Process
Much of the design process for this show developed out of creating looks around significant stage pictures, and then interpolating out into the rest of their scene. An early concept of an opening moment picture was fun to toy with as if it was a painting that needed filling in, and we experimented with color and texture in the early stages of design development. The design evolved over the entire production process, starting in early blocking rehearsals and ending once the curtain rose on our performance at state finals in Boston at the Back Bay Events Center.
The Bottles
One of my projects was adding electrified flowing bottles to a canopy net, as our rendition of As You Like It's Arden is set in Appalachia and we wanted bottles to be a large feature of our scenic design. These bottles evolved over numerous iterations. We used colored, plastic bottles with fairy lights inside to be powered externally by a 5V DMX decoder so they could be controlled in cues. This ended up being an incredibly time consuming challenge, as the entire scenic setup had to be assembled on stage in 5 minutes to comply with competition regulation. This meant all wiring in the canopy had to survive being folded up and transported many times. In my naivety, I used copper magnet wire for all of my cable runs, where insulated wire would have been much more durable and easy to use. The first iteration of the bottles was open at the top, and was hung with tie line secured to the bottle with a zip tie. Magnet wire threaded throughout the canopy supplied power to 6 bottles, which were attached to the leads by simply twisting the copper wire. This proved to be unreliable at best. This iteration was immediately retired when the bottles began smoking during our competition performance. A call was made to the booth 15 minutes into the show telling me that actors were exiting and complained of smoke on stage. The bottles were parked off for the show. Once returning to Danvers, I set out to create new bottles and a better system for transporting the entire piece.
First iteration of light up bottles
The Revision 2 bottles were capped and all connections were soldered and heatshrinked to prevent any shorts. The bottles were also weathered with sandpaper to diffuse the glowing lights inside.
The bottles were attached to the canopy permanently and all power network wires were securely zip tied into the woven grid with enough slack to allow folding and stretching many times over (the canopy was elastic, copper is not).
The final result!
Production Stills
