Another Part Of The forest

LD: Kate Ashton
"Another Part Of The Forest"
Peccadillo Theater Company

I really enjoyed working with the Apollo products. I had not used them before. Another Part of the Forest was a challenge for me because I had to create many times of day within an extremely limited vocabulary (only 60 dimmers!) in a large set with many levels and a huge cyc. Act 1 takes place early on a bright summer morning, Act 2 moves from twilight to deep night, and Act 3 begins in a rainy predawn and moves through to sunrise

I experimented with many new gel colors for this project. I wanted to create a warm, beautiful environment that stood in sharp juxtaposition to the meanness and petty backstabbing of the characters. The color correction blues AP2020 and 2030 were useful and versatile. But it was the warm ambers that I considered a real find. AP7050 was wonderful pinky amber, great for the idea of an interior at night. AP6600 was perfect for dawn, and worked really well in conjunction with a clear template system. AP 7570 was great for hints of sunset to fill in the shadows. These colors helped me carry the intense color of the cycle forward onto the actors in a more subtle way.

Several of the cycle colors were particularly successful as well. AP 4250 is a wonderful intense blue. We used it in a major cyc transition in Act 2: under a medium blue daylight sky to add some punch, by itself as a dark blue twilight sky, finally fading it out to leave only the blackness of the scrim. It combined beautifully with AP7570 to transition through lavender at "sunset" and a hot pinky amber for the big sunrise in Act 3-- creating the perfect onstage dawn as the play's power shift to a new regime completed.

I found the templates especially wonderful. MS-1054 Grass Textured was just the right balance of open and shadowed to create a mysterious, theatrical image of a single actor isolated against an intense amber cyc as he relived the horrors and glories of a war that pitted brother against brother. This image expanded to a full stage idea as the sun rose and the play began. MS 1022 Breakup combined with MS 6020 Window helped me to define sunrise in the "parlor" part of the set-- and add some life to it when it wasn't in use.