Description:
For this project, we were required to read Patricia Wettig’s play, F2M. The story of a transgender college student working his best to come to terms with his new life, and his loving but toxic family situation, where his parents can’t seem to grasp that he is a transgender man.
Responsibilities:
In this project, my responsibilities were to draft and plate the construction drawings for the production. As this was my final project, my ambition was at its peak. I planned to implement all of the skills I had been honing in on during the semester. Problem 4 was, in a way, going to be a culmination of all the learning opportunities I had in this class specifically throughout the semester.
Process:
I began to draft my project in 3D CAD, assuming that assembly, top views, side views, and detail drawings would be easier to demonstrate. However, making sure that everything was exactly oriented so that I could accurately achieve that, took twice as long because it was in 3D. While 3D CAD is a more complex way of making construction drawings, it isn’t exactly appropriate for every situation, nor does it become less time consuming in every situation.
Conclusion:
My 3D model for this drawing was successful. I achieved what I wanted in my model space. However, when it came to the actual plating and construction drawings, my 3D model became a heavy weight to the project. In that sense, the learning opportunity for this project, was to gauge my criteria for success with both ambition AND productivity. The challenge in this project was realizing that taking too long on modeling can easily take away time for plating, which is the most important part. That is what the shop crew sees, and failure to complete construction drawings won’t necessarily stop a production completely, but it can slow down the process.
While this project was the more incomplete project out of the four, it also provided the biggest learning opportunity. Perfectionism can jeopardize a project. Ambition is good to have, but there needs to be a reasonable ambition that contributes to the time constraints given for a production.
