The crucible

For my exam in the second year of my Drama(Set Design)A-Level I had to design and construct two sets. One of these was for my groups chosen play The Crucible. The scene that my group picked was set in the Proctors Household, and the time was 1962. My design had to be naturalistic so I researched the era and started to gather my ideas together.

 

I then made lots of sketches and constructed a ground plan for my design.

The next step for me was to construct a scaled model of my design in order to get a better picture of my design and to start to bring my design to life. As you can see from the photograph in the bottom left corner as my model starts to come together, it still looks quite symbolic and not naturalistic, this is when i did more research into houses of the time and my model started to become more naturalistic.

I transformed a little room in school into a workroom where I could collect all my thoughts and ideas. This is a picture of the room with my model and ideas in progress.

After my model was complete I ordered the necessary materials and with the help of my schools woodwork technician  started to construct my set.

I used two different colours and used a rag to create the dabbled effect on the set.

I worked closely with my group to help make my set as naturalistic as possible. I had to work with the lighting and sound technicians closely to ensure that their designs worked with mine and so that thier lights and speakers could not be seen. For example I built my fireplace around two of his birdies and he used gels to suggest the warmth and fire. He then altered the strength of the lights to make it look like the fire was flickering. This made the fireplace look very naturalistic.