Edexcel GCSE Drama: Designing Drama

STEP 2 The design brief meeting and rehearsals Now that you have an understanding of the script and have some costume ideas, arrange a meeting with your group. Take your script and notebook and any costume sketches you have. If you have a set, sound or lighting designer, they should be there too. A costume designer needs to consider potential movement restrictions of the set, for example. You will not be able to properly develop your costume designs until you know: • the style and setting of the performance (Is it naturalistic or stylised? Is it set in a particular time period? Do you need to create a typical Victorian gown, or are you setting the play in modern times?) • which character(s) you will design for. Your choice should give you plenty of scope for creativity and impact. It should allow you to contribute to characterisation and meaning. It must also set you a sufficient challenge. If you design costumes for both extracts, you might want to make the two designs quite different from each other. During themeeting 1 Share your thoughts so far about costumes. Show any sketches or mood boards and invite feedback. Try to deal with any criticism positively: very few designers are likely to get it all right first time. 2 Listen carefully to others and give similar sensitive feedback. 3 Make sure you discuss the following questions. • Do I have questions from Step 1 that can be answered in this meeting? If not, how and when can they be addressed? • Are we beginning to move towards a shared artistic vision for the performance? What do we imagine it looks like? • How will we communicate our ideas to each other? Can we create a shared resource bank that we can put notes and images in as we work independently? (This could be a shared folder on your centre’s intranet or a service such as Dropbox, which many professional theatres use.) • What shall we work on before we next meet? What do we want to achieve by when? 4 Make detailed and well-organised notes of the discussions and any decisions made. You could put them under the heading ‘Design Brief Meeting’ in your notebook. 5 Agree on a date for the next design meeting. DESIGN TIP In professional theatre, a white-card meeting might be held once the set designer has constructed a simple 3D version of the set in paper or card. Alternatively, there might be 2D sketches of the set and possibly some costume sketches. Rough sketches for a contemporary costume design for Hansel and Gretel . Chapter 6 Component 2: Designing for the Performance from Text 186