#4: A Busy Week

This blog post is going to be quite late, I’m afraid. This covers the week of 9/20-9/27. 

Telescope Project

This week I’ve made fairly minimal progress on the telescope project. I’ve collected some notes from the sprint presentation’s feedback, with ideas to develop and some changes to make. I do still need to update the computer model to reflect that. I’ve also come across a few fun-looking concepts of tabletop particle accelerators, and tossed them into Miro to look at when I start work on the brain box I’m imagining going along with this telescope. Apart from that, all I’ve managed is a shopping trip to gather supplies for the mockup, though I do now have what I need to get started

RJ’s MFA Project

I’ve made a few updates to how our Kanban board works, am pretty comfortable with the work I’m doing as Producer, except perhaps the quantity – everything is running so well, I feel like I have enough time to take on some other roles. After talking to RJ, there are a few level-design areas I can contribute to, and may allow us to widen the scope of the project. noclip.website is a brilliant resource for this; It’s an archive of many of the now-vintage racing video games that our project is inspired by, and it allows me to explore the levels to get an idea of the layout, scale, and tools that those level designers used to get their results.

Holy Cross

I’m honored to have lit a staged reading of Lloyd Suh’s Far Country, a recent and evolving off-Broadway play following “an unlikely family’s journey from rural China to California in the wake of the Chinese Exclusion Act at the turn of the 20th century.” We also hosted the latest in Broadway in Worcester’s concert series, with Jessie Mueller and Seth Rudetsky. This event gave us a shakedown of a set of wirelessly-controlled, battery-powered lights we’ve recently gotten, and I’m grateful to the team at Immedia for lending us the missing piece we needed to get them working! And finally spent a wonderful morning on a photoshoot for the Estreno journal of contemporary Spanish theatre, which is now housed at Holy Cross. Needless to say it’s been a week of very long days.

I’m also nearing the end of the timeline for the design for our mainstage production of Good Person of Setzuan, and drew up a rough light plot and rough systems list all ready to completely change along with some groundplan updates to solve some fire egress issues and when I watch the full run-through of the show next Thursday.

AOB

In other news, I’ve discovered a minor pantry moth infestation in, well, my pantry. A brush with these creatures in my childhood home instilled in me a desire to keep all grains and pastas in sealed containers, and that really limited the damage. This cabal were particular fans of some sunflower seeds and almonds that had sat unused for a while.

I also watched the first full run-through of WCLOC’s All My Sons on Tuesday. I’m delighted to designing for such an excellent cast, including several recent Holy Cross alums and returning members from last year’s Small Mouth Sounds. The show is coming up quick, but going smoothly so far. Over the summer I’d designed and hung a rep plot with enough flexibility to adapt easily to multiple shows, and because of that I plan to finish hang, focus and most of the work in one morning this coming weekend.

And finally, on top of that, I’ve finally come to understand the gravity of what originally appeared to be a minor scholarship-related billing issue! Every time I thought I had settled, some new, exciting and totally contradictory information revealed itself. Unfortunate details aside, I’m glad at least that the matter appears to be almost over.