Process Pics

As promised, a few progress pictures for Fun House Theatre and Film's production of Romeo and Juliet:

Here's my drafting board when just getting into construction documents.  Note the old-school actual hand-drawing tools.  At the top of the board is the schematic design sketch, below is the half finished construction plan being drawn on white tracing paper laid over the yellow trace of the schematic design plan.

I find it helpful to do early sketches on yellow trace.  For one thing, the blank paper doesn't look as blank so it's less intimidating to start thinking (and so I have to color in less), but there's also some evidence that the color yellow helps creative thinking... who knows why?  That, supposedly, is the reason sticky notes are yellow.  That or because yellow is easier to notice?

Below are photos from two stages of construction.  The top photo shows both towers mostly built, but incomplete around their bases.  In the second photo the angled "skirt" of the Capulet's tower has been added at the right.  On the left, the rest of the stones at the base of the Montague's tower are still in progress.  Please forgive the hideous work lights!

Set construction actually started in a remote shop - those photos to come - while in the theater space my kind helper and I started painting the upstage yellow "stucco" wall even before the previous set had been removed!  Though you can hardly see it in this view, I left some painted sky from that show in place... peeking over the top of a garden wall.

Below is the finished fountain at the stage right proscenium.  The rim/bench and sorta headstone pieces were built for this show, but the waterlilies came from a production of Madame Butterfly that never happened (in my garage for years!) and the decorative fountain head is leftover from another show (a keystone cobbled together from a Halloween mask and foam... but I forget for which show).  Notice the elaborate outer rim/bench then darker inner moldings, then inner rim, then small pool design?  

This developed because February is not yet kiddie-paddle-pool season.  No one could find the 36" diameter bucket I wanted.  A 22" diameter bucket we could find.  Yeesh.  As the carpenter had run out of time, this was a last minute scramble on my part, using an old circular "Texaco" sign from a show about Hank Williams (in my garage) cut into a donut using my tired scroll saw, plus $5 worth of fat pipe insulation, and all the greenery (in my garage) I hadn't already used elsewhere...

In the background you get a better view of the rocks at the base of the M's tower.