Amy Worrall
Member
I'm considering set for a pantomime. We perform in a village hall, there's a stage with a proscenium, but no facilities for hanging/flying anything, and not much wing space. The stage is about 7m wide.
We need three scenes: town, forest and inside the castle.
Initially I'd thought we could get away with two scenes (town and forest) — for that, I had the idea of making the town out of freestanding flats, which we have plenty of. Then for forest, using a cloth backdrop, attached to the flats at the top. For scene change, the stagehands just pull the cloth backdrop over to the front of the flats, or pull it back to hang down behind them to go in reverse.
But now we're considering three scenes. I think two separate cloth backdrops attached in this manner would be fairly unwieldy. The "inside castle" scene would be fine if the forest was visible out the castle window, if that helps. Does anyone have any bright ideas?
To avoid doubt, I must emphasise the need for things that are low budget and easy to do scene changes. There are some people in our company who are of the opinion that the pantomime should have no backdrop at all — that's what we did last year, and I made the forest scene by projecting gobos on the back wall. It looked fairly good, but proper set would have looked better. If I can come up with an idea that I can convince people is not too much effort, then I'd like to propose it!
We need three scenes: town, forest and inside the castle.
Initially I'd thought we could get away with two scenes (town and forest) — for that, I had the idea of making the town out of freestanding flats, which we have plenty of. Then for forest, using a cloth backdrop, attached to the flats at the top. For scene change, the stagehands just pull the cloth backdrop over to the front of the flats, or pull it back to hang down behind them to go in reverse.
But now we're considering three scenes. I think two separate cloth backdrops attached in this manner would be fairly unwieldy. The "inside castle" scene would be fine if the forest was visible out the castle window, if that helps. Does anyone have any bright ideas?
To avoid doubt, I must emphasise the need for things that are low budget and easy to do scene changes. There are some people in our company who are of the opinion that the pantomime should have no backdrop at all — that's what we did last year, and I made the forest scene by projecting gobos on the back wall. It looked fairly good, but proper set would have looked better. If I can come up with an idea that I can convince people is not too much effort, then I'd like to propose it!