Mother Courage

As I had no plans for this weekend and I'm really keen to get as much scenic art experience as I can, Jude and I decided that we would voulenteer to help paint some the of the set for Birds of Paradise Theatre Company production of Brecht's Mother Courage. It really was an invaluable experience and I had a really good time working with Hazel Blue, she made me feel really comfortable and I felt I learnt a lot as it was a real working environment.
Jude and I had the task of texturing the flats with wood filler instead of the usual artex as it was much lighter but gave the same effect, we then painted the flats with a grey emulsion and left them to dry. As the flats dried we painted the tower, Hazel helped mix us a grey rusting colour to use and then when the tower had dried we had great fun making the tower look old, rusting and dirty. Hazel and the one other girl employed to do the scenic art on the production told us that in the real world there just isn't the money in the arts for small theatre companies, so they often don't use ROSCO paints and to create worn effects on scenery people usually just use anything that comes to hand as usually there isn't enough time to do stuff properly. So when Jude and I were scuffing up the tower we actually found that using scrunched up ball of masking tape gave a good effect if you used it like a sponge to apply the paint!
My day with the Birds of Paradise Theatre company was really good fun, and I felt achieved a lot in helping them get a lot of the scenery painted,

End of my second week in Scenic Art

Gosh my second week went rather quick, its been hard work but it has really made want to be great scenic artist. I keep on looking at awe at the Albert Herring Set, its been painted so nicely and looks so GOOD! On thursday and friday we were basically doing the finishing touches to the set before the paints went down with to the Renfrew Street Campus with the Friday van.

My tasks on thursday were to add some more flower stencilling to the side of the house. It may have seen like an easy task but Michelle and I struggled at the beginning because the paint had lost some of its original colour so was a more purple colour than pick so thankfully Garry helped us with the colour mixing to get the original colour back which was achieved by adding more red. Also at first we just hand't got the knack of it as the paint kept on seeping from the gaps making the flowers look blotchy (gosh we must have repainted over so many!) but after a couple we got into the swing of things - I found it easier to roll on the paint with a minimal amount while Michelle held the stencil in place and then at the end we both went over painted over any blotchy petals with the light pink base colour using fine paint brush to define their outlines.




Also on thursday (this task also followed onto friday) I had the task of drawing up the ground plan for the paint call on tuesday. Not going to lie, i think it took me so long as I was so scared that i was going to muck it up and then the whole floor would be wrong for everything in Albert Herring, but thankfully I think its turned out just fine! My other tasks on Friday included: repainting the toilet white and glossing it, as well as painting to the toilet floor an off white; painting the edges of the green grocers marquee and helping Joanne paint the awning structure in a distressed and manky way which was achieved by spraying it with a wash and sponging parts of it with a dirty brown and green colour.



Now that this week is over I can't wait to see the Opera and I feel so much more comfortable in the department. I'm looking forward for next week as i'm intrigued to see how the doily is going to turn out on the tuesday paint call on the ath floor, and I am looking forward to working on the column project with Jamie.

LipDub

I'm really trying to make the most of my time at RSAMD, so I'm really trying to make more of an effort get involved with extra-circular activities and so I decided to help with LipDub. At first I had no idea what LipDub was but its basically people being filmed lip synching to a song hen dubbing over it in post editing with the original audio of the song, originally it was the TPA and DFTV second years collaborative project but sort of blew up into something bigger so they needed all the help they could.
So a couple a weeks ago I went to a meeting for the applied artists who wanted to help out, and we had the task to make the costumes for the Killers song Bones but they had to made out of paper! I really wanted to make sure that I showed that I was willing to help out and to make a good job of my dress as the past few weeks I felt that I hadn't really been able to show my true abilities as everyone on my course is so good, and I guess I felt i was pretty rubbish at everything, so this is how my dress turned out :




I made the bottom by hand sewing lots of paper folded fans to an old tube skirt I had, and I made the corset top by rolling pages of newspaper into long tubes, sellotapeing them together and sticking paper spiral to the top part with super glue!

Here's another LipDub photo, on the saturday we applied artists made countless UV stars to hang with the moon (made from a large bouncy ball covered in white fabric)

2nd Week of Scenic Art

Eventhough its my second week in Scenic, it sort of feels like my first as last week I was on Outpost. Its only been two days in but its been really good, the department is so nice and Joanne has been great, she really knows her stuff and I feel I can ask her about anything I am having trouble with.

Yesterday Michelle and I learnt the a+b=c rule (pythagoras theorem) from Garry which allowed to make sure the canvas we were painting as an awning for one of the stalls in the opera Albert Herring was accurate, it turned out okay however sometimes we bleed out of the lines making our stripes look a bit odd, but thankfully those could be touched up!

Today we had a paint call in the new athenaeum theatre, which meant from 9 until about 6 o'clock the scenic art department had an allocated time slot on the stage to get the back the wall of the ath painted - we had to paint the background of a mountainous horizon and to touch up the black. The task seemed pretty straight forward but it was actually quite hard and had to be precisely done. To begin begin with Joanne scaled up the model of the background, which she and Louisa then began to sketch on the wall with chalk in a grid that Michelle, Chris and I had marked out. The painting of the background took quite a while as we only had one zip frame and we had to wait for the first base coat of grey to dry before we painted a grey wispy effect on top. Creating the the wispy effect was also quite challenging as I found when I was up close up to the wall i thought it didn't look right and wasn't blending in, however when I looked up from the stage floor it looked it fine!



Chris looking rather shuffed after finishing the base coat of grey!


So today I learn some good basics:
*How to grid up on the back wall of theatre (always remembering to start from the centre!)
*That to reach higher areas with a paint brush - simply tape the brush onto a stick!
*Always step back from your work now and then to look at it from a different perspective

Scenic Art on Outpost 2

I was really happy when I found out I could complete my first week of my scenic art rotation on the set of the new Nazi zombie horror film, Outpost 2. My experience there was really valuable, as even though I had never done any scenic art before I learnt the basics in a real working environment.

The Outpost set in Govan was not what I was expecting at all, ofcourse I didn't think it was going to be Hollywood, but it was absolutely freezing by the end of the week I was wearing 5 jumpers, so this was a real eye opener thats the film industry is not just all glitz and glamour! I spent the majority of my time prepping the set with artex - I learnt how to make the mixture, how to apply it and how to shutter with it. The other days when I didn't spend my time artexing I was painting the long tunnels a base coat of dove grey, and gosh it was like a workout - my arms were aching after the first day of 8 hours rolling that paint in every direction making sure that there not even a millimetre of white was showing through or that would have affected the wash which was to applied next.

My time on Outpost went really quick, and eventhough I was not doing anything really exciting I found it rather demanding (when i got home i was in bed by 9pm!) Also I'm hoping to go back and help at the weekends so I can see the developments in the set and learn some other skills as most of all the prepping should be done in the next couple of days. I'm really grateful that I got a chance to work on Outpost, not only was it enjoyable but it taught me a lot, it was great to be able to work with people who are highly respected in the Scottish film industry, and its has inspired me to continue to work hard at a high standard so that I one day I too can work in this industry as a scenic artist.

My time in Construction

My time in Set Construction which started at the end of January went much better then I had expected. I was really nervous about going in as I had never used any machinery like a table saw, a cross cutter, a bandsaw ... However, by the end of my 3 weeks I felt much more confident in using all the machinery I had been using.

During my 3 weeks I learnt the basics of the three main saws - the table saw, the radial arm saw and the band saw, and along with learning how to use the machines properly I learnt how to safely handle the machinery so I wouldn't do anything stupid like cut my fingers off!

To be honest at times in set construction I felt a bit overwhelmed and that I was totally rubbish at everything, espeically when things kept on going wrong - for example things seemed terrible when Michelle and I were making the fruit boxes for Albert Herring. However, I look back now feeling a bit more positive about the fruit boxes as they were the first thing I had ever made out of wood and I guess they did turn out okay. Additionally when Michelle and I were making a tressel things once again got rather tricky, but I'm really grateful that Zander saw that we found it challenging and helped us!

The positives about my time in set construction are: for the majority of the three weeks I found them rather enjoyable and I really do think I have become more confident in my abilities. I enjoyed achieveing and see the end products of what I had been making! Also, I hate to be a geek, but one of our home work tasks was to find out about some things on table saws, interesting facts and figures about the construction industry health and safety etc ... and some of the stuff on internet was just crazy like the video 'Band Saw Magic' ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YXW55S4X9zo ) and I found it really interesting to know that 1 in 4 people working in the construction industry are more likely to get asthma.

A little Bit Extra in Props

So Electrics/LED's wasn't really my forte - found it rather hard but least i know now how to create a small circuit with a buzzer and a LED!

I had such a good time working on the panto, but I also learnt a lot: I never realised how much stuff got changed at the last minute just because the designer felt things didn't work/look right despite them being exact to the designers design, so this taught me that you can't be attached to the props you make because the designer may hate it and scrap the prop all togher!

Things i helped on during the panto: the boats (repainting them), painting the bubbles with UV paint, making rope (actually wasn't used :( ) covering the trampoline with pink felt/velvet to blend in with the tongue of the whale

Props!

This was from my sketch book on the 22/11/2010 basically it was my initial thoughts and ideas of what I was wanting to make as a personal project in my three week rotation!



After some time deciding what to make, i finally went with the idea of making a Faberge egg and came up with a plan of how I would make it:
1. Carve egg out of blue styrofoam - remembering to cut the egg in half and hollow the inside out!
2. Cover the egg in jesmonite several times
3. Sand down any bumpy bits to get a smooth base!
4. Paint egg in a rich colour and a pearly colour inside
5. Choose a design for egg and buy materials
6. Get cracking on the design - sticking it down with super glue
7. Varnish and admire!



Here is my page in my sketchbook which shows images of my inspiration for my egg and all the designs i liked (pictures are from http://www.mieks.com/) I've also done a few colour samples, I've stuck down a tiny bit foam that i contemplated using for the design but found it to difficult to use so I stuck down the two materials I contemplated on using instead - gold beaded thread or gold like wire.





An overview at my personal project - feeling confident at the start, hating my egg in the middle and loving my egg at the end!









The end product of my egg!

New Blog

So just came in from another good day at RSAMD and I thought I would have a cheeky swatch at two of the 3rd year Scenic Artist blogs, and I was to say the least rather jealous of how good they were! So i've decided to scrap my mahara blog - to be honest it was really slow, sort of hard to get pictures where i wanted, and i guess i just didn't feel inspired to write on it!
Anyhoo this is now Sazzy's Fabby Arty Bloggy (great name huh?!) which I will begin to reflect on my time at RSAMD!