Are you still in the same Gym theater?
Stage very small and shallow? That might be a very important design consideration for the foliage to consider. What’s going to be more realistic a projected scenery on a back wall, a back wall of painted
drop, more or less three dimensional scenery all over the
stage similar to
wing and
drop type panels of trees but in this case at least partially three dimensionally constructed, or a combination of projected scenery and dimensional stuff. That’s also a time and budget thing which will necessitate consideration. Given your reported crew, can they pull off making the scenery given that’s the solution, or would it be a wise investment to be renting scenery given other budgetary goals.
In other words, given the depth of the
stage, I might go for a combination of set and lights to do the forest with scenery plus lights. Say a
cyc with projected foliage, a
scrim than a dimensional scenic forest. The more detail and layers, the better it would look even if fairly close together in depth. But unless you could borrow such
stock scenery from another benevolent college or high school, I would not put the bucks into it renting. Nor would I put too much into the crew’s abilities to make art on time. Should be if in a high school with a great drama department, the tree set would be a great experience, but from what I understand, your’s is still in the building stages and “KISS” Keep It Simple Stupid would probably be the best solution. Or as my theory of past goes, scale it down to the
level of the production. Less can be more if the talent is able to do their part. More is less if they can’t anyway. In the mean time, perhaps for this
element and concept you do the best you can reasonably be able to pull off within budget and skill
level.
I did not read or do the
play but from what you describe, there is more to the differences in forest than just leaves, it would also be atmosphere. Could even use the more sparse one to add to the dense one but that’s cuing. To me two looks to it says two scenes worth of patterns projected. One more dense, the other more sparse. I’m beginning to become a big fan of custom gobos and glass filter colored ones - almost slides. Probably not the best solution for you on a budget. Might get pricing anyway at least for the greens, saves time and effort in making what is otherwise shadow effected green forest.
Otherwise many patterns come in sets of two or three. They match up with each other for a unified picture as projected across the
stage as opposed to just a bunching here and another there of differing designs best fuzzed out so you can’t tell the differences. So, given projected back wall of three or more instruments, for one scene and three more of another, plus various breakups for down and side lights that might or might not be the same patterns, where does that put you control and
fixture wise considering that’s not general, key and
wash lighting that would be involved with all? Say, what new lights did you get anyway? Any new cool stuff?
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