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It was part of a concert with 12 different pieces and a lot of them explored human connection to places or other people so the intimate feel is part of that. It was in a 3/4 space so I couldn't do direct side light without ruining sight lines for someone. So the best I had was high sides and I have learned that the two don't really compare.
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Aug 20, 2013 09:13
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Princess Nebula posted:This is probably too late, but your spirit gum is screwed. Acetone can take off spirit gum- adding it to the stuff will kill it, or has in my experience. I would go ahead and buy a new bottle or two. Also, what show are you doing where everyone wears a prosthetic? Curious. We were doing The Hobbit. All the dwarves had beards, trolls had fake foreheads, goblins had noses, elves and hobbits had pointed ears. I'm using an app to read forums but I will try to figure out how to post an image.
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Aug 20, 2013 16:02
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http://imgur.com/a/CrOQL There's an album with a few pictures.
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Aug 20, 2013 16:10
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I don't know poo poo about dance but dance lighting is my favorite thing. No one else lets you use saturated colors and darkness. I almost think I enjoy dance more not knowing much about it, I can walk into a show with no expectations.
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Aug 20, 2013 16:44
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bunnielab posted:I don't know poo poo about dance but dance lighting is my favorite thing. No one else lets you use saturated colors and darkness. Agreed.  With dance, lighting is another storytelling factor where its purpose is to be noticed. In a play or musical it's usually the point not to be noticed.
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Aug 20, 2013 18:54
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More dance photos! This is from my second dance concert which was in May about 7 months after the one I posted photos from before. I did have the ability to use direct side light though rather than just high side light and could make better use of color scrollers because of that.    
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Aug 22, 2013 07:11
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How early should non-equity actors show up to an EPA? Say it's at 9:30am. Show up at 7:30? 8:30? In NYC
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Aug 23, 2013 04:41
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Some of my friends say they start lining up at like 6 am.  Any recommendations for affordable places to take acting classes in NYC? Any studios that have a variety of teachers?
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Sep 9, 2013 03:06
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Do AEA showcases get you hours towards your equity card?
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Sep 9, 2013 19:14
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Just finished up a hellish 3 weeks or month. I don't even remember. Smuin ballet is touring around the country right now and they stopped in my house so I was house ME for that. Their in house/touring LD is a really cool guy though so it made it all worth it and I learned a lot from him. The week after we loaded out Smuin, we were hosting TED talks and I was lighting and projection coordinator for that. The talks had a live audience, were live streaming to 2 other physical locations, plus the website, and being recorded for the website as well. It wasn't really demanding tech wise but it fell in a really bad place in our production schedule that slowed down our regular season shows. I think I finally get a slow week before we load in our black box show. I just want to sleep for the next 6 days.
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Sep 28, 2013 00:47
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I'm jealous. Did six days in a row (going on seven tomorrow, today was the day off) of doing Hamlet, finishing the slowest tech to ever loving exist. This tech is a giant blocking rehearsal. </complaining>.
Princess Nebula fucked around with this message at 06:31 on Oct 1, 2013 |
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Oct 1, 2013 05:04
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They shortened the season from a 7 shows to six starting a month later. This was to theoretically give us more time to prep. Instead, we keep getting builds from outside contractors and random events keep getting scheduled that we have to drop everything and deal with (our shop is 15-20 minutes away from the theatre, depending upon traffic). On the plus side, building for other people allows us to buy new tools! I love pocket hole jigs.
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Oct 1, 2013 05:13
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I feel like there have to be more theatre goons around... Am I so wrong?
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Oct 1, 2013 06:32
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I get to direct my first show (I've been an actor, stage manager, assistant director, and now a producer) and I think my biggest weakness is going to be timing everything. It's a two-person cast with a short-ish script featuring three-page monologues. I'm really excited, the script is insanely cool, and I'm being allowed to basically run things however I want as long as I've got a show ready by the end of May. But there's my problem -- I have no idea how much rehearsal time is needed. I'm not doing typical auditions at this point; I'm more interested in finding people who connect to the script and who won't get discouraged if the audience is kinda meh about it (small town, experimental theatre, blah blah). Generally our theatre does 6-8 weeks of rehearsing, I'm concerned that with the giant monologues I may want to budget more time for it. At the same time I don't want the material to get stale for the actors. Rehearsal space isn't an issue at this point, minimal set, props are mostly things I have in my apartment right at this moment. Any advice on rehearsal schedules would be super helpful. I generally don't even know what day of the week it is.
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Oct 3, 2013 06:03
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Look Under The Rock posted:I get to direct my first show (I've been an actor, stage manager, assistant director, and now a producer) and I think my biggest weakness is going to be timing everything. It's a two-person cast with a short-ish script featuring three-page monologues. How long is short-ish? 6-8 weeks sounds like it might be verging on too much time as it is, unless there are other factors at play like the skill level of the performers, the number of hours available per day to rehearse, etc. etc.
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Oct 3, 2013 08:35
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Yea I would just write out a mock rehearsal schedule for a 4 or 5 week period plus a tech week. Look for key moments in the script you want to focus on and decide how much time you want to dedicate to those key scenes in your mock schedule then use the other scenes to flush it out. A week before tech starts you should be doing full runthroughs. So tech week, full runthroughs and key scenes are all fixed things on your schedule and it should be easy to finish from there.
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Oct 3, 2013 17:48
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Einstein on the Beach is the greatest thing I have ever seen. Does anyone know anything about the technical processes behind it? I don't know if I totally understand how they get the bar of light to do that.
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Oct 12, 2013 23:58
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Magic Hate Ball posted:Einstein on the Beach is the greatest thing I have ever seen. Does anyone know anything about the technical processes behind it? I don't know if I totally understand how they get the bar of light to do that. Do you have a picture or a clip from youtube? Robert Wilson and Philip Glass...who could ask for anything more?
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Oct 13, 2013 00:20
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In the bar of light scene ("Bed") it goes from this to this to this but it rises in place rather than just lifting up on one end. Then it rises off the stage and disappears into the flies. There's a video on youtube somewhere of a rehearsal of a regional production (I don't know how you'd manage that) where someone's sitting off in the wings turning a crank really quickly, which is how I assume all the "thing moves slowly" effects were achieved. It wasn't a perfect effect, though, and I'm not sure why but anything that did that actually moved in slow jerks. The spaceships that fly over the field dance scenes were particularly bad for this - since they were hung from four vertical cables they could swing pretty freely and it was actually kind of distracting. The lighting, though, was consistently phenomenal. The Bed scene had a really strange effect that I wasn't expecting in how it illuminated the audience and the theater hall, it felt like we'd shown up for some kind of religious ceremony. There's no dimension to the bar of light, either. It's just there. I stepped out for the beginning of both dance scenes but it was totally, completely riveting. Not once was I ever aware of time, in fact the show kind of rushed by. Seeing it all together really underlines the show's structure - I think it was Wilson who called the show "autodidactic" in how it teaches you to watch it as you watch it. The first act is all action: the Train scene repeats three times, first quickly then slower and then slower again, each time introducing new elements, and the Trial scene is cluttered with things to look at, and then by the time we get to Night Train you're sort of acclimated and it's not an issue that it takes twenty minutes for so little to "happen". There's a clutter of videos online, though as you can imagine it loses some of its punch. Still, I wish someone would make some kind of film of it. Maybe it could be compressed, like the studio recordings. Or in 3D. It's really amazing how loud it was. The thrumming that underlines the first Train scene was this enormous, constant thundering, almost a physical presence. The way the show occupies the full scale of things, even in just one scene like Train, from enormous (the thrumming electronic music, the crane tower the boy stands on, the huge, flat cut-out of a train that creeps in) to miniscule (the ponytail on the woman doing the diagonal dance, the paper airplanes the boy throws to the floor, the conch shell that sits downstage, spotlit, until a woman moves over to it and picks it up and listens to it) is almost overwhelming. I could seriously see it a hundred times.
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Oct 13, 2013 01:07
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Max22 posted:How long is short-ish? 6-8 weeks sounds like it might be verging on too much time as it is, unless there are other factors at play like the skill level of the performers, the number of hours available per day to rehearse, etc. etc. The script is 48 pages. Maybe 6-8 weeks is too much, I guess they normally use that schedule for plays with larger casts. The performers will be skilled for sure, and I'm thinking two-hour rehearsals 3-4 times per week. Whoever recommended coming up with a schedule, that's what I'll do, I just don't really have any concept of how long it should take to get everything nailed down. I'm pretty quick with memorization but that's partly because I have no life and just sit around and run lines with nothing distracting me.
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Oct 16, 2013 18:52
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I would suggest anyone shopping around for a technique that interests/resonates with them for acting, should purchase the book Training of the American Actor edited by Arthur Bartow. It is a compilation of essays on a variety of acting techniques written by people very close to the teacher/originator of the technique. It goes into The Six Viewpoints, Practical Aesthetics, Meisner, Chekov, Adler, Hagen, Neo-Classical Training, Straberg, Grotowski, and Fritz Earl. While it does not go as in depth into the techniques as you would from reading a book written by the creator themselves, it is incredibly informative (also many teachers did not put their ideas to paper). Every section has a recommended reading section which will help you find other great books pertaining to the technique you are interested in. You can grab it used for under  so I would snatch that poo poo up.Also The Actor and the Target is a phenomenal book. It really blows that I didn't get much technique work in college since our whole faculty god flipped around with a change in department head halfway through. So I'm trying to learn about teachers in NYC that I can go to while I'm sweeping sidewalks or whatever.
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Oct 28, 2013 19:47
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I just got done with my duties as the props master for a production of Cabaret. It's not a particularly difficult show to prop, and there's a lot of fun opportunities to build some really interesting stuff (I got to build a giant champagne bottle with a baby bottle nipple on the end for the MC's baby new year costume) But I swear, I hope I never have to build eight custom telephones again. Especially since we only had four shows and I have to destroy them tomorrow during strike because lighting needs all their parts back.  Then again, we don't really need eight phones that we would likely never use again in our stock.On the plus side it was a pretty fantastic production. I might try to post some pictures once I get them off of my camera. On a more general note I was wondering if anyone else has read The Prop Building Guidebook by Eric Hart? I had a professor loan it to me, and am thinking of picking up my own copy once I'm a little better off cash-wise. I was a big fan of Hart's blog Prop Agenda and had been following the progress of the book for a while. The finished product is an interesting book, and it almost reads like a reference book, as he basically travels through a different subset of materials in every section, and the tools, techniques, and what each different material can be used for. My only issues are that because the book is so general a lot of the techniques are barely covered, and a lot of the tool descriptions leave a lot to desired since they mostly boil down to "This tool is used to do X to Y material" and not a lot past that. The book also has godawful spiral binding, which is meant so that it can lay flat on a work table, but in practice just makes the pages bind up constantly. That being said the book is still excellent, and is a great counterpoint to Thurston James' The Theatre Props Handbook which, while one of the best prop books out there (there aren't terribly many) is extremely specific. If you want step by step instructions on how to make a Russian style tea glasses or a spinning wheel James' books are excellent. However, the usefulness of the book is basically limited to the included projects, and any knowledge you can gleam from those instructions. The fact that it was written before the advent of the internet and rise of certain safety practices also leads to some interesting steps or methods that are no longer practical. But, like I said, I'm interested to hear what other goons think about it. I'm not sure if there are many others who do props on the forums, but if there are I'd still recommend picking it up if you can. I pretty much devour anything new about props that I can get my hands on at this point, since it's such a limited field writing wise, if anyone has any other reading recommendations I'd love to hear them.
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Nov 2, 2013 18:11
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Last week's production meeting: "Okay so it sounds like we're right on task, nope, there's nothing else we need for now, everything looks pretty great!" Last night's rehearsal: "Oh poo poo we need a stage manager RIGHT NOW and it has to be someone who can handle wrangling 30+ children under the age of 12! Also could you be the one to call the person we want for set painting crew chief because she won't work with most of the people at this theatre? It'd be best if she could be at the production meeting in two days. Oh and please help work on costumes on Sunday and props Saturday kthxbye!!!!" I really love crunch time but I have no idea how I'm going to find a stage manager for this show...
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Nov 14, 2013 02:22
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There wasn't a stage manager lined up during preproduction?
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Nov 14, 2013 04:24
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rantmo posted:There wasn't a stage manager lined up during preproduction? Traditionally the assistant director continues on as stage manager at this theatre. The AD for this show is in the cast though. I've been so busy during rehearsals that I somehow didn't catch onto that and nobody brought it up until the other day. I love this theatre so much and part of the charm is the disorganization. Also this particular show has been fraught with weird road blocks. Our props guy was admitted to a psych facility last week and hadn't brought anything in yet so we all had to band together to bring in various props. Also we have someone learning the guitar specifically for one scene, and I'm learning the accordion. Tonight's drama was trying to get the pianist to send me the list of demands she insists she sent me already (and definitely didn't). This is my first time as producer and I'm learning as I go, but we also have a newbie director and a newbie tech chief so there's been a bunch of stuff that should have been there from the start and really wasn't. Either way I'm having a blast. Lots of work outside the theatre itself and basically no down time during rehearsals. Just the way I like it :-)
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Nov 15, 2013 05:39
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Look Under The Rock posted:disorganization When you find a theatre that is relatively organized and still has no down time during rehearsals, that's when the fun truly begins.
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Nov 15, 2013 05:43
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Here's my acting debut. http://the-puppetmaster.squarespace.com/33siwvt4glcmajas118o863w6tcfpd and a writeup in the campus paper. http://www.dailycampus.com/puppetmaster-mixes-live-actors-and-puppets-into-intriguing-story-1.3118740#.UoZxQCfjWKI It's been quite an experience going from being mostly a designer and builder of puppets to acting.
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Nov 15, 2013 20:10
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r0ff13c0p73r posted:When you find a theatre that is relatively organized and still has no down time during rehearsals, that's when the fun truly begins. That would be awfully nice. The theatre I work with is a civic theatre in a small city. The next city over has a wonderful civic theatre and I'm hoping to get involved with their shows at some point. This place is a five minute bus ride away though, so I've kind of made it my goal to work really hard there, get the calibre of the shows up, and pull in new talent to grow the program. My hope is to learn everything I can there and maybe go on to do something professional, once I figure out what I do best (I'm hella good at stage management. Not so great as a producer although it's fun).
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Nov 16, 2013 02:26
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Any of you guys know a bit about lighting? I'm going to try to convince the other ensemble members in my theatre company that an iPad for our new space will be an awesome investment, and finding a light board that's controllable from said iPad will go a long way to helping my case. I've already seen Luminare, which seems like some fantastic software, but is there a board/set of lights that will light a smallish space (we're a storefront operation) and use that software w/o breaking the bank? Ideally we'd find a sound system that's controllable that way as well, but I think that's further down on the list of priorities.
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Nov 19, 2013 04:24
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I would recommend the ENTTEC line. It runs off a laptop rather than an IPad but it has really great functionality and room to expand if your lighting inventory does. Specifically this one: http://www.enttec.com/index.php?main_menu=Products&pn=70570 One thing not to do. Do not ever buy a console from Chauvet. They are terrible soulless consoles and it took me at least 3 days to get the Chauvet console to communicate with Chauvet brand lights. **Edit** The ENTTEC line was created with musicians in mind, hence the footpedal control, but it will work well for small theatre spaces. Burger Crime fucked around with this message at 04:47 on Nov 19, 2013 |
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Nov 19, 2013 04:40
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3 years of studying contemporary theatre makes me feel woefully underprepared for applying to an acting MA here in the U.K. Bah. BAAAAHHHHH
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Nov 30, 2013 01:10
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We have lost an actor. Literally. Cannot find him anywhere. His cell isn't working, he's not answering emails, we left a message with whoever answered his home phone number but have not heard back, we even went to his work and they said they haven't seen him in a month. I'd be worried and panicked if he also hadn't been skipping most rehearsals anyway. So instead I'm relived as now I don't have to ask him to leave the production myself, and still panicked as we open on Christmas Eve and need to find an actor to replace the guy. So that's been fun.
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Nov 30, 2013 04:06
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SatansBestBuddy posted:We have lost an actor. We lost an actress who had two roles. Neither of the roles had more than a couple lines, but we found out about it on the day of our first dress. The part of this that's amusing to me is that she was in her 40s and a 12-year-old girl from the chorus asked if she could take over one of the roles. I was impressed by the ballsiness of asking so I told her yes, and she's done an awesome job. She learned Jingle Bells on the guitar overnight and is always the first person in costume. I hope she sticks with acting, she's clearly talented and guts will take you far, right?
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Nov 30, 2013 05:21
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Yeah, I'd say she has the bug.
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Dec 2, 2013 14:47
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OSheaman posted:Yeah, I'd say she has the bug. This theatre is really cool because most of the veterans there are intensely supportive. They recognize that everyone has something bigger in their lives that they're working on and most will try to help you do your part when working on a show (example -- I don't have a driver's license and the bus stops near my house shut down during this production, so I had people picking me up and dropping me off every night). The problem is that they are really bad at getting new talent in there; there's kind of a big focus on PAY YOUR DUES. Even as a talented actor it's hard to break into and can be really discouraging, if you want to design sets or be a stage manager or director or producer it's even harder -- they want to have seen you work on several shows before you're trusted with any large responsibilities. I get why they do this, but they're burning out the talented veterans and never bringing anyone new in. One of the producers there shares my philosophy about what the theatre needs (skew some shows to a different audience than our normal middle-aged WASP crowd, bring in new talent with a mentor system, focus on growing the program instead of allowing it to comfortably stagnate) and being kind of loud about how I think things could change has begun to pay off. I've been empowered to start shaking things up around there, sometimes with success (I brought a couple high schoolers in as stage managers on this show and they've been great) and sometimes not (the tech guy I picked had no idea what he was doing and actually SKIPPED the tech rehearsal). I get to direct a show that will run next spring and I'm hoping to do it in such a way that it'll show the artistic committee that there's an audience in our town for stuff that's on the weird side and that lack of experience sometimes just means that you need decent mentors to grow latent abilities. But to me, if something means enough to someone that they'll approach you and ask for it, why not give them a chance to be successful? I have been really excited to see the girl who asked for that role step into things. She'll leave this show having had a great experience rather than just being one of the older kids in the choir with no lines, she got to challenge herself a bit and be more involved with the production. If you can sleep through your role but it's still sucking up all your time and it's kind of thankless, of course you're not going to come back. I think part of a supportive program should be finding the people who REALLY REALLY want it, and helping them to find achievable goals within each production. Blah blah I could probably go on about this stuff for hours because it takes up so much of my thought processes. Has anyone ever done the show Trap for a Lonely Man? It's the next one we're doing and I'm auditioning tonight, but I don't know much about it besides the synopses I can find online. Trying to decide if I want a part or if I'd rather ask to be on a crew.
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Dec 2, 2013 21:00
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I love that this thread exists- thespian on thespian action. I'm doing finals week hell right now but just got some goodies in the mail, listed below, and will be sure to talk about them once I can read them. I'm also working on a one act for our college theatre group that is based on slash the result of a play me and another person began to write a long time ago that I've decided to take and make into something different and surreal (while avoiding to be pretentious). Anyhow, the current ones I have are: Doctor Cerberus by Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa Mystery Book that I seem to have misplaced.
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Dec 14, 2013 19:29
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Director bailed due to a death in the family. Producer has heart surgery for a pace maker right before we open. The set foremen didn't tell us he hosed off until we checked on the sets and found none of them built or painted. The props master had to replace the actor we couldn't find. Oh and another actor was hospitalized and needs to be replaced. I'd find this hilarious if it wasn't for the fact that I'm the stage manager so instead I'm finding it all falling at my feet and I'm expected to pick up the pieces and try to get this show up and running. We open in less than 10 days. 
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Dec 15, 2013 07:53
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Just focus on the basics if you are that far into the process. The blocking should be mostly set if you are 10 days out. As long as blocking and lines are down, just focus on that. What show is it? Can you show location with lighting rather than set? If lighting and props can be used to show location, set can be minimal to none depending on the show. I don't know if any of that is actually possible, but its how I would approach the issues.
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Dec 15, 2013 10:04
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SatansBestBuddy posted:Director bailed due to a death in the family. Producer has heart surgery for a pace maker right before we open. The set foremen didn't tell us he hosed off until we checked on the sets and found none of them built or painted. The props master had to replace the actor we couldn't find. Oh and another actor was hospitalized and needs to be replaced. Write in a children's choir in the first act to get grandparents in the seats then add a nude scene in the second act to bring the perv crowd in. At least then you will make some money.
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Dec 15, 2013 16:07
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I may be exaggerating a bit for comedic effect, it's not like I have no idea what I'm doing.  This is just December in a nutshell, not an "all at once" thing, looking back on it there's an amazing amount of poo poo that's gone wrong in just two weeks, the cherry on top happening after I bought a ticket to The Hobbit and one minute later getting the call that the director is dropping out and I'm now in charge of everything. Still watched the movie, was pretty good, need to look up how to do that Smaug voice cause that would be perfect in our show. Burger Crime posted:Just focus on the basics if you are that far into the process. Show is Aladdin. Kinda need sets. We got them mostly "built" (oh the sins against the art of carpentry we needed to commit) and spend all yesterday laying down the base coats of paint, outside, in the snow, using hairdryers to get everything to dry so we could paint on the other colours. (we didn't) We have the basics like blocking and lines down, so the actors are fine and know what to do, the chorus still need work but there's no more time so we're just hoping nobody falls off the stage again this year. bunnielab posted:Write in a children's choir in the first act to get grandparents in the seats then add a nude scene in the second act to bring the perv crowd in. At least then you will make some money. Children's choir is already in the show. Nude scene is in the first act, set to "I'm Too Sexy" by Right Said Fred. Seriously. Actually, from the number of tickets we've already sold, we're in the green, and are expecting walk-in numbers to be ever bigger so we're really in the green. Ticket numbers are not even something I have to worry about. Making sure we have a set is, like, 90% of what I'm worried about, the rest is odds and ends like "Where are our props?" and "What time do I have to meet with the technical director to discuss plans I only half know?" and such. I'm not even worried yet. My chorus choreographer phoned from the hospital this morning and said she had to drop out and I barely even blinked, that's how not worried I am.
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Dec 16, 2013 01:40
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