As you may remember from an earlier post of mine, I thought we'd do fabric waves for The Ocean, which makes an appearance a few times in the play. I showed this drawing to the director...
...but she wasn't really buying it. I was bummed out about this, since she kept talking about wooden cut-out waves, and I thought my fabric waves would be so much better. Finally, one night when I was at home I decided to make a miniature version of my fabric waves. I scrounged up some blue fabric and cut it into long strips. I cut a piece of cardboard into shorter strips and attached the long fabric strips with my scrapbooking ATG 700 gun (crafters, you seriously have to get one of these if you don't already have one).
When I brought in my sample the next day, she loved it. "Ohhhh..... That's what you mean. Oh yeah, I think that will work! that will be really nice!" I'd post a picture of the sample I showed her except I can't find it. I may have left it at school. Anyway, at that moment, it dawned on me that many people can't picture things unless they have some concrete prompts to help them in the visualization process. I tucked that little tidbit away in my memory bank for when I tried to sell the other scenes...
So luckily, the director's husband, who is one of the two people doing construction for the play, CAN picture things. The three of us had an informal meeting last Friday night, and I pitched all of my ideas to him, and he gets them. We worked out a concrete plan for the waves. Here it is:
We're going to have 4 groups of two kids making up the front wave. These kids will be standing in the pit in front of the stage. Each set of two kids will have one "wave" that measures 24" tall and 10' long. Each kid will be holding it by a handle, and they'll hold it pretty much at eye level. The bottom of it will cover the edge of the floor and it will be just high enough to conceal the feet of the actors from the audience as they come on stage. Any higher and audience members in the front rows won't be able to see kids further back on the stage.
I purchased 6 yards of each of the fabrics I've shown above. I'm cutting them all into strips about 2 to 4" wide and 10 feet long. See below...
I cut it on the floor and weighed down the fabric with a couple of heavy items so the fabric didn't shift too much when I was cutting it. Then I mixed the fabric in random mixes of colors (oh, the white-ish fabric you see in the top picture is extremely sheer, so I may add that on top of the other fabric later or use it somewhere else - it's too sheer to stand on it's own). Here's my planned mixture of fabric strips...
Once the fabric is mounted on the wooden strips with the handles, the kids will be able to pull it taught across the stage. They're going to walk back and forth, giving the impression of water moving. It should be really cool.
I'll post more pictures when it's fully assembled.
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