By Ellie Parker
Wagga Wagga has always produced incredible graduates, particularly in the creative industry and for three third year designers their degree has provided the chance of a lifetime. Three Bachelor of Stage and Screen (Design) students were chosen by eminent local director Peter Cox to design his latest stage production, ‘Away’ produced by the Wagga Wagga Civic Theatre. With that under their belts, the students are now onto designing Peter’s children’s summer show – The Lizard of Oz! This shows that enthusiasm, hard work and maintaining contacts can really pay off.
Georgia Rendell, Evangeline (Evie) Buckley and Elizabeth Boardman were ‘spotted’ by Peter when he was a guest lecturer for one of their classes this year. All three student were extremely excited to be chosen, and Evie says: “It was really exciting to be chosen as a professional designer. It is a great opportunity to explore what I have been trained to do and to actually implement a design in large theatre. The process of being chosen was also quite interesting, as this highlighted to myself and my course mates that what we are learning to do in our degree is actually how we will get a job at the end of it all.”
Georgia thinks their vast expanse of volunteer work and work for the department has helped them get to where they are today. Whilst studying their Design degrees students start as crew in first year, and then become heads of departments in second year and eventually designers in their third year.
On this, Georgia says, “Having to start as a crew member and work your way up to a designer has meant that we have a really good knowledge of what goes in to both designing and constructing a show. We learn how to communicate really clearly and the practical work environment has given us a lot of experience with organisation, scheduling and problem solving, so that when things inevitably don’t quite go according to plan we are prepared!”
The three students have extremely bright futures ahead of them and are looking at all career options currently available to them. For now, Evie is planning on undertaking a Teaching degree so she can share her passion for theatre design to students, whilst Georgia is moving to the city to work in set design and Elizabeth plans on becoming a stage manager.
