Intro to Producto

Grab and insight into my squishy brain and tiny knowledge of Production...

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This link shows you the discussions we have been having together, I have also posted videos of Sophie and Beau's talk on music and lighting...

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Presentation Evaluation

Today was the big day, we came in early to set up everything form ourn presentation, Beau had his piano, Sophie was sorting her gels for lighting, Mark was tweaking his model box, and I was keeping my masks in check. The last meeting we had before today we decided that Beau would play his piano the whole way through whilst we were speaking so create an atmosphere in the room simiular to that in the actual performace, this worked really well. Having some creepy yet simple music in the background made speaking infront of eveyone more relaxed and deminished any awkward silences there might have been. I thought it was important that we each play to our individual strengths to show how we all put our talents together to come up with the concept, out of all the other presentations that we have seen, no-one brought in thier own piano to play music that they had written and compesed themselves, I was really proud of that.

In my personal section on costume I felt like I had put myself at a disadvantage because when looking at the others who were also doing costume, they had exmaples of other peoples costume and I did not. As my strength is in children's illustrations, I felt that although my ideas were fairly 2D, I got the idea across well in an artistic way. If I had more time, I would of looked at different types of masks and re-designed different types to show a variety as the ones I had crudely made did not have eye holes, nor did they have the ability to be situated above the actors head. I would really like to continue on with a slight production side of drama, especially using props and costume within my final piece for third year, we had some very positive feedback from our peers and from Mike which encouraged me to carry on with working with characters and creating more weird and wonderful things.

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Beau's talk on musical scoring for our piece in our presentation for 'A Midsummers Nightmare', creating an incredible atmosphere within the room with his creepy songs.

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For Demitirus, I took to social networking, I uploaded all of the drawings I had so far and asked my friends on Facebook if they could give me any feedback. Originally, this character would not of made the cut, especially with him being distinctly different from the others I had already chosen, but loads of people commented on how they thought he was great, so I reworked the image and here is the end result.

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Mr Rzykruski from Burton's Frankenweenie, he was never used for our Midsummer's Nightmare piece, but its and example of the transition from the original to my own drawing.

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Class Presentations

Fridays session was the second instalment of our presentations (we are due to go in the third week) here's an update on how I thought they went: Callum's group- Ellie's group -

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If you look really closely at the lefthand corner you can see the character that I have begun to develop, I found her really interesting because of her overly round head and tiny eyes which completely contrasts Weird Girls. I also like that she's quite chubby but has tiny legs and arms so it makes you wonder if she actually is, the proportions of each character is what gives them their quirky personality which in turn almost determines their attitude. 

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Again, you can see my process for Lysander, he looks alot less like Hermias original character but still has some of the same features. I am unhappy with the way the mask went, but hopefully I will have the chance to sort it out and come up with something a bit more exciting. 

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Here you can see 'Weird Girl' from Burton's Frankenweenie, and then my own adaptation of the character, I took what was important (such as her eyes and face shape) and used it in my own drawings to create a similar (perhaps less eerie) version of her. This character in our own production will be Hermia, the more pretty of the too, and you will see why...

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Tim Burton characters

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Costume

Week 4: Now we are set on Tim Burton, I have begun looking into all the different types of films, real life ones, such as Alice in Wonderland, and his cartoon ones such as Corpse Bride. I decided to stick to cartoon as that's the genre I feel most comfortable doing as I specialise in children's illustrations, I found through watching his films that there are quite a few characteristics that make them instantly identifiable as Burton, for example:

Characters are either extremely small or extremely tall

Characters have very angular faces with pointy chins

Characters have huge haunting wide eyes

Taking all these features into account I will combine them with my own style to see if something strikes gold, 

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Costume

Week 3: Our Production team have decided that we want to look into Tim Burton, and have come up with the theme of 'Midsummers Nightmare'. This weeks session is all about drawing costume and using the human form to draw your ideas onto paper, I do a lot of illustration and as I am doing costume for our final presentation I am taking charge in this less. However, I find it really difficult to draw realisticly, which is why its a brilliant idea to look into Burton's film because they are very stylistic and surreal. Cathy showed us how to draw the basic body which you apply the costume too, or maybe even cheat and get one off the internet! We experimented by using different kinds of media to draw with like: chalk, pencil, pen and paint. Personally I like to use collage and felt tip pens to create my own style of work, but I will give it a go!

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Photographer Tim Walker, a great example looking at use of colour to evoke feeling, how do you feel?

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Costume

Week 2: We started looking at all the different kinds of things that we can get inspiration from, we looked at artists such as Tim Walker who specialises in photography, and painters such as Goya who looks at the surreal. Looking at the use of colour within an art form we can get a sense of the emotion we are meant to feel, the place that perhaps its set in and what time of day it is. For example: if a photo is drenched in a pool of ice blue, it gives the impression that its cold and possibly deserted, or maybe an unhappy place. In our Production Teams we are not starting to look at our own interests, what do we find visibly interesting to look at? We have now picked the play we are going to 'put on' and as a class we have chosen Shakespeare's  'A Midsummer Nights Dream' as its a  play that can interpreted in a hundred different ways, have have started to spitball ideas to find a common ground.

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Costume (and not the fancy dress kind)

We have had 4 great seminars with Cathy Kelly who has been opening our eyes to many different aspects involving costume: 

Week One: Cathy brought in photos that might inspire us and provoke thoughts as to what was going on in a photo. For example: one photo was a pile up of old Volkswagen Mini Vans, this can as a result of the riots during the late 70's that diminished the revolutionist movement which destroyed material possessions or things that were not seen as 'American'. I understand that looking at the different time eras you can get a sense and an identity of that time period, the identification that indicates it is the 70's are the Mini Vans, something we associate with hippies and free love. Its important for a production that you can clearly understand the time frame, for example: if I was to put on a play set in the 70's I could have my actors wearing flares, tye dye shirts, have long hair and funny little round glasses, that way most of the audience should be able to see what era this play comes from. 

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Another short video of how lighting effects the actors face and facial expressions, having lights from several different angles can make quite a transformation as to what the audience can see, you can see Brian angling the lights in different ways to show what impact it has on Callum's face.

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January 25th Today's lesson was with Brian, he gave us a special lesson looking into lighting. In the video you can see that he's explaining to us the effect different colour lighting has on the actors, for example,if you are using a green wash, it could not only too a bit too much like a pantomime before the witch is about to come out, but it also makes the actors look rather zombie-ish.