Prop Making (pre-editing)

For our prop-making module, I was assigned to make the book for our children's theatre production of William Shakespeare's 'A Midsummer Night's Dream'. For this, I studied various book used in pantomimes and shows to draw inspiration from; however, I did already have a vague idea in mind for the design. Nevertheless, I continued my search for a range of on stage books and found myself struggling as resources showed different complex designs that I had no hope replicating in the time frame we are given for the module. Some of them are as follows:

As they are both used as part of the stage rather than a prop on stage, I was unable to draw any inspiration from that so I moved on to my own interpretations of what the book should look like; provoking my initial design ideas to be put into motion. This entailed using recycled toilet paper tubes as the spine of the book, then the paper being wedged into the middle as the pages for the book. However, when putting this into practise, it proved tricky as the tubes were tougher than first thought so it was perplex when approaching with a saw due to its awkward shape and position on the workbench. I got through it however, with Pete's assistance, and moved on to making the front and back of the book.
It was best, I thought, to make them out of wood to avoid any problems with the strength of the book during performance. Therefore, I found two similar size pieces of wood and sanded them both down to rid of any sharp corner or splinter and made them approximately 60 centimetres in length and 35 in width. This I thought an appropriate size as it was big enough for the character Shakespeare to handle on-stage, yet not too heavy to have a negative impact during performance.

In addition, I unwittingly stumbled upon a picture of a stage book similar to my design ideas and so it inspired me to develop them as I had more of a structured idea of how I was going to design the book.