I started to sketch ideas for the set, I started by drawing a story board for the scene I had chosen in The Lady and the Lion as it would be originally, using the forest and lion king etc to see what I would need
to adapt in order to make it fit into the science fiction genre.
SCAN IMAGES IN (LADY & LION\)
Once I had drawn the original story board, I started sketching ideas for the sci -fi story board. My first thoughts were setting this scene on the moon, as the father could have gone into space (set in the future) to bring back gifts for his children, I thought that once he landed (in a spaceship/rocket) he would pick something up and an alien would attack him.
I took to the idea of setting it on the moon,as people would instantly recognise that it was a science fiction production. Here is my first idea in short: The father lands his spaceship on the moon, he's in search of a gemstone for his daughter, as he is exploring the craters on the moon, an alien or un-human type figure approaches him aggressively telling him to leave the stone where he found it and to go.
I then thought that it might be quite difficult to make the stage look like the moon as if you imagine it, there would be a white surface that would represent the moon, and the sky would be black, it wouldn't look very interesting. I thought about other ways of setting it on the moon but not necessarily so obviously so I sketched up some drawings of it set in a crater, this way you could tell that it was on the moon, also a crater would be a good place to have the gems as you could imagine they would be somewhere hidden away. I imagined the rocket being either inside the crater, so the father would have
landed in there, or he could have landed his rocket outside of the crater, so in this scene you would only see maybe the top of the spaceship (this would also cost less from the budget because you might not have to build the whole model of the rocket). I drew some design ideas for this scene set in the crater.
These are just simple sketches where I was trying to work out how I would make it appear like he was inside the crater. You could build a wall type structure which would look like part of the crater wall. It would make the audience feel like they were inside the crater as the whole stage would be set inside it. To make it look like it was inside one on the surface of the moon I would build part of the spaceship the father landed in, outside of it on the surface of the moon, so the audience would only see the top half of it. I also would make the sky pure deep black with millions of tiny moving stars, represented by lights maybe, as then it would give the impression of space as all of the planets are constantly turning, this would create the impression of movement which would make the entire set look more realistic. I also had the idea of creating lots of spheres that would be hung in the background that would represent the other planets in the distance. The Earth could be there too, you could either have them painted appropriately or have a projection of the right colours onto them, the projection would be quite effective then the projection could rotate rather than the actual spheres. I got inspiration for this idea from the science museum as they had an installation of the world, and on it was a rotating projection of earth with bright coloured lights, and numbers and figures of temperature, wind etc onto it.
