25 May 2007

Final design meeting - Tender


Preparation for the meeting

For the meeting I had prepared a screen based Pdf presentation. Though in the meeting with the director from Mary Barton and La Ronde meetings I had shown screen based mood boards in support of the designs, both other directors had viewed the development designs in a printed format. In addition the designs shown at this meeting were not in progress but the intended final designs. That is not to say that the designs were not flexible with the pending deadline looming I wanted to present designs as near to finish as possible. Also I prepared thumbnails of the designs which showed all the designs on one page. This sheet I had printed in hard copy to give to the director at the end of the meeting.


The meeting

The meeting started as usual of a discussion about the set first. This put the production in context and aided the director to visualise the set with the costume. Following the discussion on set I presented the costume designs to the director on a screen presentation. The meeting was held in the MA Acting production room which is a busy room with other directors, acting tutors and administration staff were busily getting on with there daily duties. Unfortunately the discussion about costume was constantly interrupted by other people in the room as the director lost concentration and started conversation with passers by. This observation made me consider the how highly the directors value the costume design and I will use this to inform one of the questions which I intend to ask the directors in a post production interview importance that directors put on costume. But also I should also consider whether the mode of presentation could have influence his reaction and perhaps he found it hard to engage with the on screen images. The director, when focused, took his time to considerer each design which highlighted a problem with on screen presentations. The computer screen kept turning off. This had not happened in other presentation felt slightly unprofessional. I should have preset the power schemes in the power option on the computer to longer than the current setting of 5 minutes. It is, however a key indicator for the length that some of the discussions took over one design. I had sent the director a comprehensive costume plot via email, this costume plot was heavily used in the discussion to understand which costume would be worn when. I did consider during the meeting whether the director had almost too much information which made him ponder unnecessarily small things at times. However reflecting on my previous observation about reading the directors personality, I think the director for Tender is a control freak therefore the more information you give him the more he wants to dissect it and question. I do feel this approach had its advantages as hopefully it will eradicate any misunderstandings later in the production process.

The reaction to the designs was positive, with only a few minor changes. The clear representation of the costumes left little to the imagination. I was please to see that the designs worked in the way I had intended. At the end of the meeting I presented the director with thumbnails which he was able to take away. I had intended the thumbnails to generate a discussion about the entire look of the costumes and the production as a whole; however the director at this point seemed happy with the decision and just filled the thumbnail images with the rest of his work and the meeting finished. As this is the last meeting with the director before the presentation of the designs to the actors, I wanted to identify key areas to look forward to as the production develops and the costumes designs translate in to 3D costume. For the production of Tender my key interest is 1. To look at whether all the in depth pre production work and attention to detail will produce less issues later in the build process. 2. It will be interesting to observe whether the wardrobe supervisor will find the designs as clear and easy to use or almost too restrictive as the design decisions are so clear cut and most of the costumes will be brought from high street shops. Will the wardrobe supervisor be able to get the same garments which I chose from magazines and clothing catalogues? 3. What reactions will the actors have to the designs? Will they find them helpful to understand there character?

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