Here is our first post from the Art Department. We are a full service company and I hope that we can create a full service blog. I’ve been searching the internet for blogs that relate to our industry and particularly our line of work. We design, build and construct scenery to be used in a wide variety of applications. Most of these are artificial environments, we show up in a studio or a ballroom or a converted bank and when we leave there is a bus or a bedroom, a boardroom or a little corner of the badlands, a different place than what we found. There is a special cadre of people who do this and I suppose that they don’t have very much free time to blog or to read blogs because I didn’t find a lot of related posts. There were plenty about film directors, and movie stars, a couple about the techies who create the CGI additives that go into almost every film made now, but there wasn’t much relating to the art department crews who drop in out of the sky and change the world overnight into something entirely different. Like a tour bus on stage in Greeley Square that wasn’t there the day before or the day after.
This is a very special type of person who works behind the scenes to create something out of nothing, to leave the world a much better place (or sometime a much worse place) than we found it. The crew - art dogs – scenics, stagehands, carpenters, props, decorators, art directors, designers, riggers, mechanics, flymen, model makers, Production Assistants (or slaves as they are known in the inner circle), all of us are in the art department coffee in hand, tape measure on the belt, paint on our shoes if not everywhere on our clothes. We come in and complain about the weather or the loading dock or the teamsters, we look around like tourists in times square to visualize what it will look like in a few hours where we can park our tools, make a fort to keep the other production people out of our stuff and away from our things. Then it starts the leap into the abyss, the long journey through the problems and difficulties that present themselves from all sides. 
the beginning of the station
It seems like progress comes slow and at about three o’clock in the morning you’re getting a little dim and then the thing starts to come together and take some shape and the plan that you made looks like it’s working. The lighting guys are asking you to drill holes for their cables and the painters are touching up the dirt and the grime stains on the walls. Before long the camera is getting set and the lights in the studio are going out and the director is asking you to move a wall so that he can get a better angle on a shot that nobody told you about. It’s magic, it’s a living. It’s a gang of hardheads with paintbrushes and hammers that have drug a lot of wood off trucks and made it into the Harvard Square Subway station. We are now waiting to take it down and put it back into the trucks.
The shot