Although most of the personnel in the scenic construction department are specialists in a particular field – such as carpentry or metalwork – they need to have a wide range of skills which reach beyond their core discipline. This is often due to the wide range of materials which the scenic construction team works with.

Many of the complex sets at the National either have a steel skeleton, or have steelwork visible on display. Steel is a very strong and safe material with which one can build items like bridges or walkways, but it's always vital to keep the weight of the structure down as much as possible.

Lots of productions need large flat areas of scenery to be covered quickly and economically. New materials like MDF and quad-wall polycarbonates help with this, while other materials like polystyrene are used for details like mouldings.

Some of the sets built in the National’s workshops are very large, sometimes up to 10 metres tall and 15 metres across. Keeping the pieces of set flowing along the production line from the workshop into the paintframe requires skilful time management.

The CNC (or ‘Computer Numerical Control’ machine) enables the scenic construction team to cut complex shapes in wood and plastic with a bare minimum of manual intervention. All that is needed is a design, which can be fed to the machine direct from a CAD (Computer Aided Design) package.