Down To Earth

This year´s school play has been created by us, the students. For the first time in the school´s history the school play has been written and produced entirely by us.

DOWN TO EARTH is a play for children in which humans, supervillains and superheroes confront each other, the play was designed with the concept of a "sketchbook", every prop and part of scenery looked as if it was drawn by kids on a sketchbook.

We are ten students in IB theatre, every two of us were in charge of an aspect of the production of the play I was in charge with other student of costumes, other two pupils were in charge of playwritting, other two designed make-up, others the scenery, and lastly one was in charge of directing the play.

My duty was to design the costumes in DOWN TO EARTH, i had to design 20 or so costumes following a certain color scheme. For instance the basic colour for both heroes and villains was silver, but heroes´costumes could have green, light blue or dark blue, villains wore costumes colour red, purple or a dark turquoise. One of the rules for costumes was the abscence of colour black, because DOWN TO EARTH was a play targeted for children, only bright colours were permitted and even during the change of scenery in-between scenes no fade outs were used as a convention established for children´s plays.

Once the designs were completed we contacted Mr. Cajas, the SASTRE, he had the task of manufacturing around 75 costumes. After we discussed what changes had to be made to the designs Mr. Cajas came to us with pieces of cloth resembling the colour scheme. Once we decided which fabrics to use Mr Cajas made an approximate budget and when we realized it was to much we had to make the decision to eliminate the costumes of ALL the humans in the play. They all had to obtain their own costumes following the colour schemes for humans, pale orange, yellow and mustard.

The overall process of designing the play costumes was really tiresome, we had to redesign several according to the limitations of the budget and evey actor had to bring their own footwear, I was absent during a week and some of the designs were not handed in at time but in conclusion i have been able to experience one of the aspect of producing a play, thanks to the Ib I can understand what skills are required to design the costumes, how much time it actually consumes, and how responsible we all must be when handing in the work needed.

If the designs I presented were not late, the manufacturing would have been faster and the costumes would have been ready before the final rehearsal, this way we could have improved them and the play´s presentation could have been improved. This is a lesson I have learnt when designing the costumes for DOWN TO EARTH and hopefully i will not commit such a mistake once again