During this project, I aimed to solve these problems by;
- spacing the seating so that there is enough leg room for the audience to sit comfortably
- building a balcony for extra seating
- having sloped flooring for wheelchair access
and 4. having a large orchestra pit underneath the stage.
I managed to achieve all of these points during this project, except for point 2. because I ran out of making time.
I do not think that my initial specification was accurate enough to ensure a quality outcome, because it only included general points of what I wanted to include in my model, many of which, didn’t even make it to the design stage because I realised that I wouldn’t complete the model if I was too ambitious.
For ideas for my design, I wrote to many different theatres in the local area. The answers I received from my questionnaire, helped me to discover what services the theatres had and which ones they lacked, in order to make a better design. I also visited 2 of the local theatres to take photographs for my project to show the general layout of a typical theatre. I took pictures of the auditorium, to help me understand the seating arrangement. I also took photos of the stage from the auditorium, to see the relative heights of the stage against the seating.
From the letters I sent out and the photos I took, I began to understand the reasons that theatres are set out in the way that they are. All of the small details link together to make the theatre work.
When I was carrying out my research into theatres, I encountered some problems. Although I sent 8 letters, I only received 2 replies, one of which, arrived one month later than the other. This meant, I didn’t have many results to work from. When I went to theatres to take photos I also encountered many problems. One theatre I visited couldn’t let me take photos of the auditorium due to security reasons, so I had to make do with pictures of the outside of the building. The second theatre I visited let me take photos, but I had to visit twice, due to the poor quality of the first set of photos I took.
I found that I needed a large selection of ideas before making the final choice for my project because I had so many different ideas of what to put in my theatre, that I had to see what worked and what didn’t.
After drawing each idea, I evaluated it to see how useful it would be in my theatre and how well it worked with other ideas. I also had to think about how long each idea would take to make due to the time limit put upon us.
When I was selecting which tools and materials to use, there were many restrictions placed upon us. For example, we could only use materials available to us in school- any other types of wood/paint etc. had to be bought by us in our own time.
The tools we could use were also restricted to the things at school but this was not a problem due to the large range of tools there. The only problem I had was the long queues there were for things like the masking tape or the glue- whenever you touched either of these objects, a cry would go up of ‘I’m using it first’ or ‘Oi!’.
I didn’t make any tester models during the design period of my project because of the way my theatre was put together- there wasn't anything to ‘test’.
Making:
I didn’t manage to answer my original brief and design specification because I planned what I was going to do before thinking it through. In my design specification, I had planned to make 7 dressing rooms, a full backstage area, a large stage and auditorium and a large balcony. By the time I designed it, however, I had cut it down to a stage, auditorium and balcony.
I think my method sheets assisted me with my making because, although I didn’t stick to the order I had planned, they reminded me of what I still had to do and how to carry it out.
I didn’t manage to stick to my production time plan because I was too ambitious. I let my imagination run away with me and often thought that I had much more time than I actually had.
Painting was one problem I had with my practical work. I did a layer of gloss paint in a pattern on the lower half of the wall. I then realised that this pattern would be too off-putting for the audience and so tried to paint one colour of matt paint on the whole wall. The area previously painted with gloss paint, however, decided to crack, and, however many layers of paint I put on top it kept cracking. I then ended up wallpapering the whole model to keep the cracks covered up.
