Treasure Island
For this production, we needed to be able to transport the audience with our characters from a dingy tavern in England to a desert island with a dizzying number of individual locations, whilst being tightly limited by wings space and construction time.
This was my last major set design during my time in the Imperial College Dramatic Society, and I wanted to go large. In the Union Concert Hall we are very limited by space in the wings so any large set pieces we wanted would need to stay on stage for the whole show. Due to this constraint any set we made would need to fit into any of the locations throughout the play. To make this all cohesive I created a mood board of textures and materials that would be used though the set. These included wood grain, dirty canvas sail cloth, netting, rope, camo netting, rock, and sand. The wood grain, rock, and sand textures were achieved through scenic painting, alongside real canvas (aged with painting techniques), netting, rope, and camo netting
Texture + Levels:
I wanted to give the director a variety of levels onstage used our available steel deck, treads, and scaffold legs to create the most organic shape I could, providing lots of interesting spaces the actors could use. This turned out to be a much bigger challenge than I thought, and I needed to ensure that we had banisters, and even step heights to align with our risk assessment and the theatre yellow book guidelines.
The Ship:
In a completely sane move I decided the only solution to the problem of creating so many different layouts, was to build a 14ft long boat in three pieces on wheels. These pieces could then be moved into different positions to indicate different locations, and spun around to reveal built in tables hidden behind the ship’s facade.
The director of this show had a very cinematic mindset when describing his vision for the show, wanting to frame scenes with both lighting and set. Initially he wanted a number of freestanding doorways to achieve this, but I proposed integrating ships masts into the set which could be moved around to indicate and delineate different locations
To bring in my other desired textures, and to further delineate locations, a number of flown set pieces we included to “frame” the top of scenes. One for the ship which included, sail fabric, netting, and a Jolly Roger, and one for the island which included camo netting and hanging ropes.
Final Product:
This design was built over two days with a small team. Day one focused on carpentry with all woodwork completed to allow other departments to work in a clean and quiet environment. Day two was a painting marathon, involving painting the stage along with wood graining the ship pieces, and the masking for all the steel deck. Between the dress rehearsal and the first show extra texture painting was added, specifically moss on wooden surfaces considering where water would pool, and aging sprays on fabric set pieces.
