Well that's finished up for Christmas now. I'm going to be so bored over the holidays. Bad thing about being ancient and at uni is that even though your off for ages all your mates are either working or stuck in the house experiencing the horror of parenthood. I'm looking foward to getting Christmas over with and starting back. The new project we're working is looking quite exciting so far. I'm trying not to think about it too much just now and just give the script another few read throughs so I can get to know it properly before trying to come up with a concept and all that. The play takes place in a Glasgow pub and shows various different characters. It's set in the mid 70's but I think it could actually be more relevant today than then. It deals with working class apathy and the need for working people to think up and act for themselves. In alot of ways apathy has increased since the 70's. In the play there's a hope that things could change in the future but nowadays after Thatcherism, New Labour and the way workers rights and social justice have become seen as being connected with "the bad old days" that hope seems to be fading in alot of people. People just seem to accept without question which is a theme that runs through the play. So I think the play would still be relevant to a contemporary audience.

From a technical point of view the play provides some interesting opportunitys to change from the actors as adults in a pub to children at school. The pub also has to change from when the characters are 16 to when the are maybe about 30 in the 70's. I'm lucky that the play is set in Glasgow and a pub because I can go out and look about the place, try to get more ideas and visit the odd pub while I'm at it. From a set point of view you could visit pubs in Glasgow that won't have changed all that much since the 70's but for costume that isn't the case. When you think 70's people have a strong idea of what the 70's look like but what would a downtrodden housewive wear or working class men in a pub. If they wore platforms they'd get done in. Will the class difference amongst the characters mean they look different aswell? Theres lost of stuff I'll need to research and consider.

Lighting wise I want to try and make sure it's a collabrative project and bring on board the lighting designers idea's. I don't know much about lighting so it's going to be good to learn a bit about it and bring it into a project.

Just finished the poetry project. I quite enjoyed doing this project. I'm not all that into poetry to be honest. In school I loathed it almost as much having to read Shakespeare plays. The poem I used for the project though was one that I did enjoy and one that I already had strong images in my head baout. When it came to actually desiging the set for the project the finished design was totally different to the way I pictured it in my head from earlier readings. If I was able to do the project as I really wanted to I would have probably have made a film. I really wanted to set it to some haunting Gaelic music I'd searched out and just to film the landscape and capture the change in the light and the dying out of the sun as the sunset. I don't have access to a video camera however so that plan was out the window. I enjoyed the project though and I did get quite involved in it.

At the moment alot of folk are working from home just now. It's undestandable when it's quite far for people to get here in a lot of cases. I kinda miss the contact with other humans though. Don't get me wrong Alek and Jess are in alot but you couldn't really refer to either of those characters as quite human. It'll be cool though cos we're about to start our projects that we will be working on together. I'm really looking forward to this and although it would untrue to say collaborating with a diva doesn't worry me slightly, I'm sure I'll still enjoy working with Grant and find the experience productive if somewhat challenging.

Right I'm off now. I'm dying of a hangover and it's really starting to piss me off so I've nothing more to say.

This week I'm working on a project which is to use a poem as the basis for a design. There's a poem I love which is about an old tinker who is dying. It's quite a sad poem but there's something beautiful about it as well. One thing that I'm getting from the poem is a connection between the old travelling folk and nature. The poem talks about the gloaming and the sounds from the tree's etc. I was sitting in the design room today and thinking on ideas of what to do etc. I was looking online for natural looking pictures. I got some good one's of sunsets and a wee burn etc but it occured to me that looking at pictures is fair enough but the best way to get a feeling for nature is just to go out there and see the real thing. Pollok Estate is great cos it's like a bit of countryside that has remained unspoiled while the rest of the city has grown up around about. You can walk out of a scheme and be in the woods with deer in a matter of minutes. The only thing is that they cut through the land to build the motorway so you can't get away from the city noises quite so easily. Anyway I decided to go up this evening. I wasn't sure if the conditions were right to get that nice sort of gloaming look that I was after. I got up there just as the sun was fading away and just had a walk though the woods taking pictures. Ideally with this project I would like to try to make something outdoors using the theme's from the poem. I don't know if that will be quite possible however. If not I think the visit in it self gave me time to go and getting a feel for what I was doing and just sometime to come up with idea's outwith the design room.

Trying to do this blog is proving difficult. Firstly I couldn't access this bloge so I set up another one for my journal and now I can get into this one but not the other. Anway I've just spent last week creating a design of an idea for heaven and hell. I guess these are pretty personal subjects to people but I think thats good cos it means you get really involved in the design. I think the main thing that fuelled my design was anger. At first I was going for a comedic approach to the task but the more I thought about the idea of heaven and hell the more annoyed I got. I just found it so wrong the way the Church had used peoples hopes and fears to manipulate them. To me I came to think of the idea of heaven and hell being a creation that was used for control. It was all about hierarchy and elites. Going by the teachings of the church there are so many things that stop you from getting into heaven, so many supposed sins. These sins are usually human weaknesses. Getting into heaven seems like an inhuman task. I thought this was quite cruel and I wanted to show that in my design. I found desinging this quite interesting. At first I had so many different ideas floating about my head but once I had found the route i wanted to go down I felt I was able to foucs and get into the task. At the end of the week everyone had to present their finished work and it was all really good. It was interesting the different approaches and outlooks others in the group had. This week we have to design costumes for our good and bad self. I think I'm going to find this more challenging to get into but hopefully I'll get on ok.