First Year Technical Blog pt.11

Monday and Tuesday of last week were spent doing the costume get out; this included the hand washing and ironing of lots of garments, and then transporting them over the road in comedy, novelty sized suitcases to put them back into the Eranda Costume Store. The Eranda Costume Store is a cavernous space filled floor to ceiling with three rows of costumes ranging in genre from military regalia to ecclesiastical robes, and in period from the loin cloths to the modern 'urban sportswear'. If, God forbid, anything were to happen to you in this space...no one would hear you scream, because the costumes obscure any sound and you can only hear what someone is saying next to you. It was also rather funny to pull on a Renaissance cloak, 'lose' yourself in the rack, and then jump out on another, more hardworking, member of your rotation as they are trying to file away the costumes you have just brought over the road. But anyway...

Wednesday and Thursday saw us return, again, to linear teaching. For me, this meant technical drawing with the inimitable Gary Thorne. We built on what we learnt, about drawing a Ground Plan of a theatre, to now include a section view - so as well as looking at an overhead view of the stage, we now also had a view into one of the wings. What we did next was really exciting, which is unusual because normally I'm not a big fan of maths. By 'making love', as Gary puts it, with our set squares and T square, we are able to create perfect 15° incremental angles without even having to measure them. We could then draw 1:25th scale squares by only using one edge of the square to draw the rest of it, using complex extrapolation of diagonal construction lines. After this we spent literally the whole afternoon building an exciting 'cloistered vault form' which I can only describe as a vault resulting from the intersection of two barrel vaults crossing in a right angle...essentially it created a vaulted shape similar to that of a...vault...in a church, and, more importantly, we were able to create this without any sort of measuring - purely by extrapolation of parallel and diagonal lines.

Friday saw us start our new rotation. I was really looking forward to Props, and the first day proved to be just as fun as I had hoped. Deryk and Davey are, I'm sure they won't mind me saying, mad as a box of frogs - Davey is a constant source of barely relevant stories and awful puns, and I haven't quite worked out what Deryk is. What both of them share, however, is a magnificent 'suck it and see' approach which, I think, is important in props where there is never really a 'right' way to do something. When 5 o'clock on Friday came I really didn't want to go home for the weekend - roll on Monday!