Category: Process

Final words!

Theatre Company has, in some ways, been the most challenging module I have taken part in over the past three years. It has also been the most enjoyable. I am thankful to have been a part of a group of such talented, lovely people. Writing a script from scratch and creating a set from scratch tested peoples patience, but the feedback from audience members, friends and family shows that all the hard work was really worth it.

The module has taught me many things about being in a professional theatre company. It has certainly taught me that communication between each aspect of the company is key. As head of finance, I needed to communicate effectively with those in charge of costume, set, props and marketing. I also had to communicate with the producer so he could overlook what was being done. I learned how to create an industry standard budget and used ‘Excel’ in a professional way to keep up to date with how much money was spent. Keeping track of everything was difficult but very important.

I learned about companies administrative production, and how technology now benefits their marketing as well as their shows. Although the module was short and we were busy doing our own jobs, it gave us a sneak peek of what being in a theatre company was like overall and how we could all help each other with certain things.

The night of the show was really something that can’t be described. There is something so satisfying about performing work that has been such a chore putting together. Every member of Progeny has the right to be very proud of themselves, and I will miss being part of a group with them.

(Yes, apparently I am being soppy on an assessed piece of work).

 

 

Word count: 299

Francesca

Marketing Plan Reviewed

Unfortunately not all of our marketing ideas and plans were carried out. If we were a professional theatre company then I think that they would have been. However, we are not and we all have jobs, other modules, essays and other things which we have to dedicate our time to. If this was a full time job then we would have had enough time to complete each stage of our plan. Although we did manage to carry out most of our marketing plan, I feel that we simply gave ourselves too many activities to be able to put them all into action. Our social network sites were up and running by January and we communicated with our audience throughout the whole process. We did this in a number of different ways, including providing ‘teaser’ pictures, generating polls for them to complete, holding competitions and revealing general information about the company, the show and the process of creating it. We also created two promotional videos by the date that we set ourselves which were released on our social media sites. We accomplished our idea of ‘tagging’ in the University library which generated a reaction from our audience. Before doing this I made sure that I emailed the library to get permission as a precautionary measure as we did not want to receive a bad reputation as a new theatre company. We also created the posters in March; however, they were not released on time as there was a delay in the printing of them. The Company that we used made a mistake so needed to reprint them. Although this meant that we had to wait longer it also meant that we were able to change the date to the new date of the 19th of May, which occurred due to a misunderstanding. We also released different posters to our initial creations. Although the first posters that we designed displayed exactly what we wanted, they did not look very professional due to the lack of equipment that we had. Instead we decided to use a royalty free image of a woman holding a rose as this image looked more professional, due to the quality, and so had a better effect on our company image. One thing that we did not have time to do was the street performances. This was due to the fact that we were focusing on other aspects such as the posters and the tagging and then once all of these were completed we had run out of time. Due to lack of time, and people’s individual schedules, it was hard to find time where we were all available to implement street performances. If I were to do this module again I would have started with the street performances as everybody in our company seemed to have more free time at the beginning, and this was the only aspect that we needed everyone to participate in. However, overall I feel that we did carry out a sufficient amount of marketing which can be seen in the high ticket sales. We discovered that the average number of audience members to attend a student performance is fifty, yet we had over 100 audience members.

 

Word count: 531

 

Marketing plan written by Jessica Smith and Kelsey Stirling:

Progeny Theatre Company’s marketing plan

 

Rehearsal and final production

What were the challenges of the production? Including rehearsals and final performance. (Personally).

  1. Learning lines so quickly
  2. Fully understanding my character
  3. Being in sync with the other actors during the Counts development scene
  4. First rehearsing the scene between the Count and Countess where they begin their relationship
  5. Projecting my voice but keeping the right emotion
  6. Trying not to trip over the long skirt!
  7. Timings for getting on and off stage
  8. Creating an instant relationship between the Countess and the Piano tuner
  9. Staging the death of the piano tuner

 

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How were these challenges overcome?

  1. Learning lines was a personal challenge of mine. I tried many ways of trying to learn them including writing down lines over and over again, reading lines before bed, trying to relate different words to different actions. In the end, writing them down over and over again as well as rehearsing them over and over again seemed to work best. The week of the performance is the first time I ran through the whole production without needing to be prompted. This was a huge worry of mine!
  2. Steph our director held character development workshops for us where we could create our own back story to the character. This helped me create a relationship between myself and the character I was playing. The back story for the Countess was that she had come from quite a poor family in the village. She had always heard stories about the Count and his castle and was in awe ever since she was young. One day news got round that the Count was looking for a new wife. Innocently, she took a walk up to the castle gardens and started looking around. The Count then finds her snooping around, and this ends up as their first meet. As the Count likes younger girls, he takes an interest in the Countess, inviting her inside.
  3. The counts development scene took a while to get to grips with. Photos taken while we were rehearsing certainly helped us see the differences in how we were sat. Bearing that in mind along with direction from Steph, we all managed to do the same movements with the same arms in the same direction etc.
  4. The love scene between the Count and Countess was again a personal challenge because I had never done anything like this before. I had to get to know the actors as well as the characters they were playing to feel comfortable with this scene. The first time we rehearsed it felt awkward, but the more we rehearsed the more comfortable we felt around each other and the more direction we got to set the scene. It was also a challenge rehearsing without proper costume until the week of the performance. The Countess’ top half got changed the day before the performance, so thankfully the dress run went well.
  5. As we didn’t get chance to rehearse on the stage, we were unaware of how loud we needed to be. During our dress rehearsal we projected as much as we could, only to be told to be louder. During the final performance, we gave it all that we could. I found it difficult to know whether I was staying in character, but I kept full focus on the emotion I was supposed to be portraying in a certain scene and how close I was to the other actors (so I didn’t end up shouting in their ear!).
  6. Again, another costume challenge. The Countess’ skirt was extremely long, and during a couple of dress rehearsals I felt either myself or another actor stand on the bottom of it, nearly tripping me up. This was quickly solved by me staying in character and picking up the skirt when I walked anywhere.
  7. Because we weren’t able to use the stage and the lighting/sound until the day of performance, there was a huge stress on us to get on and off stage in time with the blackouts. Our dress rehearsal went well, so knowing this, we were just that little bit quicker on the actual performance. This is something that could have been worked on a lot more with dedicated time in the space to rehearse.
  8. The Countess and Piano Tuners relationship changes so dramatically in such a short period of time, I found it a challenge to portray how we felt about each other. Characterisation helped with the first scene between the two of them. Also the way we staged it, with the Countess being sat very close to the Piano Tuner. The audience had to realise that, (like Shakespeare) the characters in A Gothic Tale fell in love very quickly. There wasn’t enough time in the production for love to be gradual. Myself and Gary had to feel comfortable with each other to be acting so closely so we worked on our relationship before working on the characters relationships. Because we are friends away from university, we sometimes found it difficult to stay in character and not laugh!
  9. The death of the Piano Tuner was something which took a while to stage as we had to make sure the audience could see and understand what was happening. The last scene was very dramatic so we didn’t want the death to look tacky and under rehearsed. In fact, the last scene is one of the scenes that was rehearsed the most. The Countess had to stab the Piano Tuner a certain way and stand in a certain position to help him “fall” to the ground without hurting himself. The fall was rehearsed over and over again to make sure we understood where we needed to be and when. Our facial expressions were also something that we worked on. I had to put myself into the Countess’ shoes – I have just killed the man I love by accident. Thinking so melodramatically was difficult!

There were of course, other challenges throughout the process of putting the production together. These were the main challenges for me throughout the rehearsal process however, and I believe that we dealt with each of them in the best possible way. We used team work when overcoming challenges and this was one of the things that brought us closer together as a group.

 

Word count: 1037

Francesca

Technical Documentation – After (and Pre-Show Checks)

I am extremely pleased with the results of our technical documentation and feel that the hours spent creating and developing them have been well spent.

We used a ‘Progeny Theatre’ layout, font and format to ‘brand’ our documentation, which gave them a professional look as well as used previous examples of other Theatre Company’s work as case studies for our own documents. The response to our documentation from the venue has been very positive and, as such, the LPAC are prepared for our arrival, which is now at 9am on Sunday 19th May.

All technical documentation can be viewed here.

Myself and the Stage Manager have produced a Performance Day Schedule which underlines the ‘desired’ performance day schedule. However, due to the recent date change (we were originally booked to complete our get-in the evening prior to performance day) we are aware that, because we are a’ tech-heavy’ group, our get-in may over-run and have planned our day accordingly.

We have completed a Pre-Show Check-list of all technical requirements and I am confident that we are fully prepared for performance day.

  • Technical Documentation – completed and sent to venue.
  • QLab file – completed 3 weeks prior to performance and has been kept up-to-date. Saved on memory stick to transfer to LPAC Apple Mac.
  • Sound – all files saved in numerous locations in case of file corruption.
  • Props – sourced and stored in venue.
  • Set – finished and stored in venue.
  • Costume – completed and stored in venue.
  • Actors – briefed on Risk Assessment and Performance Day Schedule.
  • Budget – up-to-date and with £30 left for last minute expenses.

Kate Dawson

Word Count: 251

Lighting Design.

When it came to designing the lights I began to look at the script scene by scene to decide what the mood of each scene was, for example if the scene features an argument in or if the general mood of the scene is a happy one. Once our stage was set and I knew where items were going to be placed I could begin to design the lights. One of the key themes of our play was the feeling of corruption in a fairy tale world. I wanted to contrast the fairy tale image with the use of a natural lighting state in the bedroom and piano room to give the illusion that the world of the play is not a fairy tale despite what  some characters might believe. The piano room was set up stage left and the bedroom up stage right and to link the two together, whenever a character moved directly from the two sections of the stage, a thin natural white light would act as a corridor so the character moving would be lit, and also this would give the feeling that the character is remaining within the castle. I wanted to give the middle of the stage the illusion that it was outside and not apart of the castle. To do this I used the colour green to symbolise the outdoors. The final scene of the bloody chamber I had problems with designing because the scene would be set centre stage. I originally thought to light the stage red to symbolise death and danger but decided on a natural lighting setting. I chose this because I wanted to show that the bloody chamber, in the world of the play, is a real place, it is reality and it is apart of the castle so it would have the same lighting as the piano room and the bedroom.

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