Problem Solving

During the process of bringing Love and Information to the stage I ran into some problems. In this part of my blog I will talk about these problems, how they occurred and how I solved them. Besides this I will talk about how my problem solving skills have developed from previous performances to this one.

The first problem that I will address is also the biggest one that I faced during the entirety of the preparation and the days of the show. The PVC piping structure. This was something that I had focussed a lot on during my research as creating and building the set was my main goal for Unit 8. Besides this being my main goal, I wanted to give the actors a great opportunity as well by having them act with an abstract set. Looking back on the entirety of the situation around the piping I was able to see were and why it went wrong. 

The reason why the problem occurred which was the piping not arriving on time as well as certain pieces not being delivered at all, was due to a lack of communication between me, my teacher and the head of purchasing items for our course. This is something that could have easily been dealt with earlier if we had communicated better. A part of this is my fault as well as I should've pressed the urgency more as well as done regular follow ups. Though, due to this not happing it created a lot of stress amongst the technical team and  cast as they didn't exactly know what to expect and were deprived of the opportunity to rehearse and for one group, perform, with the set that they were promised. The set is something that I believe was totally achievable in the time frame that I got given and it does slightly disappoint me that I wasn't able to show off the entirety of my new learned skills in set design and constructing. 

The problem wasn't completely solved in my opinion as I had delivered a set which wasn't up to the standards that I had set for myself nor the ones that I had promised to the director and cast. Even though I wasn't completely happy with the end result, there was an end result that mimicked the image that I had originally planned on realizing. Needless to say, I did the best that I could with the materials that I had. Together with my teacher and the venue technician we decided to go to the plumbing department within the college to ask if they had some of the fittings that I needed that I could borrow. Luckily they did have one of the three fittings that I needed to create the structure which were 90-degree elbows. Although the sizes of the elbows were slightly too big we made them work by taping them to the pipes with white gaffer tape. The structure wasn't as stable as I planned it to be but it is quite amazing how far we got with a roll of gaffer tape as the structure was able to stand on its own and would stay like that if no one leaned on on it. Another thing that I did was to go back to the 3D-drawing website and recreated the stage as it was during the actual shows so I would be able to compare the original idea to the outcome.

The stage

3D-drawing of the stage

Another issue that I ran into was that I was called away from my project of Love and Information to assist my classmate with his shows. This took away my opportunity to be with the cast during the final four days of rehearsal before we would start doing the teching of Love and Information. 

Though my classmates show was something that I was aware of as I was working on my own, I did not put this into my planning due to the fact that I had not realized that this would be something that would take up as much of my time as it did. Somehow I thought that the only thing that I would have to do for his show was to be present during the performances instead of being there during the technical and dress rehearsals as well. Looking back on that I should have taken this into consideration though I feel like the planning of the shows is to blame as well. During this process we were expected to focus on our individual shows as well as assisting our classmates which seems hard to do when we have our own rehearsals to attend. 

The way that we could have changed this was by scheduling time between the two shows in which I would be able to attend the final rehearsals as well as helping my classmate with his show and gaining experience through doing that.

An issue that I ran into during one of the performances was that in one of the scenes an actor accidentally pushed a chair off the stage. This occurred because she stood up out of her chair and pushed it backwards to exit the stage. As she did this, the chair fell and the seating part broke. Neither of the actors that were on stage at that moment took the chair off which led to frustration and quick thinking on behalf of the technical team. My technical team member went down to source a new chair and give this to the actors who figured out during which scene the chair would be taken off and the new chair would be put on. The transition of the taking off and putting on was fairly smooth as it fitted in with the setting of the scenes in which these were included. 

Gobo wheel including some of the gobo's
that I used

The final problem that I ran into during this last week was that the lighting work that I have mentioned in my Planning section of the blog isn't on the recording of the show. This is something that I was really proud of as it shows how much I have progressed in the lighting area. Besides me being very proud of my own work, my teacher had said that she found my lighting work very creative as I had taken fragments of the script and visualized them by using the moving lights that we have available in our theatre. 

The reason why my pieces of lighting weren't filmed is unsure to me. The only thing that I can think of is that the lighting was something that the cameraman hadn't expected as the shot is zoomed in on the actors or that he simply didn't care about catching it on film.

My teacher and I had an idea to resolve this problem by going back into the theatre and make a video and take photo's of the lighting but due to the lights being re-rigged for another show, this wasn't a possibility anymore. Instead of this, I have tried to explain my process in as much detail as I could in my Planning section to try and create a mental image of what I have actually done with the moving lights.