Die Zauberflote

Poster Design

One of the most exciting projects I was working on for production in April 2020 was Mozart's Die Zauberflote for ICW Productions. Sets AND costumes. Unfortunately it turned into another Covid-19 cancellation and as a result the designs currently remain incomplete. I have decided to publish the sketches I'd already completed for the costumes as well as a couple of projection stills I had conceived. 

The rest I will save for better days, those which see us finally able to bring our vision to life.

One of the reasons I was so gutted that we had to postpone the season indefinitely was because it isn't everyday your Director turns to you, gives you free reign and says he is happy to direct around the designs!

My hat off to Ian Westrip, OAM, for this expression of trust in my artistic abilities. I'm forever grateful. Let's get this done as soon as we can.

The Costume Sketches

1st Lady	2nd Lady	3rd Lady
Pamina	Queen of the Night	Tamino
Papageno	Papagena	Monostatos
The Speaker	Sorastro	Priests
2 Armed Men

One of the great struggles I have faced in my stroke rehabilitation is the fact I now seem quite unable to draw hands. So please forgive the roughness of these drawings, it got down to doing the best I could in the short time frame I had to do them. 

Given the incredibly tight budget of nothing I had to work with these appear rather ambitious. This was also something the rather surprised cast said to me when I presented them. 

Fortunately I am completely used to working on the smell of an oily rag budget wise, so I managed to source most of what you see, with a few minor makes courtesy of the incredible Merri Ford at Hustle and Bustle Costumes. Any headdresses, armour and other personal props I would either provide or make myself. 

In fact the only costume that truly needed making from the ground up was for the Queen of the Night. In these days of self-isolation I have in fact made completing the headdress one of the projects I'll do at home.

A word about the Set 

Due to the restrictions of budget and space I decided to limit physical scenery and props to a minimum and rely mainly on projection and pre-filmed segments combining animations. The decision was then made to produce a kind of generic set build we could re-purpose for practically any production we wanted.

It's been tailor made for the Stage Door Studio, where our productions are to be mounted for the forseeable future, but also I have made it flexible enough to be able to expand on it's size should we need at a later date, plus also with the possibility of touring in the future.

Below are some samples, I don't want to share the rest yet, that would spoil the surprise.