Digital Techniques

‘Waiting for Goddot’

By Ruby Savage

(images shared with Emily Lansell)

Play – ‘Waiting for Goddot’

• Initially this project was to be completed in pairs, and as Emily and I had read the same play and had a long conversation about all the under lying religious connotations in the story we chose to work on ‘Waiting for Goddot’.

• A lot of the play was based with a natural theme, and this we had many ideas about in respect of set and costume design

• The entire play takes part under a willow tree literally ‘waiting for Goddot’ it is very simplistic, the scene is often changed however, for example in one scene the willow tree can be living, in another it is dead, we thought tackling sets like this in new software was an achievable yet challenging goal.

Photo Shop

When we were first introduced to Photoshop we were given some images and allowed to affect them using various tools. We decided to use some of the artistic effects, for example ‘water colour’ and ‘film grain’ above are two examples from this exercise.

Photoshop

This is another image we made from the original photo, I’ve included this one because it looks nothing like the original image and it demonstrates some extreme effects you can achieve in Photoshop.

I was already very familiar with the Photoshop software before this session so I didn’t find it very difficult, and I enjoyed playing around with various settings.

Costume designs

We were given the out line of a person, a photo of a man and some fabric images and we used them to fill in the blank sketch, these are two examples from what we did.

I found this an extremely useful exercise, and I got the hang of it quickly, although I was familiar with the software I had never used it like this before, I think this will be useful to me in the future.

Photoshop set designs

Once we had been given the basic run through for Photoshop we were asked to collect some images relevant to our chosen play, we then used these to create some sets for ‘Waiting for Goddot’

We started out with a basic circle of wood which we built up into our circular stage, we then used lasso tools and layering to build up the scenery for various scenes.

We used images of things that appear in the play like the cart and the willow tree and layered them on to our stage, we then added the finer details and flattened the image

In some of the scenes the willow tree has died I used colour balances and transformations to Create the set below. I also cheated a bit… I Moved the sets into Jasc Paint Shop Pro, Another design programme I enjoy using, and Added the rope and leaves to the sets in there.

Having done the costume exercises I was fine using with this exercise and very comfortable doing layering, I enjoyed playing around with the images and exploring what could be achieved with Photoshop.

Final stage

This was the final set and stage design we developed for this exercise, this is for one of the end scenes in ‘Waiting for Goddot’.

Over all I really enjoyed working with Photoshop as I was familiar with Photoshop I found it useful to build on what I knew rather than starting from the basics and I know this will be useful in the future.

3D Studio Max

3D Studio Max was harder to get the hang of, I think it is very useful for creating things like stairs from different angles quickly and easily, but with one teacher between all of us, I didn’t learn as much about it as I would have liked to.

This was an exercise we did to create a table and some basic furniture, just to show us the basics and give us an idea of what we can do with 3D Studio Max.

These are some images from exercises in which we were learning the basics, creating simple three dimensional structures like windows or complex ones like staircases. We could get very complex structures done in a short space of time once we had learned the basics of 3D Studio Max. However, given the choice I think I would prefer good old fashioned drawing.

Auto CAD

I think of all the software this one, I found, was the hardest to use. We spent our first few exercises leaning how to create basic shapes in various sizes and colours, how to build them on to each other etc.

Auto CAD

Here are two images from the next exercises we attempted. We progressed to creating more complex shapes and learning how to alter them, for example – taking the corners off of a square.

Auto CAD

This was the final exercise we did using auto CAD, we each had to use what we had learned about creating various shapes with mid sections to do this exercise. This was a useful exercise, getting us all used to the way Auto CAD works.

Again I feel I would have learned more if there was more one on one teaching.