Welcome to the latest installment of "Listen to the seamstress" and your continuing lessons of how to make life easier the first time around. The summer show I am working on (Once On This Island - Four Seasons Theatre) needed some "rain" props for a dance number with a chorus of 50 people. The first thing that I suggested was wrist bands with streamers and the director loved it. Somewhere along the way, when the job went to my designer and the intern.... it got broken.
There are many things that went wrong at this point with about 3 different people completely dropping multiple balls that I am picking up out of a shear sense of "don't do ugly or unfinished work." This is not my responsibility but I am doing it. But the intern cut the supplies to make the "rain" hand held and I, being a good monkey, assembled them when she didn't ACTUALLY make them..... When my designer saw it, she asked where the elastic was. Huh? Elastic? These are clearly (like the template I followed)hand held rain. She wanted dual elastic bands so the rigid stick lay flat on the arm (see the photos).
This made me crazy - especially after I actually went to a rehearsal and saw that this approach would not work with the dance. I decided to go back to the wristbands, my original approved idea, since this whole project just got dropped in my lap and I have only a day to do it. I redesigned it so the "rain" can be directional and have a screen effect (that wouldn't happen with a simple wrist band) and now I am going to rush manufacture 50 of these before tonights rehearsal.
Life is easier if you just listen to the people who know what they are talking about....
( see the photo progression )