TPA3064C is the first course in scenic design — deciding what the physical world of a production looks like, and producing the drawings and models a scene shop builds from.
Florida's statewide description is unusually specific for this prefix, and it is worth reading closely: "classroom and laboratory study of the principles of modern scene design for the theatre… an introduction to the elements of design with a focus on conceptualization and problem solving. Students are also introduced to the professional design process used to create scenic designs for theatre productions. Students produce research and perspective and technical drawings used to communicate information to both the design team and the scene shop. Students also produce scale models of their designs."
⚠ Note what that description commits to. It names four distinct deliverables — research, perspective drawing, technical drawing and a physical model — and it names two audiences for them: the design team (director, lighting designer, costume designer) and the scene shop (the people who will actually build it). Those two audiences need different documents, and learning to produce both is most of what this course is.
UWF's description of its own scene design I puts the conceptual half well: "Scene design is a complex combination of artist, painter, sculptor, actor, and director. Designers need to be able to envision the script and translate it to a three dimensional space, interpret how the actor is going to move in the space and how the director will compose the stage picture."
⚠⚠ Exactly one Florida public institution carries this identifier: Florida Atlantic University, at three credits. But scene design I exists under three different Florida numbers, and that fragmentation is the single most useful thing this guide can tell a transferring student — see Special Information.
This is the most important practical fact on the page.
| Number | Statewide title | Carried by | Its own title there |
|---|---|---|---|
TPA3064C | Scenic Design 1 | FAU — this course | Scenic Design 1 |
TPA3064 (no C) | Scenic Design 1 | UWF | Scene Design I |
TPA3060 | Scene Design | FIU, UF | Scenic Design I / Scenic Design |
⚠⚠ Four institutions, three numbers, and no two of them agree on both the number and the title. The institutions are aware of it — UWF writes the prerequisite for its second scene design course as "TPA 3060 OR TPA 3064", deliberately accepting either family.
What to do about it. ⚠ Never assume a number match or a number mismatch settles anything. Take the syllabus and, above all, the portfolio to the receiving department. In a design discipline, placement is made on work, and that works in a transferring student's favour.
C suffix here is earned, and the hours are the reasonIn much of this project's experience a C suffix in the inventory turns out to be a filing artefact. ⚠ Not here. Florida's own statewide description opens with the words "classroom and laboratory study" and ends by requiring scale models — physical objects, cut and glued by hand at a bench.
So the 60 contact hours recorded here are the right figure and they describe real scheduled studio time, against the 45 a three-credit lecture would carry. ⚠ And expect the true commitment to exceed even that. Drafting and model building are slow, and a model that is nearly finished at the deadline is not finished. Students consistently underestimate this course.
⚠ Budget for materials. UWF assesses a material and supply fee on its studio theatre courses; whether or not a fee appears on your bill, board, foam core, blades and adhesives cost money across a term.
The TPA prefix splits along a professional division that the numbers do not make obvious:
| Design side | Technical / craft side |
|---|---|
| TPA3064C / TPA4061 — scenic design | TPA3313 scenic technology; TPA4077C scene painting; stagecraft numbers |
| TPA3022 / TPA4021C — lighting design | TPA3223C — lighting technology |
| TPA4045C — costume design | TPA3230 — costume construction |
⚠ The advice working designers give consistently is to learn both. Nobody is hired as a scenic designer out of an undergraduate degree; carpentry, scenic art, drafting and model making are what pay while a design career is built, and a designer who knows how a flat is framed designs better and is a far easier colleague.
| Institution | Its title | Credits | Contact hours |
|---|---|---|---|
| Florida Atlantic University (SUS) | Scenic Design 1 | 3 | not published |
One carrier, at three credits. ⚠ No Florida institution publishes a contact-hour figure for this number, so the 60 hours recorded here is derived by Florida's convention for a three-credit integrated C course — and, unusually, the convention is corroborated by the statewide description's explicit reference to laboratory study and model production.
⚠ FAU's catalogue could not be read for this guide. FAU does not expose a public course catalogue at its catalogue host, so its own description, prerequisite and any material fee are not available here. The content above is written from the statewide record — which for this number is detailed and specific — and cross-read against UWF's and FIU's descriptions of the same course under their own numbers.
Prerequisite. Florida's statewide record names TPA 2000 (introduction to theatrical design) and TPA 2200 (stagecraft). UWF requires TPA 2200 or TPA 2200C for its version. ⚠ Confirm FAU's own prerequisite with the department, and note that a foundation in stagecraft is assumed either way — you are expected to know what a flat and a platform are before the first design problem.
An upper-division course following stagecraft and introductory design. It leads to TPA4061 (Scene Design II / Scenic Design II) and sits alongside lighting design (TPA3022 or TPA4020), costume design (TPA4045 / TPA4045C) and drafting (TPA3344) in a design and production degree.
⚠ Florida's statewide record classifies it as transferable to an institution offering the same course, with no Gordon Rule designation and no general-education category. It is marked for dual enrolment carrying elective high-school credit — and note that TPA genuinely discriminates on that field, with a minority of numbers in the prefix carrying performing-fine-arts credit instead, so the elective marking here is a real classification rather than prefix-wide boilerplate.
⚠⚠ A single-carrier identifier in a prefix where 78% of all numbers have exactly one carrier. That is the norm in TPA, not an anomaly — but it does mean this number will not appear at most institutions, and the "same course offered" condition in the transfer guarantee is doing real work. Plan on presenting a portfolio and a syllabus.
Scenic design adopted computation early and comfortably. Drafting moved to Vectorworks and AutoCAD decades ago; 3D massing studies in SketchUp routinely precede a physical model; rendering, photo compositing and digital painter's elevations are ordinary professional practice. ⚠ A student entering this field should expect to use all of it.
Generative image tools add something genuinely useful at the front of the process. A model will produce evocative images of a stage picture from a sentence, and for exploring a mood with a director, or generating twenty variations to react against and discard, that is real value. Designers use it, and there is no reason a student should not.
⚠⚠⚠ But this course exists to teach the step the image cannot supply, and the statewide description names it exactly. The required deliverables are "research and perspective and technical drawings used to communicate information to both the design team and the scene shop" plus "scale models." ⚠ A generated image is a picture of a result. A ground plan, a section and a set of elevations are an instruction to build, in a specific theatre, at a specific scale, from specific materials, within a specific budget. The design is the second thing.
The failure mode is concrete. Generated scenic imagery routinely shows geometry that cannot be framed, masses that could not be flown or shifted, sightlines that would not work from half the house, and spaces with no plausible entrance. ⚠ A student who has built a model and drawn a ground plan sees these immediately; a student who has not, cannot — and presenting a director something unbuildable is a serious professional failure, because the director will have started staging it.
⚠ There is a second, quieter risk specific to this course: the model IS the assessment. Cutting and assembling a scale model is slow, frustrating work, and it is precisely the work that teaches spatial judgement — how big a doorway really is, how a platform reads from the house. There is no shortcut through it, and a course that let you take one would not have taught you to design.
Used well: generating concept imagery to argue with, researching period and architectural reference (⚠ verify it — models confabulate architectural history confidently), explaining a drafting convention or a perspective construction, and scripting repetitive CAD tasks. Used badly, it produces a portfolio that answers neither of the two questions every interviewer asks: what did you design, and why.
Generated September 15, 2026 · Updated September 15, 2026