We meet the wife. She’s excited to see what her husband has caught her for her birthday, but he returns sheepish and empty-handed. Maybe a little scared. He explains that he did find an excellent deer, but he just couldn’t take its life. He explains its sparkling silver antlers and is sure she’ll think he’s just making up an excuse. She gets even more upset, but even after all the ways he imagined this exchange happening, her response catches him by surprise.

Did it grant you a wish? A wish?

She explains that if a stag has silver antlers, then it must also have magical powers. (This makes sense.) She sends him back out into the woods to find this magical stag and to make it grant her a birthday wish more grand than anything he could have done before.

There are some leaps between this scene and the introduction, which I showed you last week. He’s a hunter now, and it’s his wife’s birthday, both of which changed on Thursday. This one’s in color, too–I’d like to increase the fidelity of each scene I share, little by little, as we continue into production. This time it’s crayon. Next time, maybe a little dimension.

Layout-wise, this scene happens quickly after the last. If our scale is as great as I imagine, the first two scenes will share one large space: the first right in front of you as you enter, and the second to your right, and a bit back. As scene one ends, you’ll hear the wife calling out to her husband behind you, you’ll turn and see a light on her, and as the man approaches, his model in that scene also lights up.

The scenes leaving the stag will always occur more quickly than the scenes approaching it–it’s the same distance for him to travel, but he’s always more excited to head home, and so the trip feels shorter to him (and is shorter to us).

Also, in every scene with his wife, his back is to us. This is bad in theater, but in a dark ride it’s not such a big deal–the audience will be able to walk around very close to the scene (but not in it; please don’t touch the models) and so our blocking can be a little more flexible.