1. High School Musical Evaluation
What was my job role?
- My job role as Assistant Props Manager was to help the Head of Props manager
oversee the props table (Sourcing props, Making lists, making the actual props etc.)
Strengths?
- My individual strengths were sourcing props from specific teachers, this included
bargaining for certain items (E.g. the science department would absolutely not allow
us to use glass equipment for our show for health and safety reasons, so we
proposed that we used plastic equipment instead because it would be difficult to
break: which they authorised.)
- My other strength was that I made seven props of excellent working quality, this
includes the six Pasta Pots that were designed with the High School Musical’s school
logo (East High), and also a folder of music notes for the pianist character Kelsie;
Kelsie’s Music
file exterior
Close up on
finished Pasta
Pot
Kelsie’s Music
file interior
All six finished Pasta
Pots

2. Weaknesses?
- We found that it was difficult to determine who needed specific props as there was
little communication between ourselves and the actors before the shows, because of
this we would expect the actors to take the props as they needed them, the problem
with this is that several props would be taken by the actors that didn’t need them
and the actual actor would then be frantically looking for their missing prop.
- Another weakness was that between myself and the Head of Props Manager there
was also little communication, meaning that if the HPM was absent from lessons or
rehearsals the props list would also be absent and I couldn’t answer questions about
specific props (e.g whether or not we’d sourced it.) which frustrated the other crew
members. We remedied this by making a definitive list that was always present at
college so crew members could check on the status of each prop and act on it
accordingly.
What we would do differently next time?
- Next time I would improve communication between the cast and myself, also with
the HPM, as this would help the props making/sourcing process run more smoothly,
as an example of how this can be done is meetings during the show rehearsals with
the HPM and the crew to determine which props they needed so that we could
make detailed notes on the props specification.
- List of who needed each prop and when so that we didn’t have props missing when
actors needed them an example of how we could do this is by putting name tags on
each prop so that the actors wouldn’t accidentally take the wrong prop anc cause
chaos.