Our House The Madness Musical (Winstanley College Prod)

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Our House: The Madness Musical was written by Tim Firth who is famous for his TV work. This can be seen by the way many of his scene changes in this production happen almost instantly like they would in a TV drama. This posed some interesting challenges when considering a set design for the college production.

Set Design:

Having considered design ideas from the West End production and posed with the extra challenge of putting a live 16 piece band on the stage for the entire production I designed a set to both be versatile yet visually striking for the audience.

I used to lite structures platforms on either side of the stage, one for the band and one for use in the production these helped frame the stage and also allowed for the band to be on the stage which was required by the director.

I mic'ed up the band using conventional techniques and used 3 microphones hanging from the lighting rig to mic up the brass section on the upper deck. The band had full fold back on communication with the stage crew via the comms system.

Below you can see 3 of 5 periactoids which I designed on wheels with one 8ft flat attached to the front (3 of which had doors in them). These could be moved effortlessly by the stage crew in and out of the scenes, quickly as required, in much the same way motorised ones do in professional venues.

These periactoid flats were also designed so that they could be disassembled and stored flat so that they can and have been reused on a number of productions

The set also required a car to be built for the "I go driving in my car" number the script called for a Morris Minor which sadly the budget did not stretch to. So I decided on a metro and it was small and the lyric "It says morris on the door" could easily be substituted and was many peoples first car so could be related to by the audience.

The Winstanley College theatre did not have a door wide enough to drive a car in so I built a wooden frame which the car parts were attached to on a large truck.

Mocked up design before building

Mocked up side view

The finished car with myself (Top Left) The Stage Manager Larner (Top Right) Lighting Operator Ben (Bottom Left) and Video and Animation designer Michael Frost (Bottom Right). We have the lightsabers for the UV scene which is explained later.

The head lights were also rigged to work from the lighting desk in the scenes too!

I designed the lighting using experience from past productions and what I have picked up from my work in amateur theatre. Having never been formally trained in lighting design below are some pictures with captions explaining my choices

Above is the "Star Wars" UV scene where the animation in the background has the actors flying down the death star trench I used UV and blues to make the scene really fun this coupled with the lightsabers the actors had really made this fun to watch and a brilliant scene technically as it drew from Lighting Sound and Video.

This scene had an animation of the nile running behind on the screen for the "Nightboat to Cairo" number. The gondola was just a flat nailed to a truck which was pulled across the stage by the crew. Originally we did hire a prop gondola but our final show was cancelled due to the snow that winter. We got special permission from the owners of the performing rights to put on our final show later than scheduled but all the props had to go back before it. So I quickly threw this together for our final show.

Above is a scene from the production. I recycled some old trucks and put school desks on them to allow for interesting choreography to be created for the scene.

Here is a making of documentary that was created by my fellow technician on the production Mike Frost (Click his name to check out his Behance) It really helps illustrate the work that was put into the production by everyone. I am interviewed at 5:43 I apologise for my terrible interview I not that good at it.