2016 – Page 6

March 19, 2016Zach Begg No Comments

Since we began to put the script onstage the process has, for the most part, ran smoothly. However, due to issues raised by herself and other members of the company which I shall not divulge, the production team (Charlie Watts, Chloe Harrison, Emily Cooksey and Myself) decided that the best possible response in the name of the future of Railcard Theatre would be for me to take over as the Director of the show (Which now has a title: Ungraded) and for Chloe to take my original role as Assistant Director as well as undertake an additional role of Assistant Stage Manager.

I have never directed anything on this scale and the prospect of doing so excites me. It feels very natural that I should direct due to my large involvement in the conception of our original idea and the writing of the script. Directing is actually rather new to me, the last and only time I was director was for British Theatre since 1956 in Year 2 of University and, in the interest of remaining candid, I will be the first to admit that it was not exactly best piece of direction. I however intend to learn from my mistakes there and take this role more seriously than I did in the past, hopefully this will put me on track to creating something worthy of being the last show of the Class of 2013/2014. Here is an updated and final list of the roles within our company:

Zach Begg – Co-Producer/Director/Head Writer/Performer
Rebecca Bierton – Health and Safety Officer/Performer
Emily Cooksey – Stage Manager/Writer
Chloe Harrison – Assistant Director/Assistant Stage Manager/Editor
Chris O’Donoghue – Lighting Designer/Writer/Performer
Chris Petit – Marketing Director/Writer/Performer
Emma Rewse – Costume Designer/Performer
Lauren Towell – Set Designer/Writer/Performer
Charlie Watts – Co-Producer/Sound Designer/Performer
Laura Welberry – Hair and Make-Up Artist/Performer

March 5, 2016Zach Begg No Comments

After a long and painstaking process, we finally landed on an idea that we are all excited for. The general premise is to follow a university graduate (John Smith) through his transition into teacher training. I feel this has great potential as it could be relatable to our entire target audience (16-25 year olds) due to the range of characters we can represent within the piece. In the creation of this idea our most important focus is making the piece accessible to the lower range of our target audience without giving them the wrong impression of what’s to come. Setting our piece in a school allows us to use characters of their age in order to make the piece relatable to them.

What comes next is the writing of the script, and luckily Railcard Theatre contains several people who recently wrote a script for another module in our course: Emily Cooksey, Chris Petit, Chris O’Donoghue, Lauren Towell and myself. Naturally, these are the people that have formed the writing team with the addition of Chloe Harrison as script editor due to her authority as Director and input from my fellow Co-Producer, Charlie Watts. The first draft of the script should hopefully be finished in a short amount of time, I have allocated people to write scenes in preparation for a writer’s meeting on Wednesday 9^th March (2016) in order to ensure that the scenes piece together seamlessly. The writing allocations are as follows:

Scene One – Chris O’Donoghue
Scene Two – Lauren Towell
Scene Three – Chris O’Donoghue
Scene Four – Zach Begg
Scene Five – Lauren Towell
Scene Six – Chris Petit
Scene Seven – Emily Cooksey
Scene Eight – Zach Begg and Emily Cooksey
Scene Nine – Chris Petit

We hope to have a final copy of the script by the 23rd of March.

March 3, 2016Emily Cooksey No Comments

Script Writing

After some deliberation, we have now completed a scene breakdown that the entire company is happy with and have been allocated individual scenes to write for the 9^th of March, after which we will edit the script as a team to ensure character voices are consistent and scenes flow correctly from one to the next.

Scene One – Chris O’Donoghue

Scene Two – Lauren Towell

Scene Three – Chris O’Donoghue

Scene Four – Zach Begg

Scene Five – Lauren Towell

Scene Six – Chris Petit

Scene Seven – Emily Cooksey

Scene Eight – Zach Begg and Emily Cooksey

Scene Nine – Chris Petit

The method we have chosen to write the script should yield efficient results as we will hopefully be able to produce a full script in a week, however, we are anticipating further work on the script will be required. We hope to have a finalised script by the 23^rd of March.

March 3, 2016Lauren Alice Towell No Comments

hit the ground running

Railcard theatre

Since forming Railcard Theatre a few weeks ago we have hit the ground running. Together we have formed an idea that is really started to take shape both on the page and on the stage. We have a fantastic cast of actors playing a wide range of characters, some whom our audiences will love and some whom they will hate. Personally I have gone into this process with a hand in every aspect of the creative process. I’m part of the production team as set and props, as well as lending a hand on the writing team, and being on stage as one of our ensemble of performers.

This week we have been pulling everything together nicely. The set has been finalised which meant we could start blocking out exits and entrances for each character in their scenes, as well as seeing what space we have to play with in every scene. Our script is really starting to take shape, with our team of writers each penning two or three scenes from which we will compile our favourite moments to create an hour long performance. We’re only days away from having our finalised script which means that our performers, including myself, can really get stuck into their characters.

March 2, 2016Christopher Lee Petit No Comments

Marketing and script creation

Over the last few weeks, we at railcard have been planning our marketing strategy and after discussing our project with the marketing manager of the Lincoln Performing Arts Centre we started to work on creating a poster and a name for our piece. We decided originally on the working title, “How to: Adult” however this didn’t fully reflect the show that we were looking to perform so after discussions with the full cast we settled on the name “Ungraded”.

With this in place it was time to begin working on the shows poster where we were able to hire out a space that reflect the environment we want to set our piece in. While there we were also able to take cast headshots ready to use in the future.

We have also started writing the script delegating scenes to certain people to write where we will then all re-join and adjust scenes to match what each other has written so we can take the best of hat each person has written and include that in each character.