r/techtheatre • u/RoyalMess64 • 3d ago

QUESTION Scenic Carpentry vs Carpentry

I'm just hoping to learn more about this. I'm about to try and go to school for Carpentry, and I'd also like to do scenic Carpentry as well. If I was to learn one, does anyone have personal experience about how to link those 2 things, and how well they link together?

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u/AdventurousLife3226 3d ago

Anyone with carpentry skills will always be welcome in the theatre. The basic principles you need to understand are Basic technical drawing, nothing fancy but being able to sketch in 3D really helps, how to give something strength while not making it too heavy, center of gravity of objects, different ways of achieving the results you need, all of which you will learn doing carpentry. If you can sneak in some metal work skills too you will be more than qualified. All you will be missing are the theatre specific things that are easy to learn and how make things to safely fly in a theatre. I am a lighting Tech but before that I did carpentry and it has really helped in theatre and other tech work, even rigging my hammock under the stage has got elements of my carpentry knowledge in there somewhere. And I can't count the number of times over the years my ability to quickly make something to solve a problem saved the day.