Brynn Olsen’s interest in set design sparked when she was young and now she is leading the crew for the upcoming production of Carrie going to be shown at Fossil Ridge High School.
She expresses how she first helped with set design by assisting her uncle since her two older cousins were involved in school theater. That experience then led to her joining Fossil Theatre’s set design her freshman year.
This year Olsen was promoted to lead.
“I started my freshman year on Rumors and then my senior year I’ve been a lead because it’s whoever was the oldest on the crew just kind of turned into the lead,” she explains.
This is Olsen’s tenth show; the first eight as part of the crew and the most recent two as the lead. Olsen explains how she began her set planning.
“I got a script, and I kind of read through and I annotated everything and I noted all the different transitions and I kind of drew sketches of what I thought it could look like.”
She shared her thoughts with Mikayla Assmus, the director of theater, and John Garner, the technical director. She then expanded them to Pinterest boards. Later on, she involved the whole design team including costumes, lights, tech, and other groups that are part of theater. Olsen explained that the design would continuously shift over time.
Students in the set crew, including Olsen, have found themselves in some challenging situations, but Olsen posed solutions.
“It was Monday. We calculated the triscuits wrong. We measured it wrong and we had to like completely scrap all the measurements we made that were like literally down to an exact millimeter, but we took the base triscuit and we measured it and we made the other measurements,” Lily Jones, a student in set crew described.
Another student described how Olsen has supported her.
“She’s always helping me to problem solve certain troubles I had in the shop. So whenever it was cutting wood she gave me advice on how to use the table saw and stuff like that and that was really helpful,” states Chloe Cropp, another student in the set crew.
Olsen talks about how she has enjoyed every show that she had worked on because they were all quite different from each other.
“I was really proud of Alice (by Heart), because that one we had to figure out how to like, put together and be able to take it down and build it back up.”
Her knowledge has expanded with every show. For example, Olsen learned how to design a pulley system used with the trees in Into the Woods to make branches fall, how to build bases for set design like platforms, Triscuits, window flats, stud walls, spinning platforms and more.
The students agree she has leadership skills and takes feedback well. Niamh McGrath, who is also a part of set crew, expresses how she feels about Olsen since knowing her from sixth grade.
“She’s so unique and funny and caring and stuff and I think that that definitely reflected on me whenever I was a kid,” says Naimh McGrath.
Olsen explains that she will be going to University of Colorado Boulder, and would like to continue set design in her free time if she can.
“I would love to explore engineering but I think I’ll end up in environmental science and technical theatre because of Fossil Theatre and my experience.”
