DESIGN REALISATION by Sara Petty

The first thing I will say for our overall design is that it came together amazingly well in my opinion. I will accredit this to our working closely together as a team. we really came together in the beginning of this module to get our overall ideas of the scene down as well as our beginning thoughts on our individual designs. The thing that really jump started our designing I believe was the found object exercise where we started pulling together the main elements of our design. The projection screen was a large collaboration between Becca and I. The thought of having not the typical projection screen and incorporating it into the adding machine was great and I think it was truly realized in this piece. The next big collaboration was the fence, and it was to create that sense of separation between the audience and the scene as well as create some interesting shadows on the scene. This one was not realized to the potential that Becca and I both hoped. The main difficulty being that the strings and pieces of fabric did not make enough of an impact. If I were to do this design again I would ideally would want to play with different types of materials to make the fence. It might be interesting to use rope such as what was used in Louisa's costume to tie into the thought of suicide and prison like setting. The use of a thicker rope would also help Becca in making the sharp shadows on the scene that we had hoped for, and with the increasing of the size of the string I would also increase the size of the fabric panels. I really like the idea Stacey Jo had to make them so big or in a way that thee audience would have to move more to see the scene and add to the feeling of uncomfortableness that we were aiming to create. The creation of the machine was the last thing that came about in the design process. The realization of it was perfect almost in my opinion because it is pretty much exactly what I had designed. The only thing that I would change would be the gears, because although they did make a nice impact in the size of the space I would want to do more with them. If I had the time and the budget it would have been interesting to play with the idea of movement with the gears in correlation with the handle or just constantly moving throughout the piece, but at minimum I would want to raise them up more so they would add more depth to the machine and make a bit more impact.

This entire process has really taught me a lot about designing as well as working in a group. As a student coming into a completely different class setting than the one I have known and then doing something I had never done before was slightly terrifying. I have had experience in designing costumes, and realizing other peoples designs with their guidance but not my own. My group was a big support when it came to this. They helped in the model making and were patient with me when I was unsure how to realize the thing I had designed. It was an experience in trial and error in some aspects. Though now I have a true idea of how to do a design and realize that idea. It really is important to be organized and have a clear idea of you abilities and time you have to accomplish the design. In the future I would probably make a more detailed schedule and what I would have wanted to get done each day and hopefully ideas on how to accomplish it. I would also have a tape measure to really understand the dimensions I am designing in as well, because although I had an idea of how big I was making it I truly could not visualize it till someone showed me on a tape measure and we started building it. In the end of it though the design could not have come together better. We had some rough steps throughout the process, such as Becca’s temporary hospitalization, but in the end I think all our designs came out to what we hoped and worked cohesively together.