His Dark Materials...

In November I had the great fortune to be Design Director as wells as Scenic Painter on the Ashton Theatre's production of Phillip Pullman's 'His Dark Materials'. The Theatre Director - Dr. Helen Brown, came to me with an initial concept of windows between worlds, layered space and actual flying witches. I developed this concept, through a series of models and drawing, working through ideas and their buildability and H&S with the theatre 'Jedi Master' technician, Alex Davies ably assisted by his Padawan, Will and Harry.

The design was a multi-layered ziggurat of decking and scaffold, incorporating swings and a slide for flying witches and daemons, covered in a kalidescope of windows We used various thematic lighting effects, (including the use of UV cannon and UV reactive finishes for the Underworld) audio location signatures and film clipped on 6 OLED screens (kindly loaned by Microvideo,) to define the transition of the action between the many different parallel worlds.

The over all effect turned out to be pretty special.

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#HisDarkMaterials #TheatreSet #AshtonTheatre