The Final Push continues

The designs keep on coming but I am meeting the challenge! With 37/8 character designs to hand in, with 6 days until the final deadline, it is all go from here. Thankfully I have progressed the majority of my designs to the point where they do not need to be altered further, however a couple I have had to change, specifically Lysander and Demetrius from act 3, the final scene with them before the lovers are discovered. Origionally, after speaking with our director Kenneth, I had planned on them to, like the ladies, be in their undergarments. However on research I discovered that in the 1970's, the most common underwear worn was in fact y-fronts, boxers not coming in until the 80's/90's and long johns only being worn by the more elderly gentleman.

 

This being the case, while I did initially design for both to be in y-fronts, due to the physical nature of the performance and being unable to ask the actors if they would be comfortable with the risk involved by the unstable nature of the costume, I have done a secondary set of designs for this scene for submission, being the two in an even more broken down form of their costumes, with y-fronts being worn underneath. That way if the actors feel comfortable enough to strip down to their more period specific underwear they will be able to.

 

With the constantly evolving and changing nature of this project in terms of designs, today I have had to make some changes on my origionally submitted work plan. Looking back to my work plan, I scheduled in a lot of fabric sourcing trips and experimentation sessions - however, the designs being so much in flux I was unable to fabric source as many times as I origionally planned due to not having a concrete set of designs to source from and spending my time working on the designs themselves. This is something that will I imagine always be an issue to a degree with such swiftly changing projects, however due to past experience I believe that on this project the speed with which the changes have occurred have been abnormaly swift and radical.

 

However this has also made this project an incredible experience in terms of expanding my creative flexibility and getting me to research from such a wide variety of subjects for a single project, and in considering things that I have not had to factor in on any projects so far such as the racism issue with the Indian influence in the costumes, and nudity in terms of the fairies and the lovers.