Construction
For Beauty and the Beast, the workshop team and I struggled with lack of communication with the director. the deigning process was very questionable, due to a director change and lack of communication with the designers with multiple slightly differing designs and no confirmation on which was the correct design. The set team struggled to put the set together as quickly as it could have been, and I feel we have missed the perfect opportunity to make one of the most beautiful visual aspects that BOA Stage and Screen has to offer
In terms of creating the set, we started with the front hanging boarder. We started by cutting all the frame pieces for the hanging border arch, we took the individual measurements for each strip of 3x1 timber and cut all the pieces to the correct size ready to be joined once we had cut the wooden plates to hold the thing together. Once we had all the pieces, we built the two border frames and then hinged them together in the centre so they can be folded in on each other for easy transportation. Then we painted them with a greys and greyish blues to give a stone wall look.
After the boarder was completed, we spent three days at the old rep theatre painting the floor in white and black chequered squares. We used masing tape to outline the squares and painted the squares their respective colours and then removing the tape to keep them as perfectly square as possible. Then, In the coming week, we started to create the rose trellis frames. We did this by making a simple 6 metre tall by one metre wide frame, then secured the trellis down with a nail gun. After securing all the trellis to the frame, we placed several layers of vines and roses on the trellis and attached them to the trellis with a electric staple gun. After creating the rose trellis, we got green paint to paint the frame of the trellis, then painted one side of the roses on the trellis black to present them as dead roses.
After creating the rose trellis, we moved onto the hardest part of the set. Constructing the portal was a time-consuming task that took 2 weeks to complete; this was because the portal needed to be built in 6 different pieces so that the whole portal was able to be transported to the old rep in a small transport van.
In the beginning, we made the top two pieces of the portal, which were just simple rectangular flats, we later hinged together the two top parts of the portal to each other and to the lower parts of the portal alongside placing two hanging irons on each side of the two flats, so that we could attach the portal to a bar in the theatre so that the portal would not fall or bend and break when all the parts were put together.
After the two top pieces were constructed, we began constructing the two side pieces which gave the portal most of its height, however, we did not screw the ply boards down to the side pieces on the insides of both parts, as we would later be placing Perspex with lighting gels inside them to act as shattered glass windows, and so they would be screwed to the inside of the two side parts of the portal.
With the outer frame completed, the construction team felt it was time to tackle the biggest task, making the arch and stained-glass windows. The Arch itself was not particularly difficult to cut down, we simply used a piece of bendy MDF and bent it in an arch shape of two large pieces of plywood boards. Drew a line on the inside of the curve, then replicated it on the other side using the same method while also measuring the distance from the center as we went up to ensure both pieces of the arch had as similar as a curve as possible.
