Unit 4

Painting the base onto our
Brussels sprouts

Research:
For Unit 4 we were tasked with creating a tableau showing a Christmas dinner from a specified era. I was given the Victorian era. To start we began research as a group, this helped start the creative process. Once everyone had a basic idea of what they wanted to do we began doing our own individual research on how we can make the tableau's come to life. I began my research by looking at the type of clothing people wore during the Victorian era. I then moved on to looking at what type of Christmas dinner I would like to create. I decided I was going to use an upper class family because it matched the type of clothing we had to hand. I then thought about the type of setting I would liked to have used. I decided to go for a table service dinner with a butler serving the dinner to the family.

     

Preparing the papier-mâché
to make the turkey

Create: It was then decided that the class would be using similar props to represent food, such as Brussels sprouts, roasted potatoes and a turkey. We all worked together on the creation of the food. The process began with the making of clay moulds to represent the potatoes. We tried to vacuum form them on the same day but the clay was still too wet and they did not come out right. However, come the following week, when we tried again everything worked well and there were no issues with the vacuum forming process. We tried to make these look as real as possible by matching our paint colours to pictures we found online. We made our Brussels sprouts and turkey out of papier-mâché. The sprouts were very easy to make, we mixed some wallpaper paste and water together, dipped some newspaper into it and rolled them into balls. These were then painted green with a darker green and yellow to create dimension through veins and leaves. The turkey was slightly more difficult to make. We began by almost entirely covering a balloon with the papier-mâché. Once this was dry we popped the balloon, creating an empty shell. The legs were more difficult to make. Because of their weight they fell off of the body really easily. To make the legs we layered newspaper together into the shape of a turkey leg. We tried gluing it to the body but this didn't work. We then tried using bobby pins but this failed as well. Eventually we decided to use a cable-tie to secure the leg to the body. This worked but we unfortunately destroyed one of the legs. Due to time constraints we were unable to make another one so collectively agreed that we would place the turkey in a way that only one of the legs would be seen. This worked quite well in my tableau. 

The Vacuum Forming machine
used to create our roasted potatoes

When it came to creating the set for my tableau we discovered some issues. Because we had recently finished a production of 'A Christmas Carol' some of the outfits and props that I had set away had been used and misplaced. I had to quickly adapt to the situation and find new sets of clothing that could be used. As well as this many of the props that were used in the production which were the same ones that I was planning to used also went missing. Luckily I managed to find many of them except for the plates, tablecloth and cutlery. My original plan was to use a white damask tablecloth as this matched the time period, instead I used  a green cape that was found in the wardrobes, but placed it in such a way that it could not be seen by the camera. To make up for the plates I used one large one and the rest were side plates that I made look bigger through forced perspective. To make up for the cutlery I had to use some from a different era.

Evaluation: In future projects I would change how time was managed. Because we were designing and creating a Christmas show alongside our tableau's we had less time to prepare as many of our sessions were taken over by making technical preparations for the show. I would also change the level of communication there was between our team and the team of actors who offered to help us. Because our schedules are so different and we only have one lesson a week to plan things in person. To fix this I would schedule small "Production Meetings" to make sure we have a set time/date for final preperations

Another image taken of my finished tableau

One of the images from my finished tableau

Please click on images to expand them.