As well as being an Actor within the company, my second role is of Assistant Theatre Technician. This means that I will produce technical elements that will be in the performance. Obviously, because of having a main acting role in the production, I will not physically be able to run lights or sound on the night, therefore the work I assisted with would need to be preparatory. It was decided between myself and the Head of Tech, Charlie, that I would be in charge of producing the projections included in the show. I have never been one for using technology and computer equipment much, but thought that this would be a good opportunity to try my hand at it. The software I used in order to create the projections was Windows Movie Maker, which is a freeware video editing software that enables the user to create and edit videos as well as sharing them. So, first things first was to read through the play along with the Director and Theatre Technician, in order to see where sounds, lights and projections were needed and why they were needed. So, it was decided that projections would be used at the beginning, for a preset, with facts and figures being presented to the audience in order to paint a picture for them on immigration and how it affects the country and the immigrants themselves.

Firstly, I created the preset video using real pictures from newspapers, but, after attempting to publish these on our private Facebook group, for the rest of the company to see I was not able to due to copyright restrictions, therefore it was decided that the video would need to be changed and adapted in order to be allowed to be shown to the audience. Here is are the Picture stills of the first opening projection, again due to copyright restrictions, the actual video could not be uploaded. Original opening video still. A cross fade effect was put on each picture on the video so as each new picture came up, the last one would slowly fade behind it meaning that one picture would flow nicely into the next one.This acted as a learning curve, and from this it was established that instead of using real pictures of newspapers, facts would be typed up and referenced using the company colours, orange and black, creating a simple yet effective message for the audience as they sat down at the beginning of the show. Here are the picture stills for the final opening Projection.

As a company, we collectively did not want too many projections as we wanted to take a minimalist approach. On the scenes where the Young Woman describes how much money she has left, I immediately sought information from the television show ‘Two Broke Girls’ whereby, whenever money is made, a picture appears on the screen with the amount they had, cross fading into the new amount of money they had made. The only difference  being in ‘The Bogus Woman’ The Young Woman loses money rather than makes money, so the money she has is on the screen and cross fades into the money she finishes with. Here is an example of one of the money videos.

 

On the technical run day, my job was to plot the sound created by the theatre technician so that she could focus on the lighting. Plotting the sound means to, use the cue lines  from the script to place the sounds into the software. After this it then needs to be determined how long the sound is going to play for and whether it needs to be looped on repeat, faded in and out, or simply snapping on and off.This was done using the software Q Lab which looks like this.

(Courtesy of Google Images, 2014)

Q Lab is a multimedia playback cue-based software designed for theatre and live entertainment by the company Figure 53. (Figure 53, 2007) It enables users to include sounds from different sources, merge them into the same format and create cross fades and snap outs from one sound to another. It is particularly useful in theatre as it means that once the sounds have been plotted, they can then be initiated on the night simply by pressing the enter button. This means that on the performance night, the Stage Manager as well as calling the show, can work the sounds simply and easily.

 

 

Works Cited: Figure 53, 2007 Company.