Final Unit - Director's Notebook (Entry 2/Week 2)

Lesson 1 - Wednesday 21st November

In this lesson we were given the play-script and were divided into pairs to perform a certain part of the play. There were 3 groups who performed scene 1, 3 for scene 2 and 3 for scene 3. I was in a group with Anuskha. In our mini performance we performed a part of scene 1.

In the part of the scene we performed we were re-enacting the part where Joanne and her aunt were discussing about the bodies Joanne found. In this scene i played the forever positive yet shady & questioning aunt whereas Anushka felt it was better in her capabilities to play the innocent Joanne.

To show the dominance of the aunt I continuously circled around Anushka to show how I was good at controlling her and her thought processes. Anushka had to be quite soft spoken in the entire thing and that ensured that I could continually impose myself by overlapping her speeches, looking into her eyes, tapping her on the shoulder and in short we tried to experiment with the text.

Obviously we thought about the global context and how that could help us improve our experiment, using science and technology for the better to make our performance more aesthetic and fun to watch. Another performance I would like to talk about was Sher and Melissa's performance which was really good as they gave the whole part of the script they were doing the whole 'quiet they are watching us' sort of thing which enhanced the fact that the setting was a dystopian society.

Concluding the above points, I must say we had a great lesson in attempting to discover the practical aspect of the text and I'm sure the experience will help us down the line at some point.

Lesson 2 - Thursday 22nd November

This lesson we drew inspiration from different set designers and people on the playtext we were using (Far Away - Caryl Churchill) we watched how different set designers set up the play according to themselves and we attempted to absorb and inspire ourselves on how we could use their ideas to help shape our performance.

Below is the list of some ideas I gained from watching the videos

1. Camouflaging characters with the background
2. Flash lighting (Generally focussed)
3. Focus Lighting
4. Same uniform for all the workers (eg. plain white, dystopian feel)
5. Different backgrounds (depressing colour scheme)
6. Simplistic theme
7. Uses of fan (Fake wind)
8. Uses of background, props to make shadows 
9. Sound FX
10. Special FX
11. Scattered lights on the ground
12. Projecting hollow lights 
13. Central bed (Theme 1)
14. Contrasting costume colours (which reflect their personalities) - (white: pale, timid - black: devilish, mean)

Final Unit - Director's Notebook (Entry 1)

In our first lesson of our final topic we did quite an open lesson with the entire class taking into account that we needed to link our performances with science and technology. Taking the idea into we did a task which really helped us gain ideas on how the use of technology would increase and assist our levels of performing. My (not performance, random) group did how we could us VR (virtual reality) to help us increase the levels of our performance (if we were to incorporate it). After some brainstorming and not really taking the aspect of a budget,  we realised with something with so much potential in VR that the possibilities were endless. Being more realistic and keeping a budget in mind, we realised that we could easily do a performance that was partially or solely inspired by VR. A great idea of VR inspiration is the 360 degree stage which had an audience constantly looking around. Other groups investigated other ways technology and science could have impacted a performance such as electronic props (lasers, smoke beams, artifical fire). Another great idea was the use of 'live broadcasting' which is relatively cheap nowadays (possibly free) using softwares such as Skype. Excessive surveillance in a dystopian performance would also be a really good idea, Visual SFX like holograms (ghosts), deep lighting (vivid imagery). In conclusion this lesson really helped us open up and embrace the global context and also helped us formulate ideas to create a successful link between that and our final performance.

(Below [EVIDENCE]: Images of each group's brainstorming)