Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/629850
P E R S P E C T I V E | M A R C H / A P R I L 2 0 1 6 5 editorial DRAMATIC IMAGINATION by Michael Baugh, Editor Entertainment industry designers need a lot of skills, from architecture and engineering to effective communication and building relationships. Some of us even pursue advanced degrees or foreign study, and practice drawing and photography throughout our lives. A good immersive artist must be more than a Renaissance man or woman. He or she must have a thousand different skills—to a greater or lesser degree—and must be prepared to confront completely new and unique challenges every day. The most important skill that every good designer must acquire, however, can never be taught, although practice can hone and strengthen it. It is imagination. That is what we as visual artists bring to an entertainment project, more than experience or talent, more than drawing or drafting or building models. We are—to a person—hired for our imagination, to see in our mind's eye what no other person on a production has yet seen: the world in which the action plays out, the colors, textures and form of the places and things that will serve the narrative and bring the screenplay to life, that turn imagination into art. This issue of PERSPECTIVE talks about dramatic imagination throughout its pages. Most obvious is the discussion of the seminal work on this skill, Robert Edmond Jones' book called The Dramatic Imagination (see In Print on page 58). In language both poetic and practical, one of the finest design talents of the twentieth century reveals how everyone working on a play (or film), from actors and directors to electricians and grips, needs to think like a designer and let their imagination loose, directed only by the twists of the story. No matter how mundane or technical the task, it is underlain and driven by poetry, and that is the reason we are all in thrall to the magic of this life. See more about Mr. Jones, too, in Reshoots on page 64. The great John DeCuir shares some wisdom with us, twenty-five years after his death, as he describes letting his dramatic imagination run free—in spite of contrary advice from his mentors—during his early days at Universal. If the precocious Junior Illustrator had listened to his "wiser" colleagues, Marlene Dietrich might never have asked to "See what he boys in the backroom will have," and audiences throughout the world would be poorer for it. Stephen Marsh, safely retired and "downsized" in North Carolina, reads some scripts for a series that pique his dramatic imagination, and the next thing he knows he's in Virginia, exploring techniques in nineteenth century medicine and reliving the American Civil War, creating sets and environments that reveal truths about race and slavery and death. Israeli Production Designer Arad Sawat sees in his imagination a dramatic truth that is more honest than reality when he selects a German orphanage to stand in for the streets and buildings of Mandate-era Jerusalem. The secrets beneath the surface of people the world over are similar, and Mr. Sawat's dramatic imagination turns this unlikely choice of location into a perfect—and dazzlingly truthful—set. In his chapter addressed "To a young stage designer," Robert Edmond Jones shares a key element of his vision: "Truth in theatre, as the masters of the theatre have always known, stands above and beyond mere accuracy to fact…Unless life is turned into art on the stage, it stops being alive and goes dead."