Directing (20) - Final rehearsals

We spent the whole time leading up to our performance preparing for it and running what we thought needed the most work. Below is what we did during the day to prepare for it:

• Set:   Before we did anything, we positioned the flats where we wanted them, so we could position the rest of our set and sort out our lighting. We brought in the sofa that we were going to use as the bed and the sofa. It was a lot lower down than what we had expected, so we all went through our movements on it to get used to it. We decided to change the ending of scene four slightly to make it easier for us - I got up as Lewis went to leave and then sat on the arm of the sofa when Ollie turned back to me. This meant that our hug was easier and looked better.
• Lighting:   This is an important aspect of our piece. We obviously didn't want any complicated of fancy lighting, as we wanted our piece to be as naturalistic as possible. We wanted naturalistic lighting for each setting that still lit all the sections of the stage we required. We could have done the performance during the day in normal day light, but we needed to do our performance in the evening and have lighting to be able to do black-outs between each scene. Therefore, we shut all of the curtains (to make it as dark as we can during the day) to see the lights properly and to know where to angle them all.
• Props:   We ensured we had all of the props necessary for the performance. We did our rehearsals with water in the bottles and glasses, but used blackcurrant for red wine, water for vodka and apple squash for white wine. We decided to do a top and tail run of the play to work out who should move what set and when. To turn the sofa into the bed, we took the back of it off so that the back of it was a lot lower. Smooth set changes help aid a smooth performance. To show each different setting we needed to make the set the same for each one. 
• Running scenes:   After we had set up everything we needed, we ran the scenes that we thought were the weakest.