1. Production meeting 1 (27 Feb 2025)

Aim of this performance: 

- To create an immersive and magical play by using lights, sound, and projections. 

Today we read over the play, and we started to annotate some of the lighting and sound cues that we think are appropriate to add in. And we started to create some sound effects that were already on the Excel that was provided to us by the actors and Ms. Williams (the director). 

Some examples from the Excel spreadsheet:

I decided to create some of the sound effects on my own with the software called Capcut, which is originally a video editing software, but there is a good sound library of all kinds of sound effects, and the software allows you to combine different kinds of sound effects track which really helps to make the sound effects that we needed. 

Here are some examples of sound effects that I made in Capcut: 

- Wind and water sound at a pond

- Car door closing and opening sound 

- Crackling sound of police radio 

- Car driving and stopping 

Here are some aspects I considered when I was reading over the script in terms of lighting design: 

• The stage directions listed in the play: 
• The stage directions help me to determine the place of where the scene is set, the time of when the scene is set, and also possibly weather, for example, rain.
• Some examples of things that I picked out using the stage directions are:
• Page 3: " MAN is standing beside the a duck pond in rural Sussex in a misty, winter's dusk" -> From this stage direction, it gave me an idea of how the scene might look like. Because of the time of day - dusk- I have the idea to use purple to represent the colors that are there when the sun is about to rise, where it mostly consists of shades of purple and blue colors. 
•  Page 30: "LETTIE notices a huge awkward thing begins to form - SKARTHACH - it's plastic, man-made, horrid!" -> This description of the Skarthach gives me a sense of the mood in this specific scene, which seems to be very dark, magical, and scary almost. Then, I had an idea to use dark purple to represent the magical and dark mood of this scene. And use low light intensity for this scene, adding to that mood. 
•  Page 55: "LETTIE's stamping grows louder and louder and more and more powerful as the ground glows impossibly bright and waves of power emanate form where she stands." -> This gave me a description of this scene of the ground glowing, and it glows brighter and brighter. This gave me an idea about applying two FX on to the lighting fixtures, one changing the iris (changing how big and small the beam of light is ) and the other changing the intensity of the lights to be brighter and brighter as Lettie stomps on the ground. 

• The dialogue of the play: 
• The dialogue gives me a sense of the dynamics of the different characters in the play, their emotions portrayed in the dialogues. It also gives me an idea about how fast the transition is from scene to scene.  
• Some examples of things that I noticed in the dialogues and developed lighting ideas for: 
• Page 48: Boy: "No!!" This suggests that this could be a faster transition since the boy is quite emotional here, conveyed by the exclamation marks. Transitioning from the kitchen scene to the bathroom scene.  
• Page 54: Boy: " Lettie!? Lettie Hempstock!!? HELLO!" Here, the punctuation again allows me to feel the emotions of the boy. And also the fully capitalized word could also show that boy is shouting and a bit desperate. And with the stage directions given he might be a bit scared, so maybe a blue wash will be fitting to use here. 
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• The descriptive words used in the play by either by the characters or by the stage directions: 
• These descriptive words help me to add further details to the lighting design of the 
•  Page 32: The stage direction states that they go back to the forest, therefore I know that I need to switch from the dark mood lighting from before to some kind of greenish forest lights
• Page 50: The stage direction states that "Dad plunges boy underwater." This gives an idea to maybe switch to a blue wash from the bathroom lighting state as the boy's head goes underwater. There could be a bit a problem when timing this cue with the actors.