I Missed the Story Because I Was Looking at the Paint

What it means to build worlds for a living—and why I couldn’t stop seeing the seams.

There’s a moment when you realize you’re not experiencing something the way everyone else is.

I had that moment walking through Meow Wolf Santa Fe.

People around me were opening drawers, reading clues, following threads of a story unfolding room by room. They were in it—moving through the narrative, letting it carry them forward.

And I was… staring at a wall. Not because I couldn’t read the writing on it. Because I couldn’t stop seeing how it was made.

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It’s a weird thing to work in an industry where your job is to make things feel and look real—knowing full well they aren’t. Sometimes even the people.

As a scenic artist, and most recently the charge scenic on The Chair, my entire job is illusion. I paint wood that isn’t wood. Concrete that isn’t concrete. Age things that were built yesterday. I create surfaces that hold history they never lived.

If I do my job right, no one notices. They just believe. As they should.

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January in Pittsburgh is not forgiving.

It was cold in that way that settles into your bones and stays there, even after you’ve stood beside a propane heater and been in a warming tent most of the day. We were working long days, moving fast, building an entire world on a schedule that didn’t care how tired you were. It never does.

I was in charge of the paint department. Which sounds straightforward until you realize what that actually means.

Everything you see on camera—every wall, every surface, every aged detail, every prop that needed to match the environment—it all runs through you. You’re managing a crew, solving problems in real time, sourcing materials, adjusting colors under different lighting, and making sure that what looks good in person also reads correctly through a lens.

And you’re doing it while the clock is always running. It’s a lot of pressure but not enough to keep you warm in January.

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There’s a moment on every project where it hits you: This will all be gone. Not metaphorically. Literally.

The walls come down. The sets get repurposed or trashed. The work you poured yourself into disappears, leaving behind only what the camera captured.

And you try to make peace with that. Because that’s the job.