We like to think about how a design evolves over the time that a story takes place to develop and that we draw these dreams and ideas into into air and into space and that it's active.

A set is not simply a static architectural construction.

It moves and breathes and evolves and transforms.

When I stepped out into the bright sunlight from the darkness of the movie house, I had only two things on my mind.

Paul Newman and a ride home.

I'm Christine Jones and I am onethird of the collective amp.

I'm Brett Panakis.

I'm a third of the collective ampsonography.

I'm Tata Nakab, another third of a mission is to give underrepresented designers an opportunity to have incorporated design experiences and to shine the spotlight on them.

The Outsiders is an American classic.

It's a classic gang film in a way between the soas and the greasers.

And it's a coming of age story about people finding family in the people around them.

A show like this has so many different desperate elements between all of the effects and costumes and the rain and the fire and the gravel and all the different elements coming together.

It takes like a a really unified approach where everyone is really on the same page about every beat, every moment.

We do a lot of research, photo research, historical research, architectural.

We talk a lot about what we're dreaming regarding lights and objects and texture and feel.

And then we work in a half scale model, a physical model and eventually integrating everything, every aspect with the synography, with the setting.

So we're really involved throughout the whole thing.

One of the really exciting things about The Outsiders is that the whole story is told through the lens of Pony Boy, this character, and we learn to discover that he is writing this story as it goes along.

So there's a way that we tried to design the show in a sense that he was conjuring it from this darkness of the theater.

Another formative moment in the process was when we realized, oh, there actually is a way that the cars can become quite emblematic.

So you have Pony boy's house is represented by one car and the soas is represented by the other car.

So you're not bringing on a kitchen or a living room.

And I think that was one of the things that we were most excited about that we're given the freedom to be in a non-naturalistic symbolic poetic world.

One of the physical touchston we would come back to a lot is the idea of the drive-in movie theater.

This sense of having this large billboard with a playground in front of it.

So we had all these requirements and really wanted to create this dirt natural floor.

And so we looked at lots of different materials like Pete moss and cork and real gravel.

And eventually we settled on a synthetic rubber which is safe for the actors to be on.

It can get wet and it has that really natural loose feel of gravel which is really the perfect product for the show.

I think as set designers it's thrilling when the set is used in a physical dynamic way in a dangerous way.

Those moments when the physical performance of the actors integrates so dynamically with the set is always particularly thrilling for a set designer.

You know, it's a collective effort and it has so many hands on the process and it's so long that it's always a little like, you know, oh, there it is.

So, it's very exciting, especially when you see that it's working.

That's, you know, evoking what you were hoping it was going to evoke.

It takes a life of its own.

We are Broadway.