic style.