Parliament Square

Parliament Square
Summary
Dates 2nd to 4th October 2021
Performance Course Third Year BA Acting
Location RS2
Creative Team
Director Becky Hope Palmer
Designer Morven McLeod
Sound Designer Lewis Brown
Lighting Designer Joshua Brown
Assistant Lighting Designer Anna Athanasiadi
Production Team
Stage Manager Shannon White
Deputy Stage Manager Eve Imrie
Assistant Stage Manager Chloe Chancheong
Head of Stage Kyle Jessiman
LX Programmer Aisha Oyedepo
DLPX Leo Wittwer
Production Sound Engineer Maddy Frost

Overview

Kat gets up one morning, leaves her family behind and travels to London to carry out an act that will change her life and, she hopes, everyone else’s. For those it touches, their lives will never be the same. But what, in the end, are the real consequences of her actions?

TSD

Design

The design was Fairly simple for Parliament Square. it consisted of a 600mm high platform made up of steal deck a couple of flown pieces and a CYC and Legs. Along with a lot of smaller set pieces and set dressing

Lighting

Sound

Speakers

This show was a fairly standard setup of RS2 as a venue. This meant using the KV2 EX6 Active speakers, one in each corner of the truss. In addition to this, I had an EV passive speaker (from the sound cages) under the centre platform as a spot speaker. Later on in this process, as we were going into the last few days of tech, I added subs to my design. One on either side, under the platform.

KV2 EX6s For a while, I had a big debate in my head over I was using the back two speakers as foldback or as part of the PA. In my head, this was something I very much had to decide early on as a strict one or the other. In reality, they were a bit of both, and i understand now this wasn't really a valid debate as I was sending the same thing to them so it didn't really matter either way. What I ended up doing though, was delaying the front set of speakers to the back ones. For me, this pushed all of the sound back a bit to behind the platform, and therefore behind the actors. As none of the actors were miced for the live performances, I felt this put them "in front" of the sound a bit more.

EV Platform Speaker Looking back on this setup, that platform speaker was the backbone of my design in my eyes. I'm so glad I put it in as it gave me so much more to play with storytelling wise, and also when shaping my stereo image. Anything that had to be on stage specifically, I sent it through the platform. I ended up putting all of my ambience (or music) through the main PA, and all of my other effects and sound through the platform speaker. To my ears, this made a nice disconnect and allowed the sounds to cut through more, and the ambience to be left alone, which I found to be a very nice effect.

EV Subs I added these on the second last day of tech I believe. These subs are rehearsal room subs found at wallace. They were not particularly good, had a lot of high end and from under the platform sounded very muddy. This wasn't ideal, but in the end it didn't matter too much. I added those subs to create a very physical effect on the audience, as opposed to a purely sonic effect. The rumble of the fire, the very lowest notes of my compositions