Kinky Boots is the exhilarating new musical from Grammy® Award-winner Cyndi Lauper and four-time Tony Award® winner Harvey Fierstein. The production has won 6 Tony Awards® including Best Musical.

 

The Broadway production is about a young man named Charlie Price who takes over as owner of his fathers shoe factory, after decreasing sales, he decides to turn it into a boot factory. The project took about 6 weeks from design to render.

 

The set comprises of 2 elements, one is the false facade of the factory which serves as a "curtain" to hide the set from the audience at intermission etc. This outer facade breaks away into both right and left stage wings to reveal the factory set in the middle. This section is quite dingy in appearance and is the centre piece of the whole set, this is where the majority of the performance takes place. I particularly like the lighting of the set and mainly chose dark colours such as Navy (#000080 ), Orange (#CC8400), Cobalt Blue (#3D59AB) and Purple (#800080). This worked very well with the already dingy look and makes the render really stand out. 

 

The set is formed from brick and cast iron, you can see the iron trusses throughout the factory set and gives the whole look of the set somewhat of an aged and dingy look, adding to the theatrical look.

 

I chose SketchUp for this project as it enables me to pre-visualize how the finished set would look and allows me to interact and modify items quickly and in the most efficient way possible. I used scenes to create a video sequences so that I could export them as a video. Using SketchUp also has the benefit of high quality rendering software so this lets me add lighting effects and materials to the finished render to "set the mood" of the set.

 

What I like about this set is how the set actually works, it splits in the middle and flies away to right and left wings to reveal the factory set in the middle.