breakinglight11: (Default)
I have been bitching and moaning a lot lately about the amount of costuming I own. It's just getting to the point where it's outgrown the storage space I have for it and encroaching on living space. I'm lucky in that I have a lot of closets and places to tuck boxes away, but I have had to get increasingly inventive and put things in places where I find them an imposition. I think the only real answer is to do a serious culling, but I'm reluctant to do it due to the nature of building and making use of this particular kind of collection.

The Victorian stuff is the most important part of it. I need it for the Mrs. Hawking plays, given how large an element lush and attractive costuming is for those shows. In the most recent piece, Mrs. Frost, most characters had three or four outfits, and nobody had less than two. We have mostly the same cast coming back for the performances, but I try to keep some alternative sizes on hand in case a new actor has to sub in. Having multiple options that way makes the collection larger with things that don't often get used, but it's necessary to accommodate changes with any efficiency.

Since that's the majority of what I'm doing right now, it might make sense to keep only the Victorian stuff. But I have so many things that are unique and interesting such that if I ever do get rid of them, they're basically irreplaceable. They were dug out of cleared-out theater storage, or found in thrift stores. They don't get used often at this point, but I often find I have exactly the perfect thing for a larp, or another show, or to lend to somebody who needs it that I can't bear the thought of tossing the cool interesting stuff even if it doesn't get much call. I just repurposed a dance costume I bought for "Lame Swans", the photographic graphic novel I made in grad school for an Intercon costume I'm really pleased with. That thing's been shoved in a plastic bin for like five or six years, because I liked it too much to get rid of it. I feel vindicated in a way. But it doesn't solve my storage problem, or the feeling of being overwhelmed by the space demands of my collection. Hell, I still have ALL the costuming from the Lame Swans project, including enough simple solid colored skirted dance leotards to outfit a small army. SERIOUSLY, IF YOU NEED TO DRESS AN ARMY OF SOLID COLORED BALLERINAS, HIT ME UP. I GOT RED, PURPLE, DARK BLUE, AND LIGHT BLUE.



I was also struck pretty strongly by the experience of dressing the ensemble for the large ballroom scene on the Mrs. Hawking film. I used almost every single ballgown and tuxedo piece I owned— WHICH IS A LOT —to make that happen, and it would have been literally impossible if I hadn't had so much at my fingertips. I found that process to be pretty brutal, honestly, even with the enormous amount of help Jenn gave me to get everybody actually properly dressed, so the idea of anything that might have made it harder is kind of terrifying. But it makes me even more nervous to get rid of stuff, because I've seen how much help it can be to have it on hand.

I think I need to sit down with an obliging friend (Jenn seems like a good candidate) who can help me get some outside perspective on what's actually special enough to keep and what is just taking up space. It occurs to me that the weird color obsession I have with dressing the Hawking characters might help me make decisions about the Hawking stuff. For example, light blue womenswear has been pretty exclusively limited to Mary and Frost, so if I've got a light blue piece that neither of them is likely to wear, I should probably thank it for its service and release it into the wild, Marie Kondo-style. I think an additional brain or two with less subjective concerns might help.

If I don't do something, I may be crushed to death in the impending tuxedo-pants-and-eighties-prom-dress avalanche.
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Found this photo on a ballet-themed Tumblr I follow.


It's like a gender-swapped professional version of Lise and Marina mirroring each other as Odette and Odile in Lame Swans. :-)

breakinglight11: (CT photoshoot 1)
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One of my pieces was accepted for performance as part of Hovey Summer Shorts! It's a festival of new ten-minute plays held in a little theater right here in Waltham by a theater group called the Hovey Players. I saw this festival last year and was kicking myself that I'd never known it was there as a possibility to submit to, so I'm really glad to have jumped on the chance this time around. The piece of mine they picked is called Last Shot, and it is a blending of two scenes written during 31 Plays in 31 Days, this one also called Last Shot and this one called Don't Tell Anyone. Both of them were written with the intention of helping me get a leg up on scriptwriting for the Lame Swans graphic novel, and feature the two lead female characters Lise and Marina.

I kind of like the idea that the story is able to cross media like this. It's even crossed my mind that Lame Swans could possibly be adapted into a full-length play or screenplay or something. It would probably be a difficult play to produce, as it would require actors who were also trained ballet dancers. But I think it would call for some interesting representational theatricality to distinguish the transitions between Lise's present at the lake, and the flashbacks to the pieces of the story that happen in the past. And dance is so visually rich I think it would make for a very engaging show to experience.

Well, this summer at Hovey I'll get the first glimpse of what it would look like onstage! Hopefully it will work as well as I imagine.
breakinglight11: (CT photoshoot 1)
So I've decided I'm just going to post the draft of Lame Swans I handed in for school. As I mentioned, the images are not edited a carefully as I would like them to be, but I won't have time to work them over any time soon, and I'd like to share this mostly-completed work with you. The models who did so much for me deserve to see the results of their Labors. I'll post one scene of the book a week or so.

Lame Swans
by Phoebe Roberts

Cover

Scene 1 - "The Lake" )
breakinglight11: (Crawling Dromio)
I've not been posting as regularly as I once was. I used to at least once every weekday, sometimes more, but lately I've had more and more days where I couldn't think of anything, or couldn't find the time. I chalk both of these occurrences up to being so busy-- it eats my time and it eats my brainpower to get everything done. But my blog is important to me, it keeps me writing, and I want to build my readership, so I have to make sure it stays a priority. I'm making up for a week of it that I missed because of residency now.

I have a lot on my plate. The fourth and final semester of my grad program, the thesis semester which I'm just entering now, is going to be intense. The workload is pretty heavy for just four months. This is going to eat a lot of time, so I think I need to keep my schedule relatively open and commitment-free. Low-key social stuff has been kind of getting lost lately, so I want to have things like that back in my life, but I think anything more responsible or regimented has to be foregone. This may prove difficult if responsibility becomes necessary to get a production put on or something, but I, for example, won't be auditioning for any plays in the immediate future.

Writing is my biggest priority. New work, of course. But I also want to shape my current writing. It occurs to me that Lame Swans could probably be rewritten to make a full-length play. That could be interesting. Might be a bit difficult to cast actors who were also skilled ballet dancers, but it would be visually very powerful. And Mrs. Hawking could be converted into a screenplay. I have to finish editing it first, to get the play into the best possible shape it can be, but there are a lot of details about it that I could include on the screen that I can't really onstage. Like, I've always imagined Mrs. Hawking being an expert knife-thrower, and lots of cool fight and action scenes. These things are percolating in my head.

I also want to post my comic book, Lame Swans. I know it's not edited as perfectly as I wanted it to be, but I'm not going to have a lot of time to do it up in the near future, and I want to share it. I just need to figure out the best way to "publish" it on the web, so to speak. It's a series of pages. Should I post it scene by scene on the blog? Should I put it on DeviantArt and share the link? I'm really not sure, I'll have to figure it out.

Things are rough right now. I might post about why in the near future. But I'm trying to keep things going in spite of it. And make things as easy on myself as possible right now as I'm trying to get through.
breakinglight11: (CT photoshoot 1)
As I went through the images I'm using for my graphic novel Lame Swans, one thing I'm particularly pleased with was how the costuming turned out. The visuals of a comic book are as much a part of the storytelling as anything else, so I wanted things to have the right look. I chose models who could conceivably look like ballet dancers. I tried to utilize settings that added to the verisimilitude. And I cared very much about finding costuming that suited the characters, contributed to the visual communication, and suited the overall aesthetic.

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More pictures and costuming process behind the cut... )
breakinglight11: (CT photoshoot 1)

At last, at last, I have come to a point where I currently have no pressing obligations. And at this point of momentary rest, I thought I'd go over the status of things going on in my life.

As of yesterday, my NYC production of Work-Life Balance is completed. We did a good job, we had a pretty full audience, and we got home safe and sound. I’m really proud of us, and grateful to everyone who helped.

I handed in my graphic novel Lame Swans on Friday. It is nominally finished, but because I ran out of time I didn’t get a chance to edit the images as carefully as I wanted to, so I will likely wait to debut it on my blog or elsewhere until I can remedy that. But I am pretty happy with how it came out, and my teacher said I did a good job.

That means I am done with school until the next residency, which does not start until January 5th. So I have a blessed respite, albeit a shorter one than I expected to. And part of that will be going home for Christmas, yay! I am looking forward to being home and not having anything to worry about except maybe eating too much pie.

The auditions held by Jessica Rose Fielding, the director for The Late Mrs. Chadwick, is happening today in New York. Here's hoping things go nicely, and she finds actors she likes!

Sadly, there will be no ballet classes again until the new year. I am sorry to go without so long, but I'm going to try to practice on my own. Also, I will be going to see The Nutcracker at the Boston Ballet this Wednesday, which I'm really psyched about. God, I love high ballet, and I'm a softy for the music.

I have my last sewing class for the Pin-Up Pencil skirt at The Boston Vintage Factory. I have enjoyed it very much and feel like I learned a lot, and I'm probably going to sign up for another class soon.

I'm also going to start taking care of myself again. Eating better, going to sleep on time, and making sure I get enough exercise. Particularly if I won't have ballet class for a couple of weeks.

I also have a few chore-like things to handle, but they are small things. So I plan enjoying myself for a little while, as in, laying around like a giant lump, before I tackle anything big again.

breakinglight11: (CT photoshoot 1)
Been working away on my comic book Lame Swans. It's due on Friday, so I'm a little behind where I'd like to be, but it's coming along. I'm still in the stage of laying out all the pages, framing each raw shot to fit the panel size I've established. I've learned a lot about the way to do this as I go. I discovered that it's best to leave as much space around each image I want to capture, even if it's meant to be a close shot. That allows me to have the maximum amount of buffer zone for when it comes to cutting it down to proper panel size. I got better and better over the course of the four photoshoots.

Due to how little time I have left, I doubt I will be able to properly edit the images in time to submit the book to my teacher. I will just have to lay it out and put in the dialogue bubbles so that it is technically complete. But before I put it out there for public consumption, I'm going to want to go over the images in a Photoshop to tweak the colors and effects. Unfortunately I don't know if I can both acquire the right program AND learn how to make it do what I want in time for Friday.

Still, I think I'll give a little glimpse of where I am right now. Here is the layout of page sixteen. It doesn't have words on it yet, but I hope you find the images intriguing.

Page 16
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Had a photo shoot for Lame Swans yesterday, the third we've had so far. I was feeling pretty awful, and I really do not know what I'm doing with these photography jaunts, but fortunately everyone is patient and willing to help me out such that somehow we muddle through. I'm really happy with how the images look; now I just need to lay them out and edit them to my satisfaction to turn them into a comic book.

[livejournal.com profile] niobien has really been my muse for this project. Not only is she so pretty, she's a joy to take pictures of. Her face and carriage are so expressive. Also, because she has talent and experience in ballet, an art I've become very interested in recently, she was the perfect person to build this project around. Look at what a supermodel she is.

carolynisamodel2


Gorgeous. I've been extremely lucky with all my models. They have tried hard, been patient with my muddling through, and best of all did a great job acting with their physicality and facial expressions alone.

2

18

There's something in my head, though, as I take and look at these pictures. Recently I have been exposed to a number of blogs and resources that highlight issues of objectification of women in comics. It's a thing that eats me, the frequency with which female characters are just incidentally presented in sexually objectifying ways, because of an often underlying, unconscious assumption that female characters are only interesting if they're sexy. My comic book has mostly female characters, so I have a strong desire to create an example of the medium that bucks that convention. When I ask them to pose, I try to let the acting of the moment and the shape of the dancing decide how they hold themselves. There is some concern, of course, for the aesthetics of that posing, but I try to make it about the image rather than the body of the model. Everyone I asked to participate is a good-looking person, and I think that adds to the charm of the visuals, but I want them to come off as pretty people, not pretty objects.

But on the other hand, the dance which is the motif I have chosen to tell my story is about a celebration of the capabilities of the physical. Showcasing the body as it performs ballet is the true visual richness of this graphic novel. I need to do it to achieve the right effect. But I find myself struggling to balance things like inclusion and focus on faces with inclusion and focus on bodies, especially given that the images have to fit in a specific layout. I don't want it to be like I wrote a story about ballet that doesn't actually show any ballet. It's an interesting challenge. I hope I'm up to it.
breakinglight11: (Cordelia)
Now that I have sent in the Mrs. Hawking revision, that means I have no more, or minimally more, writing assignments for the rest of the semester. You have no idea how relieved I feel to be able to rest, especially in the wake of a week where my car wouldn't start at one in the morning and my bank card number got stolen and I'm still waiting to get the money back. I need a break from the stress. Today I plan to go home and do nothing except go to ballet class, maybe take a nap and watch some stupid TV. It was be luxurious, though I may not be fully conscious enough to enjoy it.

My parents are coming to visit on Sunday. They will be here with me for a couple of days, then we will all drive home to Allentown for Thanksgiving and the rest of the week. I suggested this is a way to extend our time together, as I can't leave until Tuesday, and this way we can spend the whole week with each other. I'm counting the minutes to when I get to go home, as I will have nothing to do except eat, and hang out with the parents, and eat some more.

What's cool is they are going to help me with my Monday photo shoot for Lame Swans. We're going to pick up my brother and have dinner together, then everyone will help me out. Every member of my family has more photography experience than I do. My mother studied it in art school, and Casey was a photography minor at Emerson and has a professional camera. It'll be nice to have more experienced eyes than mine to help me get good shots. I just need to make sure I have everything in order, amidst my attempts to finally relax.
breakinglight11: (Crawling Dromio)
burntme

You know, I kept telling myself once November hit, things were going to ease up for me. But I realize it's not really like that at all. I have to finish writing Break a Leg for SLAW this coming weekend, and then get prepared to shoot the images for my graphic novel Lame Swans. I meant to get all the sheets for Break a Leg completed by last night, but as SO OFTEN HAPPENS, as soon as I RESOLVED TO SPEND ALL WEEKEND WORKING, I came down with a killer head-splitting migraine. Probably due to my stress over getting things done, I get a migraine, which prevents me from getting things done, which increases my stress over getting things done. And so I become more prone to migraines.

I have only three more sheets to go, and they're all pretty short for a short game, so I know I will be able to finish by tonight and send them out. They'll be quick reads, and they got costuming hints weeks ago so they should have been able to prepare. It'll be okay.

I'll just have to power through, as I am ready to switch gears. I don't have time not to. Shooting for Lame Swan begins this Wednesday night, and I still have a lot of prep to do. I have to make my shot list based on the models I will have present, which will take time, and gather the last few costume pieces I need. Hopefully without spending any more money. I have poured too much into this already, so I'm going to scrounge for what I can borrow and fake. Fortunately my models and assistants are being incredibly accomodating, so thank God for them. Every little bit helps.

My stress level is high. I am accomplishing a lot of cool things, things I'm proud of, but there's been no respite, no release of all the tension. I have to keep going, but I've also got to find some way to chill out. I don't know how much longer my system can take all this cortisol before I crack.
breakinglight11: (Bowing Fool)
574

Normally I go to bed at a pretty early hour, but last night I stayed up until two making the last push to finish the script for my graphic novel. I had only one scene left to go, and I could have finished it this morning and turned it in right after, but I was really feeling it and I wanted to ride that wave of focus and creativity. I sent it in to my adviser just now, and I'm actually pretty happy with it. Kind of mind-blowing that I could feel so good about it while simultaneously feeling so burnt out. I have been writing pretty much non-stop since the beginning of this month, first finishing with the second half of Mrs. Hawking, then putting together my eleven-page craft essay on theatrical pacing, and now completing the script for my comic book. But that means I've knocked off three out of my four consecutive major projects.

What I'd like to do is jump right into planning and preparation for the photography. I've already scheduled several photoshoots with my models, but I want to go in with a very firm, organized schedule of what shots are needed, with what characters, in which costumes, in what locations. My plan is to make shot lists grouped by those parameters, so that every combination of X characters in X costumes in X place can be executed all at one time in a systematic fashion. I intend to have this finished before the first shoot scheduled for a week from yesterday.

What I NEED to do instead is finish up things for Break a Leg, the larp I'm running at SLAW. I've been putting it off in favor of the more pressing homework deadlines, but now that those are out of the way, it has to get done. I want to have the character sheets out by now later than this coming Sunday. It's a short, funny, silly game that doesn't require a lot of planning, and the character sheets certainly won't be long, so I think that allows the players plenty of time to peruse them. I'm hitting the point where I really would like to take a break from writing, but this is the last thing I need to immediately complete. Then I can rest for a bit. Of course, the final revision of Mrs. Hawking is due two weeks from now, but I feel confident enough in my direction for that piece that I don't think revising it will be too grueling.

Mostly through this tunnel now. Wish me luck.  

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