The Visit

Last friday I had my first design meeting for the second year physical theatre group's production of The Visit. As it is a physical theatre piece the set is pretty minimum, however, the director decided he would like a number of signs made that would mark different scenes on stage. These signs would be hung from the rig, placed over the front of tables, or even held by a member of the cast. As the play is set in the delapidated town of Guellen the signs are intended to represent different areas or buildings of the town. For example, the largest and grandest of the signs is the Golden Apostle Hotel, which will be hung form the rig as it much more important than the others but also it would be too large to be held by actors.

During the meeting we talked about the different aspects of the play and the layout of the set so that I was brought up to speed with the show. I discussed with the director what he wanted from each sign and went away that weekend to draw up designs for the meeting on monday.

As the show is on at the beginning of march it was crucial that designs were developed and approved of as soon as possible. Over the weekend I devised a wide variety of designs for the director to decide on. By doing this it sped up the process of getting the designs picked so that no time would be lost actually drawing up and painting them on time. Above are my designs for the railway station, general store, wood carving and police station. They all follow a style fitting to the 1950s, post-war setting of the play. Below is my designs for the hotel sign, I also included another option for the geeneral store to add to the variety.

Having presented my ideas to the director on monday the designs have all been chosen and sizes decided on. Although the size we agreed on are slightly smaller than they would be in reality, due to the lack of time, we felt it would be better to have smaller, more accurately and detailed signs than larger, more rushed versions.

Today I spent the best part of the morning clearing a space in the workshop to start building the signs. Once I had done that I drew the outlines of their dimensions to get a better idea of the their scale. This also gave me a sense of how long it would take to complete them all. Tomorrow I will be starting to draw up the lettering so I can concentrate on painting next week.