[gentle music] ♪ You ain't know ♪ ♪ Texas women do it bigger ♪ ♪ Say it ain't so ♪ ♪ In the South it gets no realer, baby ♪ - [Narrator] What does it take to turn a vision into a kind of magic?

♪ I'm hotter than your mama, sucker boy ♪ - Take the vision and break it down into time, money, materials.

♪ And here, the show first comes to life ♪ - [Narrator] In the old days, many theater stage designers had to rely on drawing boards and even miniature replicas to give themselves an idea about what would work in real life.

But stage design today has become so complicated, and with so many moving parts, that doing it with pencil and paper doesn't work anymore.

So how do they do it?

They do it with a computer.

It's called computer-aided design, or CAD.

It's technical drafting software used more and more in designing sets for theater productions, including this one, "The Legend of Georgia McBride," done by PlayMakers Repertory Company at the Paul Green Theatre in Chapel Hill.

[upbeat music] - Months ahead of time, directors, designers, choreographers, whoever, are having meetings with each other about the concept, what they want it to look like, what they want the vibe to be.

[drill whirring] - [Narrator] So a vision wrapped up in a vibe, rolled into a plan.

- It takes a complicated thing and it gives you a toolbox to accomplish it more easily.

I can render an object in three dimensional space instead of having to carve a real model of it to figure out how it works.

I can move pieces against each other, I can lay things out and make sure they fit, instead of going, "I think that'll work, "we'll take some measurements and then build the thing "and then cross our fingers "and hope we don't have to cut it apart."

[upbeat music] Blues, I have that big window seat.

- The bench, yeah.

People want their stuff.

The want and desire for stuff to accompany stories goes all the way back.

It goes to the coliseum, it goes to Epidaurus.

- Oh my god!

- [Narrator] McKay Coble's career spans Broadway productions like "Dream Girls," to major motion pictures like "Ghostbusters."

She says back then, all they had to use was a pencil and a prayer to pull off complicated shows.

She says CAD turn that all around.

- Now, if I wanna put 15 tons of water on stage, we can do the stress and structure, we can do the math, we can do the physics, we can do the chemistry.

My definition of theater magic is we're all sitting in this arena, I see you, you're unwrapping a candy, someone over here is sneezing, whatever, we are very aware we're in a human community, but what's happening on stage transforms as it takes us to a place.

♪ I'm a whole lot of woman ♪ ♪ Anything I see, I want, I get ♪ ♪ I'm a strong ♪ - We need to move higher and about six inches off stage.

At different points in the process, we have different types of drawings.

Sometimes they're build drawings, so I'm looking at a piece of paper saying, "You're gonna take this two-by-four "and attach it to this piece of one-by."

[nail gun popping] Sometimes we're in load-in where we're actually taking the scenery and putting it in, and we have, you know, sort of maps of where things go, or I might have a printout of the grid and say, "Hey according to this, you need to be over here," and they go, "Oh, okay," and then they take that information and they carry it on.

So instead of me or carpenters or welders remembering all the details, it's all drawn out, it has typed notes, it has drawings, it has renderings.

- Now I can click with my computer, make extremely accurate drawings.

I can flip it around, which is enormous effort when you're doing orthographic projection or isometric drawings and you're just doing it with a pencil.

But AutoCAD allows us to really get into the detail in a way we never could before.

[upbeat dance music] - It is science, it is engineering, it is structural analysis, it's art, it's hands-on.

It's the place where you can get your hands on everything and you can kind of guide yourself through where you land in what your real love is.

♪ Take me down like I'm a domino ♪ [confetti popping] [crowd cheering]