I thought maybe I should include something I do for fun.
In late 2020 I began attending a series of private readings of Shakespeare plays, organized by a small group of accomplished actors whom I’d met through TikTok. The readings usually happen around once a month, and have an accompanying drinking game.
It’s been pointed out at every one of these that everyone who does it is a performer and they could be even more fun with an audience, so plans are in the works to start livestreaming on Twitch. Here’s the link to the Twitch channel, in case it’s happened since I last updated this page.
Primary skills used:
Facilitation
Typesetting
Graphic design
Experience design
Web media production
Logo design, manufacture, and photography
We set up a Discord server to organize the readings, and I quickly made an icon for the server in Clip Studio Paint EX (right), based on the traditional theater comedy and tragedy masks, using the crying-laughing emoji and the vomiting emoji.
I wasn’t happy with the quality of the art, and while it was fine for a time as the icon of a private Discord server, I wanted to have something better in time for a channel launch.
After several experiments (of which I unfortunately can’t find any photos) I decided to make masks to use as models for further drawings. I downloaded the .svg set of the Twitter emoji library, and adapted the designs from the laughing-crying emoji and the vomiting emoji from that set into a pair of masks laid out in Adobe Illustrator, and cut out using a Cricut Explore Air 2.
That still wasn’t producing satisfying results, so I eventually got some colored paper and remade the masks to photograph directly for the icon.
Typesetting and book binding
I’ve also typeset the scripts for two of the shows using Adobe InDesign, and will be continuing to do so moving forward.
For the first few readings we used the complete Folgers editions of the text, but a couple have been cut down for a more reasonable runtime by the organizers. But that document, accessed on different devices and in different applications by various actors, is likely to fall into disorder during a reading.
It’s important for us to all be able to stay (literally) on the same page, so everyone working from the same PDF or printout can save a lot of trouble. It also means I can ensure a clean, readable page layout, and catch and clarify ambiguous passages (like when one character gets a line of stage direction in the middle of another character’s monologue) to ensure that everybody knows which lines are theirs.
I set two versions of each script: one straight column with page numbers in all four corners, to be used on a phone or tablet as a PDF, and one set in spreads for print as a booklet, text spaced further from the center margin, and with page numbers on the outer corners.
I’ve printed and hand-bound my scripts for two recent productions, “Julius Caesar” and “10 Things I Hate About You.”
Script of the screenplay for “10 Things I Hate About You,” posted to the Theatre Nonsense and Drinking Discord server, captioned “One of my favorite things abt getting to know all of y'all nerds is that I'm finally in an environment again where I have to put in some actual effort to be the Most Extra Person In The Room.”
