We started this process in October of 2020. The designers and mentor sat down with the director Ricky Araiza as he told us his first concept ideas. He began with the theme. He wanted it to be about sharing a story from generation to generation. Sharing your legacy and helping others begin theirs.

Araiza wanted to explore the idea of really playing into memories coming to life. Which brought about the concept of looking into a scrapbook, with the actors playing in separate frames made to look like photographs that have come to life.

Since this was also a show about wrestling featuring a lot of fight scenes, we had to find a way to do them virtually as we wanted to keep the actors separate in light of the pandemic. Araiza and I discussed the idea of framing them in a way similar to comic book style fights, with campy effects and dramatic movement.

In the first round of drafts, I made a rough mock up of what I envisioned the scrapbook could look like. We were going back and forth between it being real or digital and this was my first draft idea of the digital world it would be in.

As we continued the discussion of the scrapbook world, the scenic designer, Jacob Dunn, and I thought about using a physical scrapbook as our base, recording footage of all the pages, and then mapping the actors into their individual frames (hence the blue taped squares). Dunn and I collaborated on all the physical pages, where I mapped out where the frames would go and he put together the imagery and collage for the background.

After we put the physical scrapbook together, we were faced with the challenge of actually mapping the content. Due to the time crunch of the production, we didn’t want to risk not being able to finish mapping every single page, we wanted to make sure this production was completed fully and given our best efforts. So Jacob Dunn took all the work we did for the physical scrapbook and adapted it into digital pages which we would then use as backgrounds.

The final step was adding the actor’s frames, and this was all done through Isadora. Throughout the Nelson Fine Arts Center, we set up 12 rooms, for every actor, and each contained it’s own setup including a green/blue screen, 5-7 RGB clip lights, a computer & monitor, and a HD camera. We sent the live footage from all the cameras into NDI feeds that were fed into OBS. From there we were able to key out the blue/green screens and place the actors in front of different locations throughout the play. I then added a small frame to each of the boxes to give it a photograph effect, and suddenly the scrapbook came to life.

At the end of March, we began the process of creating the faux fight scenes that would be seen throughout the show. The actors had spent weeks in rehearsal over zoom working with David Barker, fight choreographer, to visualize how these fights would play out. Then it came time to put it all together. The idea was to film each actor individually performing their fight choreography and then edit the scenes together in post.

We did all the filming in one day, a total of 6 hours straight. We had actors stand on stage as sound (Sophia Rodriguez), lighting (Ashley Auchincloss), and media (Me!) worked together to create a cool environment and record multiple shots and angles of all of the fights.

I spent the next three weeks editing each of the actors performances together to create cohesive fight scenes, which were then sent to sound for audio effects and music to add on top.