The
Rangiora
Players

 

Home Productions Mailing List Join Us About Us Maps Members Area Thanks

Return to the Production Index page for Take a chance on me

Technical Overview of the Production

The script has very few notes on exactly how the play should be staged, and thus the production team have almost literally a blank canvas. This page shows some of the choices the Players made.

Overall picture of the stage and associated areas, on the left is the beach scene, and to the right of the procenium arch is the slide projection area. On stage can be see the two periaktoi downstage, the combination sofa / bed is mid stage and at the rear is the is the table on a rostrum, the stairs can be seen outlined in white. The picture was taken from the very back wall of the auditorium, which is not a place people viewed the production from, but the camera lens could not go any wider so a more representative shot could not be taken

The Periaktoi

A pair of periaktoi were used SL and SR, providing the background for a number of the episodes. Originally there were planned to be two periaktoi per side, but one proved to be adequate in size.

The scenes depicted were

SR (Left) Periaktos SL (Right) Periaktos
HomeHome
OfficeStadium
BarRestaurant

Some of the faces had other elements that were interchangable, for example the office was dressed as either Diana's office or the lawyer's office. In addition differing tables, chairs and stools were used to differentiate the scenes in front of the periaktoi.

The Sofa/Bed

The central pieces of furniture were a sofa and a bed, but it was unclear how these could be accomodated. Constantly shoving the two on and off stage was not appealing and would disrupt the flow of the play. Creating a double-ended struture seemed to have promise, with the back of the bed and the sofa being common, and revolving the entire structure around a pivot.

However the final idea was a convertable. The back of the sofa could slide from the sofa position to form a headboard. This worked well enough that the actors could (after a couple of practice goes) reliably transform the sofa to bed as required.


As bed

As sofa

The Signs

All the signs were to be projected, however it was not clear exactly where they should be projected to. The best place appeared to be above the table, but it seemed technically quite hard, because of lens focal length considerations and fan noise, and keeping contrast up with light bounce from the stage lighting. Eventually the easy option was selected, which was the wall adjacent to the procenium arch. There was a bit of keystone distortion, but this was considered acceptable.

The slide that would be projected in competition with stage action were all on a clear background, giving the greatest visual change, whereas the slides projected around blackouts were generally on dark or coloured backgrounds.

The slides were projected using a Kodak Ektapro projector, controlled the using RS232 interface on the back using the P-Com protocol, see below for details of the control mechanism.

The slides were made by creating a page using Visio that had all the slide outlines and text. This was printed to a sheet of OHP film using a colour inkjet printer. The slides were cut out from the sheet, and mounted in Gepe model 7001 glassless slide mounts.

The slides can be downloaded in the original Visio format slides.vsd (right click, select save as in most browsers).

Control

All lighting control, sound effects, music, and slide projector syncronisation was acheived using PCStage. The slides projector was interfaced as outlined here (link to follow).

There were, in total, something like 180 called cues, so quite busy for a play!


Comments to the Rangiora Players or The Webmaster are always welcomed, please use this contact form.
The Rangiora Players is the public name for the Rangiora Dramatic Society Incorporated of New Zealand.
The Rangiora Players, PO Box 473, Rangiora, 7440