Week off, work on

This past week during the school break, i worked on my Director's notebook portfolio in all of its aspects. I also got to see a play in NYC and managed to visit actual theatre facilities at a university (with actual lights and real floors).

This is really frustrating... i have a massive writer's block, and i really don't feel like working on 20 pages of pure work. But being all serious and honest, i think this is a great challenge we have taken. Writing an essay is one thing, but developing a portfolio is something else entirely. I sometimes feel like giving up and just handing in whatever i have, but i guess i just have to man up and keep on going.
So far, i'm pretty confident about my job, i think i have produced a fair amount of work, and i did manage to do develop more throughout the break. I still feel like I'm missing something, like my portfolio could be better, or even that it is not of a good enough standard.
What really bothers me is the fact that I'm used to working with a very structured scheme, and i thought the DN had a very defined and structured one. But it turns out that it is incredibly flexible, and i don't like that. Each of the three examples i read were entirely different from one another, and they all followed their own structure. I got to the conclusion that it was pretty much just having all the information needed, without any clear structure whatsoever. I'm not very fond of this, because it makes things very ambigious, and it becomes harder for me to actually lay out all of my ideas.
As of now i've already planned one of my scenes, and have lots of recorded ideas of the third part in my journal. I literally spent a day sketching the stage and some of the costumes. It's really fun actually, and i like the fact that i can let my imagination free. What i don't like is that the second part is very confusing, and none of the examples show either a pattern or what i thought was supposed to be done in that part. So i guess i'll just carry on with what i'm doing.

Something i've learned in further detail is organizing myself. Having two essays and a portfolio for the IB is not an easy task, so i guess i've been improving my organization skills. And i think this is really important not only to complete the work on time for the deadlines, but also to reduce the stress and the pressure. I believe that this skill is useful in the school, life, and even as a theatre maker. Obviously a director has deadlines to complete his work, and obviously creating an entire play takes a lot of time, and thus a lot of organization, for him to be prepared and follow a schedule. I think that i can relate this a lot to the work producing the school play, because we had to organize our works to deal with everything on time.
And i'm not only talking about organization in terms of work, i'm also talking about organizing and setting ideas. Obviously a creative process requires creativity (duh.), and sometimes your imagination flies away and you come up with all these really cool and wonderful ideas to include. But maybe they don't all match, or maybe you think of it in the shower, and then forget. So something i've learned is to keep track of my ideas that come up randomly, and writte them down to remember them. Even so, when i was visiting the drama school, tons of ideas flowed through my mind, so i started to write words on my phone to remember them later. I think this is something that happens not only to directors, but also to writers, producers, designers, etc. They can draw ideas from very simple things, and i think is important to organize them and keep track of them. Maybe some ideas work, maybe they others don't, but who knows they might come up useful anytime soon. I've heard of directors who discart ideas for one play, but then use it for another, and i think that i something i could do with the ideas i don't use for one of the scenes, and use it in the next.
And i think something really interesting, and a technique i find very useful, is to draw the images that come up in your mind. I think that as a director reading a play for the first time, it is useful to draw the characters, some of the important objects described in the play, the setting, etc. to get a physical picture of your vision, and what you want to achieve. I recon it helps to make your vision clearer and actually approachable to evaluate if it can be done, or if it works and matches with the play. I believe that as a theatre maker, someone who works with visual performances, it becomes better to record the images in your mind than just recording the sole reactions.
Speaking of which, i've had a hard time putting my ideas together, because there are so many and they don't all match together. So i've been improving my judging skills on the ideas, supported by the organization skills to put them in the most logical order, and then evaluating to see what could be useful and what is just garbagge.
Something i've noticed, is that a director is always looking for new inspirations, new ideas, new things to try. Before, when we watched plays, i was only looking at the aspects as a student, to later analyze in the play review. But now that i'm working on being a director myself, when i watched the play in NYC, i was noticing more the ideas that could apply to my own play. I've been reflecting on how directors do this, and i think this is why the DN asks us to compare and relate to previous theatre experiences. They want us to dig the ideas from things that actually existed and we have seen. And now that i watched a play with that in mind, all i could think was "maybe i could use the light in a similar way". And probably that's what directors do in real life, they look and evaluate to inspire themselves.
What i still struggle to understand, is how do directors take the vision and make it real? Now i know the DN is not going to happen, but i've been wondering about it. How do they manage to bring all of those processed ideas onto the stage? I remember how we did it in the school play, and it was not an easy job. But we had standards and limitations to follow, so we knew exactly when we were going off chances. However, how do directors know that? The budget? If so, when they know they won't have the money and decide to go another direction, wouldn't that take something off their vision? Could it make a huge difference? And how do they manage to transmit their ideas to the designers, artists, and builders? I mean, a picture in your head is not the same in someone else's head (this is why TOK is useful). And what happens if he has so many ideas he looses track of his initial vision and concept?