The alarm sounds, why would I set it for 3 minutes after I fell asleep?!…oh.

Yup, morning has come once again earlier than I’d hoped…but no time to grumble, it’s off to the station for me and my precious cargo of seventy five 1:25 scale chairs and a small conference center – that is they’re 25 times smaller than the real thing and all lovingly handmade by myself and my very patient and tolerant girlfriend who has to put up with me bumbling about the house at all hours muttering about UHU…

This is one my favorite parts of the design process – the model build. It’s tedious and time-consuming and after all my hours handcrafting and gluing it’ll end up battered and forgotten in a production office somewhere, but I love it!

It’s the first time for me that I can actually touch the design. Move it about, make it bigger or smaller, blue or yellow. It’s through this process I create the final space for the production. There are many ways to make this part easier for myself – use 3D visualization software on a computer for an example but for me I learn SO much about the design by the physical act of hand-making it. By having the design as a real tangible object in front of me I can light it, experiment with different paint effects, textures, sizes, heights etc. I could spend forever at this part of the design, obsessing over detail, remaking walls, adding more detail…but I can’t…There’s a rehearsal room at the end of this train, bus and car journey that are very eager to see what I’ve come up with! Will they see what I see when I look at the model? Perhaps. Hopefully. It doesn’t really matter, what matters is that we are one step closer to that final space.

The space that is between the actor and the first word of the play.

Ciaran