Green Bird
by Hillary DePiano
Design Process
Before the production of the actual show, I was tasked with creating a collage based on the elements and principles of the play. I chose to go with a certain theme based on the play which was greed. The seven sections of the collage represent texture, emphasis, contrast, shape, line, color, and space. I chose the colors green and red which I think represent greed. I used jagged lines to represent the personality of greedy people and used space to portray the emptiness I think greedy people have inside. I used contrast to show how through the façade, greedy people are very sad inside. I used emphasis to show the distance greed will take people. For texture, I crumpled paper and taped it onto the original paper I was using to again show the rough exterior. Lastly was shape, which I used to show the castle that the evil queen (a character in the play) got due to her greed for power.
Sound Design
My midterm project was to choose between doing a costume, set, or sound design for my class play that was starting next term. I decided to do a sound design because I knew I was going to be the crew head for sound and I wanted to get a head start. The project entailed creating a sound sheet and getting sound effects for the script. I shared the project with a classmate and it was decided that I did the first half of the script and my classmate would do the second half. I ended up using many of the sound effects for this project in the actual show such as a sound I made for a castle rising out of the ground. I used a earth rumbling and magic sound effect and combined it using Audacity.
Sound Crew
Part of being in technical theatre meant that I had to be a crew head for a technical crew and considering I was in sound for Cadre's production of Skeleton Stories, I decided it would only make sense to be sound crew head. I ran into a lot of hardships, but the main one was the sound board. I barely knew how to use it and had to learn the ins and outs of the board. Another major hardship was remastering the sounds constantly, and I even had to remaster all the sounds the day of the show because the sound system wouldn't keep the same volume.
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The main obstacle I faced during the production of Green Bird was the sound board not working. The aux that connected the MacBook into the sound board was old and it ended up needing to be replaced. There were also times that amp on the board would get unplugged out of nowhere and I wouldn't notice. There were times where I had to play the sound cues from a Bluetooth speaker so that the actors would have sounds to react to.
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The easiest part of the production of Green Bird was getting the sound effects. There were times where multiple sounds that I needed to find like the magic sound effects and there were so many different magic sfx that I needed to find. Other than though, the sound effects were pretty straight forward. I ended up finding all the sound effects in about two weeks including the environmental and transition sounds.
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My favorite part was seeing the reactions of the crowd during the show. It felt really rewarding to see the audience laugh throughout the show and seeing them enjoy it made all the hardships and difficulties I felt during the production worth it.
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I went into this show without any experience with the sound board in the booth in the Blackbox theatre. I had felt really frustrated whenever I couldn't fix the sound system and even more so when I needed to constantly remaster the cues. Yet, I enjoyed mostly the entire process and learned all the aspects of being in sound like running cues. I also learned more about leading others as the crew head. I was thankful that I had a crew that helped me enormously with finding the sound effects and made my job that much easier.
