I’m always looking for ways to extend my mobile usage in my work at Wayside Theatre. (Maybe I’m just looking for ways to justify my gadget purchases.) One of the many tasks I enjoy as we are preparing to produce a play is prop hunting and shopping. Period plays require shopping in antique stores. Fortunately in our area we have a number of them. Quite a few are very generous in their support of Wayside Theatre by loaning us some very expensive props. (We once had a show with over $20,000 of loaned antiques on the stage.)

Today our design team headed to a new location for prop shopping. I took along the PPC 6700 with the express purpose of using the camera within OneNote 2007 Mobile (Beta) to record what I found. Our team was looking for props for the next two shows, Shakespeare’s Othello and Agatha Christie’s Black Coffee. We uncovered a treasure trove at Why Not Antiques and I snapped pictures like mad.  When I returned to the office I synced up the PPC 6700 with my Toshiba M200.

I made a few notes and will distribute them to the production team via email so we can discuss them at our next production meeting. The beauty of this is I can file all of this within each show’s notebook where I keep my research and notes. In this kind of prop hunting you are often looking for something specific, but occasionally you see something hiding in a corner that spurs the imagination that is not on your shopping list, or you see something that isn’t for the current show, but might work for a show later in the season. We can keep a digital record of what we’ve scouted and can refer back to it for future shows. Of course the other part of this is that the production team all wants PPC 6700s and Tablet PCs themselves. One of these days we’ll find that donor who’ll help us out with that.