Finding the setting and props at school

Where you perform, in front of the audience or in front of a video camera makes a big difference in what you need for the setting.

The setting
If you are performing your play “live” in front of your audience, you will have to be able to make the setting fit that space. Often, the artists draw the setting on canvas or a big sheet of paper that has a backing so that it can stand up. This is called a flat. This takes lots of time. We’ll give your teacher instructions about how to do this.

If you videotape your play (that’s what we did), you can find your setting inside or outside your school building and then take the actors and camera to the setting! This is lots easier than having to make settings for the place you are going to bring the audience. Actually it’s pretty fun to think about where in your school or outside your school you can find a setting that looks like what you had in mind.

For our plays we did our videotaping in lots of inside places:

• The reading area in the library
• The meeting room off the library
• The Arts and Science Room. In this room we put the gym mats on their sides to make a plain background. Sometimes we draped the mats with fabric to make it look like we were inside a house. Sometimes we put up signs to say where we were -- Immigration Office, Oswald’s Pub, Marcie’s Mercantile Store
  
• The halls

We found outside places:

• In a teachers’ car
• In the amphitheatre
• On the playground
• In front of the school
• By an outside door
• By a fence (we climbed on it and turned it into a trolley)
  
• By the bench in the shaded area
• In front of a neighbor’s house
  

To turn these places into other things, we made our own filters for the camera. We cut out a frame quite a bit bigger than the camera lens and covered it with suran wrap. Then we used felt tip markers to color it. We made an underwater scene and a night scene this way.

Under water looking for pearls

The props

• For set props we used what we had. There were small tables in the halls, the meeting room and the Arts and Science Room. There was a nice big overstuffed chair in the library reading area that suggested a house.
  
  We used the school chairs. For our history plays we borrowed an old rocker from one of the Moms. It suggested we were living a long time ago.

  
  A chair, set prop. Photo by Jim Wright

• For hand props we used what we could find at school. Paper, pencils, books were easy. Cups and spoons and other things we brought, carefully, from home. We didn’t break anything!
  

Lights and Sound for the play
For light, all we had was the lights in the room or the sun outside. We turned off the lights for night scenes. We also tried making a colored filter for the camera. It worked ok, but we’re going to keep trying to get it better. If we use our larger camera we can buy a blue filter.

Sound can be more fun. We made our own sound effects. We had kids make wind and rain sounds. One of the boys snapped a leather belt to get the effect of gunfire for a Civil War battle. It worked pretty well. It’s real fun to experiment making sounds with your hands and voice and the things that are sitting around. A long time ago when there were dramas on the radio, they did lots of things to make the sound effects. We’ve also played sound effect CDs quietly behind the scenes. We think this works better than adding sound as we edit our movies on iMovie.