- Sound cue 30.
Go.
You guys all right back there?
- Like you care.
- My name is Sepy Baghaei.
I'm the associate director on "The Boy With Two Hearts."
- There's a shorter journey this time,
just five or six hours.
- My name's Tic Ashfield, and I am the co-composer
and sound designer on "The Boy With Two Hearts."
- To a place near the Ukraine border.
- My name is Amy, and I'm the lighting designer
for the "Boy With Two Hearts."
- Where we're left on the edge of what looks like a jungle.
- I'm Hayley Egan, and I am the video designer
on "Boy With Two Hearts".
(soft music)
- We are following the Amiri family
through their journey of the jungle,
which is on the border of Ukraine and Russia.
Now this jungle is just one part of their very big journey
to get from Afghanistan to the UK.
It's quite a visceral moment,
and it was really important
to make the audience feel like they were there
and it's happening to them,
and they're experiencing the shock of it all as well.
(person humming)
(thunder booms)
(singer sings)
- All I want is my own bed in my own bedroom.
- I don't miss my bed, I miss the sofra.
- That's what I miss too.
- Coming home to the smell of mum's cooking.
- Eating together, knowing you're all safe.
(singer sings)
(people shouting)
- The starting point was movement.
Our movement director, Jess,
her big challenge with this show generally
and within this scene, is to create a sense
of many, many locations and many, many things
that they experience.
So in the jungle, you know, they come across mosquitoes,
they come across a helicopter, they come across rain.
It's a lot of passing of time in this scene.
So movement was used in a way to manipulate time,
and manipulate the places that they went through
within this jungle.
Then we added in the lighting and sound.
- So I guess on a basic level,
it's just to light the actors in the set,
and that's the very like basic start of it.
But then when you go a bit deeper,
it's about working with the creative team,
and supporting the mood, and the different locations,
and supporting the story as a whole.
It's very specific with the locations, but again,
the set isn't so specific.
So it was kind of about letting the lighting
hint at certain locations with colour and texture
rather than saying, we are definitely here,
we are definitely here.
So we're just coming in
through the upstage entrance of the set.
The cast run underneath the platform here,
and you can see that they're lit by the lighting tube
but we only light a small part of it.
Then the family start to slowly come out
from under the platform, and we use the sidelight
to pick them up.
So they're still quite sculptural.
We're not exactly sure where they are,
and then as they're moving a little bit further round,
we get the sound of a helicopter coming in.
So we use a moving light as a spotlight,
and the colour links to the colour of the projection.
We've got the flashing of the clothes in the rig
to represent thunder and also a helicopter coming over.
Then we use our moving light to sweep all over the stage
following the actors
as they're running and trying to escape.
So I guess for me it's not really about
spoon feeding the audience about where they are
in terms of location, but it's more about
supporting the text, and the mood in the show
about how they're feeling.
So my aim is to make the audience feel like
they're part of the journey
and part of the story of the actors
so they can empathise with the characters more.
- So the video designer basically designs
any of the projected elements.
You get feedback from everyone and even the actors,
we had a projector in rehearsals
and we were sort of throwing things up
and going, oh, what do you think of this?
Or we could do this.
And it's a constant conversation
between watching what Tic might do with the sound here,
and then how I can respond
with what the sound design's doing.
It was a team effort, I think.
- There's so many things that as a co-composer
and sound designer, you have to be responsible for.
From the composer perspective,
you are involved in creating the music,
understanding what the role of the music is gonna be,
why there's music there in any one scene,
working with the director really closely.
- Stupid mosquitoes!
- And then with the sound design element,
how much environmental sound is gonna be needed?
Do you need to record any of the actors?
And then looking after the QLab programming,
which is the piece of software that plays back
all of the sound in the space.
So creating the music and sound for the scene
was really interesting.
Firstly with sound, when I spoke to Hamed and Hessam,
the authors of the book whose story it is,
I asked them about the jungle and what it should sound like.
And they'd kind of imagined it in all different ways,
they weren't exactly sure where they were.
So I kind of had fun with putting
all different kinds of jungle and forest sounds
from lots of different places.
So we kind of get this amalgamation
of different insect noises, and trees,
and just this sense of this place
that we're not exactly sure where it is.
And then with the music, the aim really
was to give a quicken enough tempo
that would work with the choreography.
So we have this piece of music
that has quite a persistent and upbeat tempo,
but it also has a sense of being slightly sinister
and slightly tense as well.
So it was about giving momentum,
but also giving tension to the scene.
There's the thunder, there's the helicopter
so it was just really enjoyable
getting to be really noisy honestly,
and make loads of sound and play around
with where the sound was coming from,
having the helicopter moving across the audience.
- So we've added the little spotlight onto this helicopter
because in our transfer when we had some time,
Amy had some time to add new things like this helicopter
light. I wanted to match that in video as well.
(singer sings)
Tic's sound design, you can hear the helicopter go past.
She actually gave me the sound file
so I could match the timing as well.
The very seed of the idea was that video
was coming on board to help it be an accessible show.
We basically did creative captioning
but really honed in on the creative bit of it.
Like, how could we use text in a more interesting way?
So if you couldn't hear what they were saying,
you could literally see the four by four,
trees, and the word trees sort of made up.
And then as the four by four
reaches the trees and the bushes,
it all sort of animates and collapses.
You find that it really works when it's just simple
and it tells the story neatly and succinctly.
So we're not having to think too hard about it
because we just wanna watch the show.
- I guess the idea with this scene
is to give you a sense of the danger
and the very real things that they came across,
which thankfully many of us
never have to go through or imagine.
But it's important to kind of give a sense
of the smells, the sensations of that,
to create empathy for the very real
and very scary journey that they went through,
and that a lot of people still unfortunately go through.
(soft music)