STARS!

Yesterday I worked on Stars in Their Eyes at Blatchingtonmill!

It was the first time ever that I have worked on a sound desk during an actual show, and nothing major went wrong at all, I didn't need any help with any of the show run, although I needed a lot of guidance setting up during the production week, however I am sure that next time I will be able to set most of the sound on stage up.
This is me!
I realised yesterday that I am never going to be in control of the lighting at the Windmill Theatre ever again, my last time was Billy! This year I'm working on LX at Teenspirit which is at the Concorde 2, which is a well know venue in Brighton and I'm very excited about working on it, but I'll still miss the lighting programme at Blatch.

The Titanic

Finally, another show to work on...
Over the past couple of days I have had the privilege to work on 'The Titanic' which was being put on by Southwick Opera :http://www.southwickopera.co.uk/

Titanic was a 1997 Broadway hit . Inspired by the discovery of the wreckage of the RMS Titanic in 1985 Maury Yeston composed the music and wrote the lyrics based on the book by Peter Stone. It won five Tony awards, including Best Musical.

Titanic is set on the famous ocean liner which sank on its maiden voyage on April 14 1912 and interweaves the lives of the different types of people that were on board at the time and all about to share the same fate.

Although the theatre was fully functioning and seated about 120 people, it was one of the smallest I had ever worked on, the wings were very small and made it extremely hard to move the pieces of set about. These included a large staircase with a locked gate at the top, a truck with a large tilted area with railings, made to represent the boat as it slowly tilted and sunk. I joined the crew a couple of days late due to work, so they had planned most of the big scene changes already. Therefore my main job was to help out when I could and then follow the script, making sure I always knew when an important scene change was coming up, and that the rest of the crew knew how long we had. I had to always know where in the script we were throughout the show, so whenever the Stage Manager asked where we were I could point to where exactly. 
My most favourite part about this show that I had never seen or heard of before was the score, I would happily pay to watch it just for that.
Moving on to Blatchingtonmills production of Our House that is coming up in February, we are Building building building! We are also in search of the bodies of 3 cars, although we only want the front half on two of them. This is the biggest show Blatch has ever done, and myself and my crew seem determined to make sure that it will go down in memory for the school. Lets just hope all goes to plan.
I can't wait to blog about more hopeful set pieces!

Mark Ups and Models

We started full on work on Our House today in Stage Management.
We decided how we were going to perform all the snappy scene changes that happen constantly throughout the show. The stage will have steel decking placed higgledy piggledy across the stage, at different heights too, getting lower as they come towards the audience, most of these will have a hard board cover, that, when propped up will provide different backdrops for the different environments in the show, with the enormous help of sound and lighting, of course. As a constant backdrop we will have a four foot high flat, painted to look like terraced houses along the back of the stage, giving us room to be able to project above them.
We moved on to making a rough, 1:50 scale model of this idea to show our director, and luckily he was very happy with it. Once we have finished the model completely I will upload a post about it alone with a picture!
All in all this had taken us the good part of 3 hours, after this I went with a fellow crew member and we had to mark out the rehearsal room in the correct scale as the stage will be, will all the decking marked out and the different heights. This took another 3 hours. After only about 2 corrections throughout. It was my first ever mark up, it was a lot easier than I realised.
Next week we begin painting and cutting these flats. This is the earliest Blatchingtonmill has ever stared for a February show!