Eldorado by Edgar Allan Poe

This is a project from my Lighting Design 1 class. The project was to choose a piece by Edgar Allan Poe and design the lighting for it. The set and lights were reused from a show that had just been done in my university's blackbox theater, She Like Girls. As a class, my peers and I decided which lights to keep from that show's plot and which ones we wanted to refocus and re-gel.

I chose Poe's poem about the city of gold, Eldorado. One of the parameters of the project was that we had to choose music without lyrics to go along with our lighting design, so I chose "Suite from 'Restless': Willow's Nightmare/First Rage/Chain of Ancients" which is a compilation of music from the episode "Restless" from Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I felt that the journey of the music matches Eldorado and the story it tells very well.

Gaily bedight,

A gallant knight,

In sunshine and in shadow,

Had journeyed long,

Singing a song,

In search of Eldorado.

But he grew old—

This knight so bold—

And o’er his heart a shadow—

Fell as he found

No spot of ground

That looked like Eldorado.

And, as his strength

Failed him at length,

He met a pilgrim shadow—

‘Shadow,’ said he,

‘Where can it be—

This land of Eldorado?’

‘Over the Mountains

Of the Moon,

Down the Valley of the Shadow,

Ride, boldly ride,’

The shade replied,—

‘If you seek for Eldorado!

Dangling Modifier by

Sammy Siegel and Emily Godfrey

An interesting challenge with this project was the overhead light plot. All the positions, focus, and colors of the lights had to be decided by the entire class, which was about 8 students. Which meant that we had to think about what was most important to us for our designs and what we were willing to compromise for the other designers.

Each of us was given 3 lights to put and use however we like, I chose to use all three of those lights on the aerial hoop, both to illuminate it more and to get shadows of it on the floor because I was very interested in the presence of the hoop outside of it being used by the dancers.

Every spring semester, the dance and theatre departments at UMBC collaborate on a dance show case. Students from the dance department are paired with a student from the theatre department's Advanced Lighting class.

In 2019 Sammy Siegel and I were paired to work on Sammy's piece which she calls "Dangling Modifier." We decided that the piece should feel ethereal and otherworldly. This led me to choosing some interesting saturate colors for low side light - deep pink, yellow, and green. I tied those colors all together using shades of blue and green mixed on the cyc to create a very otherworldly look on stage.

Day and Night

This is the final project from my Sound Design 1 class. For the project I had to pick an animated video 1 to 3 minutes in length, knowing that I had to take all the sound out of the video and put in new sounds and music.

I decided to use the first 2 minutes of "Day and Night" which is a Disney Pixar short, anthropomorphizing day time and night time.

My design concept for this video focused on the internal sounds within Day and Night - all the sounds of the animals, nature, people, and everything shown in the video. I wanted the specificity of direction too, using stereo sound to make the sound move from left to right or vice versa.

A big struggle for me was figuring out the sounds of the actual beings and ended up taking inspiration in balloons. I felt that it would go along with the nature of this video - a playful Pixar short movie.