This practical, accessible and far-reaching guide to making site-specific theatre and performance emphasises the diversity of approaches to the practice, and explores key principles of space and site. Phil Smith draws on a wide range of interdisciplinary and international performance examples, and uses an innovative variety of exercises, to show students and aspiring performance-makers how to find a site and generate a performance beyond the theatre building.

How do audiences look at actors in costume onstage? How does costume shape theatrical identity and form bodies? What do audiences wear to the theatre? This lively and cutting-edge book explores these questions, and engages with the various theoretical approaches to the study of actors in performance. Aoife Monks focuses in particular on the uncanny ways in which costume and the actor's body are indistinguishable in the audience's experience of a performance. From the role of costume in Modernist theatre to the actor's position in the fashion system, from nudity to stage ghosts, this wide-ranging exploration of costume, and its histories, argues for the centrality of costume to the spectator's experience at the theatre. Drawing on examples from paintings, photographs, live performances, novels, reviews, blogs and plays, Monks presents a vibrant analysis of the very peculiar work that actors and costumes do on the stage.

Problems plague every screenwriter, and even most pros' first drafts inevitably need a bunch of rewrites. Good writers don't despair; they see their problems as creative springboards to make every subsequent draft better.

But how do you know what truly isn't working in your screenplay? And even when you've figured that out, how do you know exactly what changes to make to improve it? In this comprehensive, step-by-step guide, best-selling author Syd Field helps you identify and remedy common screenwriting problems. Field provides professional secrets that make movies brilliant - secrets that can elevate the quality of your screenplay, and aim it for success.

Using The Screenwriter's Problem Solver, you'll learn to:

• Understand how great stories work regarding: structure, feeling, entertainment value and more,
• Hook professional readers by writing the most powerful version of your script's first ten pages,
• Use a "dream assignment" to liberate elusive parts of your creative self, overnight,
• Leverage action to build character, the way Quentin Tarantino does,
• Recover when you "hit the wall" - and overcome writer's block forever.

Syd Field's ground-breaking work discerning the deep structure of successful screenplays is based on decades of study - encompassing thousands of scripts and films. This is the stuff that doesn't change - even as wildly popular trends, like superhero movies, come and go - because the fundamental elements that make stories resonate with audiences are rooted in our shared humanity. Field's insights about screenwriting are not only practical, they're also expressions of compassion and wisdom. You may find that some of the solutions you uncover using Field's approach to writing can apply to other challenging aspects of your life as well.

Learn how to create historically accurate costumes for Elizabethan period productions with Elizabethan Costume Design and Construction! Extensive coverage of a variety of costumes for both men and women of all social classes will allow you to be prepared for any costuming need, and step-by-step instructions will ensure you have the know-how to design and construct your garments. Get inspired by stunning, hand-drawn renderings of costumes used in real life productions like Mary Stuart as you're led through the design process. Detailed instructions will allow you to bring your designs to life and create a meticulously constructed costume.

Special effects have become an increasingly important part of both film and theatre production. With storylines becoming more sensational and technology more sophisticated, the market for high-quality special effects is huge. In this book Janus Vinther provides step-by-step guidelines for achieving a wide variety of grotesque and outlandish effects, including bullet holes, body fluids and burns. In addition there is a chapter on specialised character make-up, ranging from Dracula to the Terminator. With detailed explanation of techniques and materials and illustrated throughout, this book contains everything you need to know to look your worst.

For more than 30 years, the Wing has produced the Working in the Theatre seminars, a series that features the greatest names in theatre. This is presented in book form, for the first time, compact, and at an affordable-paperback price. Spanning the range of these seminars, with a concentration on the most recent shows and current stars, the information, anecdotes, gossip (yes!), heartaches, and triumphs are all here. We learn: What a career in the theatre is really about, from inspiration to a Tony or Pulitzer Prize; How actors prepare? What actors have found to be the best techniques? How writers get their work staged? How playwrights and cast interact with the director?

"This book is entirely unique, very well written, dramatic, and, at the same time, philosophical. It is likely to appeal to a very large audience, including anybody interested in the visual arts, in film, in theater, in philosophical problems of transformation, and in the unconscious generally." -- Melvin R. Lansky, M.D., UCLA Medical School and Los Angeles Psychoanalytic Institute

Wearing a mask-- putting on another face-- embodies a fundamental human fantasy of inhabiting other bodies and experiencing other lives. In this extensively illustrated book, Thomas Morawetz explores how the creation of transformational makeup for theatre, movies, and television fulfills this fantasy of self-transformation and satisfies the human desire to become "the other."

Morawetz begins by discussing the cultural role of fantasies of transformation and what these fantasies reveal about questions of personal identity. He next turns to professional makeup artists and describes their background, training, careers, and especially the techniques they use to create their art. Then, with numerous before-during-and-after photos of transformational makeups from popular and little-known shows and movies, ads, and artist's demos and portfolios, he reveals the art and imagination that go into six kinds of mask-making-- representing demons, depicting aliens, inventing disguises, transforming actors into different (older, heavier, disfigured) versions of themselves, and creating historical or mythological characters.